On this date 157 years ago, Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born in London into an upper class Anglo-Irish Protestant family, her father an Arctic explorer. Her childhood friend W.B. Yeats later wrote a poem in the memory of Constance and her sister Eva. Constance studied art in London, where she first became politically active and and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and later at the Académie Julian in Paris, where she met her future husband, Casimir Markievicz, an artist from a Polish landowning family in present-day Ukraine, then part of the Russain Empire. After marriage, they settled in Dublin in 1903, where Constance gained a reputation as a landscape painter and was a founder of the United Arts Club. We know her as Madame Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary nationalist politician and suffragist, and the first woman elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. In Dublin, she was connected to leaders of the Gaelic League, working to preserve Irish language and culture. In 1908, she joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), a revolutionary women's movement. In the women's suffrage campaign, she flamboyantly appeared driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses. A male heckler asked her if she could cook a dinner, to which she responded, "Yes. Can you drive a coach and four?" She was jailed for the first time in 1911 for speaking at a demonstration of 30,000 people to protest against George V's visit to Ireland. She joined the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), and during the Easter Rising of 1916 in St. Stephen's Green, she was accused of shooting a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who later died. After six days, the ICA garrison surrendered to the British army. Constance was court-martialed and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison "solely and only on account of her sex." She was released from prison in 1917, under a general amnesty granted by the British government for those involved in the Rising. Around this time, she converted to Catholicism. She was jailed again in 1918 with other Sinn Féin leaders, as part of the "German Plot." While in prison, she became the first woman elected to the United Kingdom House of Commons, but in line with Sinn Féin abstentionist policy, she did not take her seat. Her colleagues assembled in Dublin at the first meeting of the First Dáil, the Parliament of the revolutionary Irish Republic. When her name was called, she was described as fé ghlas ag Gallaibh (imprisoned by the foreign enemy). She was released from prison when the "German Plot" proved spurious. She became Minister of Labour in 1919 in the Second Ministry of the Dáil, making her both the first Irish female Cabinet Minister and the second female government minister in Europe. She left the government in January 1922 along with others in opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She was active for the Republican cause in the Irish Civil War. Constance left Sinn Féin and joined Fianna Fáil on its foundation in 1926. She was reelected to the 5th Dáil in 1927. But shortly after the election, Constance died at age 59 after appendicitis operations, a dangerous surgery in the days before antibiotics. She died in a public ward, "among the poor where she wanted to be," her husband and friends at her bedside. She is remembered in County Sligo and Dublin by her married name Markievicz on public works, a portrait in the British House of Commons commemorating women's suffrage, a plaque on her former home in Dublin, and, in the Ukrainian village of Zhyvotivka, where Constance stayed with the Markievicz family in 1903, a room dedicated to Constance and her husband with the documents brought from her father's estate at Lissadell House in County Sligo. Credit: https://w.wiki/HjW9 I rode a short, easy route today, unsure that I had fully recovered from a cold over the last five days. It was warm, nearly 80 degrees, even at the beach, with strong sun, but I never felt too hot. I was glad to be outside on a nice day, almost two weeks since my last ride, ugh. I don't know why I score my rides based on the traffic lights on these familiar roads! I joined San Vicente at Montana, and I caught the green at Bundy and at 7th, but the red got me in between at 26th. Earlier, I went up Pearl, the best route up to Barrington after San Vicente. On Pearl, there are two annoying traffic signals, at Centinela and, only 1,000 feet later, at Bundy. They are almost always red, don't sense bikes, and the pedestrian buttons do nothing. Today, I caught the green on both of them. So there!