From co‐op to co‐opt

Gender and class in the early Civil Rights Movement

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12919975
AutoresTara Keenan‐Thomson (Fordham University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Volumen2
Número2
Páginas207-225
Fecha de publicación2009-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Sixties (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1754-1336 • E-ISSN: 1754-1328
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17541320903346536
OpenAlexW1969474183
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas14

This essay begins with a discussion of how the Homeless Citizens League based in Dungannon and comprised almost entirely of young Catholic mothers coalesced around the issue of discriminatory housing allocation in the early 1960s. Drawing on tactics pioneered by American civil rights activists, these women challenged Unionist political domination of the town's Catholics on the street. Quickly after they began to protest, the local doctor's wife joined the group and set about professionalizing the women's advocacy efforts as the group's “chairman.” Utilizing a combination of archival research, documentary evidence, and supplementary semi‐structured interviews this essay analyzes how class and gender hierarchies interacted to change the face of the nascent housing rights movement and transform it into a middle class civil rights pressure group. I argue that by manipulating the prevailing patriarchal and middle class attitudes of their political innocence, these women were able to challenge the local council and, by extension, the state. Once the state met their initial demands, however, their own acceptance of gender and class hierarchies contributed to their complicit withdrawal from the movement

Innocence · League · Middle class · Political science · Politics · Social movement · Sociology · State (computer science · Wife · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society