** also to be considered for the Political Participation Section**
This proposed paper builds on my doctoral research related to the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC) and is based on research in its initial stages. The framework of analysis employed is taken from my doctoral dissertation and is original in terms of the concepts it combines with a gender focus. It draws on Rogers Brubaker’s concepts of “nation” as practical category, institutionalized form (“nationhood”), and contingent event (“nationness”), combining these concepts with William Walters’ concept of “domopolitics” and with a feminist understanding of the centrality of gender to nation. Furthermore, it draws on the concept of “God’s people”—a chosen or covenanting people for whom religious identity was tied closely to a “national” identity and particular territory—within both Ulster unionist and Afrikaner nationalist ideologies, as discussed by Donald Akenson (1991).
This analytical framework is used in this paper to compare and contrast the role of women in both the Ulster unionist and Afrikaner nationalist movements during the early 1900s and the constitution of Ulster (Northern Ireland) and the Afrikaner nation by those respective political movements. Through such a comparative analysis this paper seeks to answer the following questions: 1. In what way(s) were the roles of women in the Ulster unionist and Afrikaner nationalist movements similar and/or different during the early 1900s? 2. How did these movements constitute Ulster and the Afrikaner nation respectively as gendered? 3. How do these cases contribute more generally to an understanding of the interrelationship between gender and nation?
