Women and the Reimagining of Modern Ireland and Northern Ireland

North American Conference on British Studies Baltimore, Maryland 10-12 November 2023

Session Information TBD

Leaving the Kitchen Sink: The Politics of Women and Peace in Northern Ireland

In 1996 a group representing both Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist members formed the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) and used a “kitchen table campaign” to get on the ballot of the Northern Ireland Forum Elections. The campaign was successful, and its representatives started a political career after many years of active work in their communities. NIWC founder Monica McWilliams described the party’s three universal principles as “inclusion, human rights, and equality” rather than using any gender-specific qualifiers in its mission. In a time of violence when cross-coalition building was almost impossible to do in the home, the NIWC found a way to come together to organize during The Troubles, a nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted for about thirty years until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Founding member Avila Kilmurray described a sign at the Women’s Information Drop-In Center in the Lower Orneau ghetto of Belfast that set the intention of the peacebuilders who met there: “Welcome, you are now leaving the kitchen sink and entering a new world.” Without this work, it is likely that there would have only been one woman at the talks at Stormont.

This paper will examine the NIWC from the Forum elections in 1996 to the Good Friday Agreement from a historical perspective using the accounts of its members and the other parties at Stormont, media from the time, and scholarly work done in the fields of gender studies and political science in order to show how Northern Ireland benefited from the NIWC’s involvement.

Fellow panelists:

Chair: Averill Earls, St. Olaf College

"This old idea is not dying out, it is dead": Femininity and Agency in Paramilitaries and Peace Work

Ashley Morin, University at Buffalo

“Hopeless, miserable, but determined and defiant wickedness”: Representations of the Wrens of the Curragh and the Negotiation of New Moral Standards in Britain and Ireland

Courteney E. Smith, Boston University

Aerosol Revolution: Contemporary Women Street Artists and their Role in a Changing Belfast

Jeryn Mayer, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick