Real and Imagined Communities in the Lives of Women in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Identity and Gender

Abstract

This essay discusses the nature of women's identities in seventeenth-century Ireland, whether they identifed themselves as Catholics or Protestants, as political actors, as spinsters, wives and widows, or with one or other racial group. It also argues that if historians of Ireland looked at family and household rather than at religious, political and racial identities, they would be nearer to understanding women's identities in particular and collective identities in general.