In 1918 Constance Markievicz was the first women to be elected to Parliament as an Irish Republican. However, she refused to take the Oath - like the others of her Party - and never took her seat. A revolutionary, she opposed the Anglo Irish Treaty "with all the force of my whole existence." An officer in the Irish Republican Army, she took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, and was reputed to have kissed her gun before handing it over on arrest. Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the rebellion, but was reprieved and her sentence commuted to life, her charge sheet stated, "solely and only on account of her sex." At the 1917 amnesty, she was released. In a 1916 article in The Times, Markievicz is described thus: "it was when authority had to be defied that [she] surpassed herself. Then what denunciations of England from this gaunt excited figure! What belabourings of man! For she was a "suffragette" as well as a Sinn Feiner, and she was a prominent figure in the suffrage disorders in Dublin." Countess Markievicz died in 1927 after an appendix operation. She was always an active politician and was much loved by working class Dubliners whom she represented.
