‘No Idle Sightseers’: The Ulster Women’s Unionist Council and the Masculine World of Politics During the Ulster Crisis, 1912–14

Abstract

This chapter argues that Unionist women were actively involved in the creation and maintenance of hegemonic standards of masculinity within the Ulster Unionist community. Dominant masculine imagery deeply affected how the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council was formed and how that organisation sought an active public role in the era of the Third Home Rule Crisis and the onset of the Great War. The importance of female respectability became an important tool in the Unionist Party arsenal during the Ulster Crisis, which then, in turn, reinforced the hyper-masculine imagery of men like Sir Edward Carson and James Craig to an even more cherished position within unionist iconography.