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The following is excerpted from Ulster's Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912-1923 by Jane G.V. McGaughey.
Importantly, these correlations between manliness and militarization were reserved for men only; women were cast as supporters, comforters, and loved ones, but not as combatants. Full citizenship within a patriarchal state was most often reserved for men, whose blood-sacrifice as citizen-soldiers and warriors was duly privileged and rewarded. Militarization was an important part of the relationship between the community and constructs of masculinity in Ulster. Ireland is an island where war and the threat of war have shaped all aspects of society and are key elements in modern Irish identity. Certainly stereotypes of Irish masculinity have been influenced by Irishmen’s presumed heritage as a warrior people or “martial race.” The Ulster Protestant soldier occupied an awkward place in the British popular imagination, as he was not as immediately recognizable as a Scottish Highlander, but he was not necessarily included in sweeping generalizations made about Irish soldiers, which often were predicated on stereotypes of Irish mania or effeminacy. According to Joanna Bourke, the popular belief that the Irish were “innately combative” meant that they were afforded a lower place on the evolutionary scale in Victorian and Edwardian military philosophy, so that their prowess on the battlefield hindered any concurrent political aspirations. These associations between regionalism, militarization, and ideals of manhood made the soldier one of the most powerful masculine constructions in Ulster society during the era of the Great War, but also one which could be redefined with a more specific Protestant unionist identity. While other manly images existed in concert with representations of the warrior, militarization was an inescapable theme in the public sphere between 1912 and 1923, making it one of the chief avenues of analysis in the following argument.
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