To many outsiders, politics in Northern Ireland appears to be about an archaic struggle between two groups defined in religious terms-Protestants and Catholics1-whose leaders all seem to be men. Women, and women’s concerns, have been largely invisible in the reports and in much of the literature generated by the ‘Troubles’—the euphemism for the violent conflict which has dominated Northern Ireland for much of the past twenty-five years.2 Where women have been prominent in representations of the conflict, they have generally been portrayed as the ‘peace makers’, uninvolved in the conflict itself.