with help of Lyttle ) to the grave of Betsy Gray, heroine of the Battle of Ballynahinch, ended in a fracas and the destruction by unionists of her memorial stone. Milligan's emphasis upon Belfast's republican past "served to highlight just how different the city was at the end of the nineteenth century". Meanwhile, attitudes on the nationalist side persuaded Milligan to launch (through the IWA) a separate Women's Centenary Union. As a woman she found that she was being barred from Centenary meetings, and that these were being appropriated by local politicians to solicit Catholic votes. On April 6, 1897, she beseeched readers of The Shan Van Vocht: "Is it too much to ask [...] that the women of Ireland, who are not asked to have any opinion whatever as to who shall have the right to speak for Ireland in the British Parliament, should form the Union which an historic occasion demands". The Shan Van Vocht The two-penny journal The Shan Van Vocht (The "Poor Old Woman" in Irish, the metaphor for Ireland in a rebellion-era ballad) was produced by Milligan and Johnston in the offices of Robert Johnston's timber yard (and often edited at Ard Righ). They had been editing the paper of another commemorative circle, the Henry Joy McCracken Literary Society, the Northern Patriot, but in December 1895 they were dismissed possibly because in three of their four issues they had supported amnesty for Fenian prisoners. In a short period, the two-penny monthly achieved a wide circulation. As touring lecturers for the Irish Women's Association, Milligan and Johnston promoted the magazine and the formation of reading circles. Agents were found in Dublin, Derry, Glasgow and New York. Within a year subscriptions were also coming in from the Irish diaspora in South Africa, Canada, Argentina and Australia. Maud Gonne, who described Milligan as "small, aggressive and full of observant curiosity", said that she and her friends were "full of almost envious admiration of some numbers of the Shan Van Vocht, a daring little paper". The formula was similar to that which had launched the Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland paper in the 1840s. Like The Nation, The Shan Van Vocht offered a mixture of poetry, serialised fiction, Irish history, political analysis and announcements. The second issue (Belfast, February 1896) contained the following: "America ... Oh mighty foster land" (poem); "The Captain’s Daughter" (a serial written by Milligan under the