ABSTRACT
Despite periodic efforts to forge a common front, the women's movement has foundered over the mutually reinforcing cleavages of nationality and religion that structure Northern Ireland's political alignments. Armed patriarchy in Northern Ireland has been attenuated by the active involvement of women in paramilitary organizations, especially within the republican movement, but it has not resolved a historically unhappy relationship between feminism and Irish nationalism. Encouraged by the apparent promise of the Easter Rising of 1916 to deliver equality for all, feminists quickly recognized that Irish nationalism was inhospitable to their demands. A self-denned nationalist from North Belfast also voices a sense of sisterly solidarity, in the process finding no difficulty in identifying differences between the sexes. Gender in Northern Ireland does not, in fact, emerge as a reliable predictor of political participation; neither does one's religious affiliation nor one's felt national identity. Northern Ireland is, in geographic and population terms, a small society within which political identities remain sharply drawn.
