Caught up in Conflict pp 61-83 | Cite as
Public Protest, Domestic Acquiescence: Women in Northern Ireland
Abstract
Women in Northern Ireland are no strangers to social and political action, but their efforts have been directed almost wholly to civil rights rather than to women’s issues. At the beginning of this century James Connolly described the Northern Ireland woman as ‘the slave of a slave’ (1981, p. 10). This graphic phrase is no less fitting today. Given the bitter political divisions of Northern Ireland, its depressed socio-economic conditions and the powerfully conservative influence of the dominant churches, it is little wonder that women have remained in a relative backwater of feminism. Striving to survive in difficult circumstances is not the most conducive forum for women’s debate about alternatives that may appear either abstract or totally out of reach for the majority of the working class; more than that, many women have been encouraged to reject such alternatives as alien.
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