Just before Easter 1916, a group of women wondered what to wear. The age-old question was especially burning because the women were about to occupy leadership positions in an imminent rebellion. Fashion was not their top priority, substance counting far more than style, but they knew the politics of perception mattered and they couldn't afford to get the dress code wrong.
Trousers were the most practical attire, everyone agreed. You could run, climb, march or whatever comfortably and efficiently in a good pair of slacks. The problem was that trouser-wearing was seen as a sign of loose morals - and loose women. No way were Constance Markievicz and her colleagues to be considered vamps.
So they decided to wear skirts. Dare anyone call them unfeminine or, worse, manly when the press reported their activities and public opinion rose to meet the bait! Markievicz wore a tailor-made green-skirted uniform as a Citizen Army Commandant, the only woman to start Easter Week with that rank. Six weeks later, she and Eamon de Valera were the only leaders left alive to tell the story.
What may or may not be the uniform she wore that precise week comes up for auction at the end of this month, along with paintings, memorabilia and furniture from her childhood home at Lissadell, Co Sligo. There's a faded self-portrait she painted in watercolours as a young girl; some works by her sister Eva Gore Booth and by Constance's husband Count Casimir Markievicz; and furniture of varying quality seen, perhaps, by the poet W.B. Yeats, who used to visit them. Yeats wrote about Constance and her sister with passion and sadness three months after she died, aged only 59, in July 1927.
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
They were beautiful and innocent. Eva spent years in Manchester working for mill workers and labourers; Constance translated her role as a member of the lesser Anglo-Irish Ascendancy into a lifelong mission on behalf of Dublin's poor. Her sex won her a reprieve from execution after 1916, which annoyed her because she didn't want to be treated differently. The authorities continually punished her for betraying her class. Then, when the new State emerged, homes such as Lissadell - standing for what Yeats called the great gazebo - were punished in turn.
No one except her friends really thought Constance would be elected in 1918 when the vote was extended to working-class men and to women over 30. Yet the newly-enfranchised people of St Patrick's Ward in Dublin decided to make her the first woman member of Westminster, a position she didn't take up. She said later that she took some consolation in knowing that her coat hook hung there waiting for the folds of her cloak, while she inhaled the damp in Holloway jail.
Uniforms mattered to Constance, as to other women in the Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan and Inighinidhe na hÉireann. Women of their class were so cosseted and corseted they sometimes needed help to dress themselves in the boned bodices and layers of underskirts you had to wear to be respectable. Climb into a uniform and you climbed a small step out of all the expectations around your gender and your place in the world. Rather than dressing for success, it was dressing for freedom.
The question about this uniform is down to the buttons. Rectangular-shaped, they bear an insignia of a harp surrounded by shamrocks. So far, no one has been able to identify them. The story of the women leaders meeting to decide their dress code suggests this was a public uniform, intended for wearing to parade at least.
But can we authenticate it and, even if we do, does it matter any more? Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth, owner of Lissadell, doubtless has his own good reasons for offering this mixed collection at public auction in Mealy's of Castlecomer. Memory and history, on the other hand, call for a wider response to some of the items on sale.
As Constance slips into the backwaters of history, fading from fashion and the reality of what she did, the places that hold our national memory banks need such materials even more. Her way of living and of dying, even her innocence, speak to the mature State - the fading class and house at Lissadell; the ferocious belief in the future; the humour in her letters stored in the National Library and Archives.
The National Museum and Kilmainham Jail hold some memories of her - the prison towels she frilled and monogrammed, some paintings and some guns. The College of Physicians keeps the hand-carved tray she made with the handles the wrong way round, a very Constance way of doing things. If the State decides, or a private citizen agrees to help out and get tax relief, some of the dusty memories can be gifted to the future.
While Markievicz lay dying, a poor family brought fresh eggs to sustain her in the public ward from which she refused to move rather than compromise her principles. Yeats wrote:
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.