Women and war: a complex matter
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Author | Elena Bergia |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905817744631 |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
22 POLITICAL INSIGHT • DECEMBER 2017
‘The conict made women very,
very strong and independent.’
These words were uttered
by a Northern Irish Catholic
woman I will call Brenda. She was 47 when
I interviewed her, and held a managerial
position in a non-prot organisation in
West Belfast. The conict that tore Northern
Ireland apart from the late 1960s to the late
1990s, often referred to as ‘the Troubles’,
threw Brenda’s life into complete disarray. Her
husband and two of her siblings were arrested
and charged with IRA membership. She was
left with no job, little money, and two young
children to raise on her own.
Despite the trauma and hardship
experienced as a consequence of the
conict, Brenda describes the Troubles as
an empowering experience for women of
her generation. Paradoxical as it may sound,
this view is often heard among women
who lived through the Troubles in Catholic
working-class areas of Belfast. The academic
literature conrms that conict situations can
be empowering for women, despite their
traumatizing eects.
Women have tended to be portrayed
either as victims, or as natural-born
peacemakers. The idea that women can nd
war empowering is novel but also tends to
present an oversimplied, black-or-white view
of the role of women in war. A close scrutiny
reveals that, on the contrary, women embody
myriad roles and qualities at the same time,
and that the eects of conict can be felt for
decades after the end of violence.
Women and war:
a complex matter
Women are often portrayed as the victims of war. But women can
play a range of roles in conflict, from peacemakers and mothers to
active participants, argues Elena Bergia.
This article attempts a more comprehensive
discussion of the topic of women and war
taking the Northern Irish Troubles as a case
study. Having ended ocially with the Good
Friday Agreement in 1998, the Troubles
provide us with an opportunity to look, not
only at the immediate impact of a conict on
women’s lives, but also on the longer-term
consequences. As a source of data, I use my
own ethnographic research in a Catholic
working-class area of Belfast that was heavily
aected by the conict and is currently
characterised by high levels of unemployment
and a staunch republican orientation.
Women and the Troubles: ‘a woman
shouldering everything’
Far from being a tribal or religious war as
some media depictions have suggested, the
conict in Northern Ireland was primarily
a political one, revolving around mutually-
irreconcilable views on the constitutional
status of the territory. Agents of violence were
not only republican and loyalist paramilitary
groups, but also members of the local police
force and the British Army.
In this complex scenario, Catholic women
in working-class areas were victimised both
by external agents such as members of the
security forces and loyalist paramilitary groups,
and by internal agents: the IRA took it upon
themselves to ward o the security threat
represented by women’s potential emotional
involvement with members of the British Army
through what has been called a ‘policing’ of
women’s sexuality. Methods employed by
the IRA to punish the alleged transgressors
included tarring and feathering culprits as a
visible marker of their guilt. When we look
at the wartime victimisation of women – an
example immediately springing to mind is
the genocidal rape of Bosnian Muslim women
during the Balkan war – we tend to focus
on violence perpetrated by the outsider, the
Political Insight December 2017.indd 22 03/11/2017 10:54
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