From co‐op to co‐opt: gender and class in the early Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

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.