A Women at the Center: Anne Dickson and the “Troubles”

The emergence of a Catholic civil rights movement in themid-1960s presented the Unionist government of Northern Ireland with its most perplexing challenge since the state’s founding in 1921. Unlike earlier anti-Partition campaigns, in this instance civil rights advocates initially sought equal treatment within the state. The Campaign for Social Justice and its successor, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) demanded an end to gerrymandered voting districts and discrimination in government housing and public employment. In 1968 the NICRA took its protest into the streets. Large-scale, peacefully intended marches jolted the Unionist establishment and provoked a Protestant backlash. Successive leaders of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland scrambled to find a middle ground on which to construct a sustainable solution to the growing crisis. None proved successful.

Scholars have extensively chronicled the early reform efforts of leading male Unionists and the subsequent collapse of the political center. Little has been forthcoming, however, on women involved in this same struggle. Diane Urquhart has written in depth on women in the Unionist Party, but her studies do not extend beyond 1940.¹ Rick Wilford and Yvonne Galligan’s analyses of women in Irish politics concentrate on the 1980s and 1990s. but do not address directly the early years of the “Troubles.”² Rachel Ward’s recent and illuminating volume on Unionist and loyalist women as political actors focuses on the post-1998 Good Friday Accord period.³ In other words, Protestant women have not yet been written back into the history of the “Troubles”; doing so will require that we investigate both aggregate groups and important individual actors. One such actor was Anne Dickson, leader of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI) from 1976 to 1981. She succeeded Brian Faulkner, who founded the UPNI in 1974 in the wake of the failed Sunningdale Agreement.

Dickson’s seventeen-year-long political career defied what Catherine Shannon has termed Northern Ireland’s “deeply entrenched ecumenical patriarchy.”⁴ Male politicians, both Unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, historically relegated women to supporting roles at best within their party structures. Rarely could a female activist parlay her party connections into nomination as a candidate for office at any level, much less a leadership position within the party hierarchy. Party selection procedures functioned as the key gatekeepers in determining access to public office. With the onset of the “Troubles” politically committed women who might have stood for office encountered even greater resistance from all-male selection committees. Women, so went the conventional wisdom, lacked the necessary “toughness” for hard-nosed politics in critical times.⁵Worse still, they were too likely to collaborate with “the other side.”⁶

Even a cursory look at the Northern Ireland Parliament (Stormont) during its fifty-year existence reveals a longstanding pattern of tokenism relative to women’s representation. Women comprised only 4 percent of candidates standing for election to the fifty-two-seat House of Commons between 1921 and 1972.⁷ Only nine women were elected: six Unionists, two Independents and one Liberal.⁸ Four of the six women MPs in the years after World War II represented Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB), a multiseat electoral anomaly that was abolished in 1969. With its small, well-educated electorate, the QUB constituency afforded women their best venue for challenging entrenched male interests at Stormont. Were it not for Dickson’s election in 1969, the disappearance of the university seats—ironically, in the name of reform—would have eliminated female MPs from Stormont altogether.

As the dominant political force during the Stormont era, the Unionist Party (UP) bore much of the responsibility for excluding women from national elective office. Although the UP included an active Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC), leadership in that organization did not provide a path to female candidature.⁹ In fact, four of the six successful Stormont UP candidates benefited more from the “halo effect” than from any UWUC experience or promotion; each was related to an important party man by blood ormarriage.¹⁰ Thus, it is particularly significant that Anne Dickson, the lone...