Wild Irish Women
by Tim Vicary Who was the first woman elected to the British House of Commons? Nancy Astor, you say – every schoolgirl knows that. But sorry, schoolgirls, that’s wrong. Read the question again, more carefully, as your teacher told you to do. It’s true that Nancy Astor was the first woman to TAKE HER SEAT in the Commons, in December 1919. But a quite different woman was ELECTED to the House of Commons, a whole year earlier, in December 1918. Constance A feisty lady from Dublin, with the traditional Irish surname of, er, Markiewicz. Markiewicz? Irish? Come on. If she was really elected, why didn’t she take her seat? Explain, please. This doesn’t make much sense. Lissadell Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, in 1868, a little girl called Constance was born. She was born in London, so she wasn’t really Irish, but her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth, was an Anglo-Irish landlord. So Constance Gore-Booth and her younger sister Eva spent much of their childhood at the beautifully ...