Abstract

Protestant women's narratives of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, though few in number, constitute a different and valuable genre of rebellion narrative. Their perspective from the interior of a permeable domestic sphere offers more complex and nuanced versions of the rebellion than those found in the male-authored histories. The women's narratives consistently eschew a systematic dehumanization of the insurgents and considerably complicate the prevailing image of the "savage" rebels. Attending to their voices changes our notion of warfare and what it means to participate in a war, underscoring the extent to which civil warfare disrupts and reconfigures gender and class roles and thwarts easy moral determinations.

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