Amazon, aristocrat, or democrat

This chapter explores how elite Protestant women navigated the transformed political landscape of the 1790s. They were increasingly caught between an older politics grounded in property, religion, and dynastic interests and a new democratic politics based on the exercise of personal judgement and individual (male) rights. The intimate web of affiliations that bound together the Protestant elite meant that many of the women considered here were personally acquainted with, or connected to, figures in the United Irish movement. Their responses to the ideological struggles of the 1790s point to a sharpened awareness of the gendered implications and (from the perspective of women of this class) limitations of United Irish ideology, as well as a frustration with the constraints which the ‘old’ politics imposed on women, insofar as it denied that they could operate as independent, thinking political agents. As they negotiated this altered political terrain, they often continued to draw on customary modes of female political engagement—investing dress with political meaning; acting as intermediaries; intervening on behalf of their tenantry—however, practices and interventions once considered conventional became, in this highly charged political context, much more transgressive. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the debates on the Act of Union and the particular resonance which the allegorisation of the union as a national marriage had for women

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