Women as Sectarian Agents: Looking Beyond the Football Cliché in Scotland

Introduction

Historically, sectarianism in Scotland, which we define as institutionalised and everyday intra-Christian bigotry and prejudice, has roots in the Protestant Reformation, Irish Catholic migration and the constitutional politics of Ireland (Mitchell, 2008). However, the seeds of the modern debate in Scotland are often traced to more recent events, which construct the issue as predominantly white, masculine, working-class and located within public spheres of social life – particularly in connection with Scottish football and parades. The politics of Scottish football, mostly the ‘Old Firm’ rivalry between Rangers (‘Protestant’) and Celtic (‘Catholic’), have often dominated much of the policy and academic interest on the topic and continue to be identified as a key mechanism of reproducing religious conflict and, in some cases, violence (Devine, 2000; Flint and Kelly, 2013).

In this article we argue that these contemporary Scottish discourses on sectarianism neglect the gendered dynamics of sectarian beliefs and practices by almost exclusively focusing on white working-class men’s behaviours and actions thereby erasing women’s agency in reproducing bigotry and prejudice. The hegemonic discourses about sectarianism which privilege male-dominated public spaces of the street, the pub and the football stadium serve to silence alternative manifestations of sectarian identity-making and practices by women in the private and semi-private spaces of the home and community life. We draw on findings from our pilot study to argue that legitimising different women’s experiences of sectarianism is a necessary step in feminist social action to recognise the situated nature of sectarianism, the role that some women might play in reproducing it and their potential to ‘act otherwise’; exercising agency to combat sectarian prejudices in everyday life. We define agency as ‘the ability and capacity for individual and group self-determination that is realised through deliberation, analysis and action’ (Emejulu, 2011: 387).

We begin this article by providing a gendered review of policy and research on sectarianism in Scotland to argue that women’s agency has disappeared from discourses in Scotland because of the dominant constructions of sectarianism as the performance of white working-class masculinities in public space. We then outline our methodology, which draws on feminist standpoint epistemology to analyse women’s agency, narrative identity constructions and the impact of hegemonic discourses, before turning to our empirical data: six semi-structured and biographical interviews with Scottish women practitioners of anti-sectarian education who culturally identify with either a ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ background. We argue that careful consideration of women’s positioning, in the private and semi-private spaces of the home and community, reveals potential roles both as reproducers of intergenerational sectarian divisions and as agents for change in countering sectarian ideas and violence.

Gendering sectarianism in Scotland: A policy and research review

This brief review highlights the marginalisation of women as subjects and agents of sectarianism and contextualises our own contribution to the field.

Scottish sectarianism has been constructed as a ‘gendered phenomenon, far more bound up with Scottish masculinity than with Scottish femininity’, ‘just a boy’s game’ and a ‘thug problem’ (Bruce et al., 2004: 173; Crawford, 2000: 188). This view of sectarianism has been (re)produced through hegemonic political, policy and popular discourses which frame the issue as a social problem manifested in public displays of physical and verbal hate crimes in connection with Scottish football, alcohol-fuelled violence and Orange Walks (parades commemorating victories of Protestant monarchs in Britain which also act as a means to intimidate Catholic communities). Problems with sectarianism are often thought to be located in specific white working-class communities in West Central Scotland (Cramphorn, 2002; Hamilton-Smith et al., 2015). As a result, certain football rivalries – such as those between Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, and to a lesser degree, between Hibernian and Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh – take on a masculine and ethno-religious dimension which often dominates most of the policy and public interest in sectarianism (Bradley, 2004). As Goodall and Malloch (2013: 165) state:

Women are almost entirely absent from the officially recorded body of perpetrators. The typical [sectarian] offence often involves football and disorder in the streets, as a province of men rather than women … men who are publically drunk [and] associated with being working class.

Despite the fact that the fabric of Scottish everyday life is encoded and imbued with a sectarian logic – a white Scottish individual’s religious affiliation and identity can oftentimes be ‘read’ from her last name, her family’s migration history, where she lives and what school she attended – sectarianism is still stubbornly defined and overly associated with white, male, working-class football culture.

The seeds of the modern debate about sectarianism are often traced back to 1999 when Glasgow teenager Cara Henderson (1999) sent a letter to The Herald newspaper following the death of her boyfriend as a result of sectarian, football-related, violence. Two months later, James MacMillan, the composer and conductor, delivered his now famous lecture on ‘Scotland’s Shame’ at the Edinburgh International Festival, in which he claimed Scotland was ‘a land of sleep-walking bigotry’ (2000: 15). This letter and lecture together sparked intense public debate which drew on and was informed by recent deliberations about Scottish nationhood and identity during the successful 1999 referendum to re-establish a Scottish parliament and a governing executive. Thus the debate about sectarianism intersected with Scottish nation-building which ensured sectarianism – directly linked to white working-class men and football – became a political priority for the new parliament and government and various local authorities (Glasgow City Council, 2003; Scottish Executive, 2006; Scottish Government, 2014).

Following the online hate campaigns, attacks on football supporters and death threats sent to the then Celtic football manager, Neil Lennon, in 2011, the newly formed Scottish National Party (SNP) government passed the controversial Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act (Scottish Parliament, 2012). At the time, it was noted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2011) that the Equality Impact Assessment carried out prior to the implementation of this new legislation included provisions for all the ‘protected characteristics’ (e.g. race, ethnicity, class, religion, disability and sexuality) except for gender (Scottish Government, 2011). This omission, while partially justified by the response that there is a ‘disproportional impact of violent crime on men’, reflects the widespread assumption about the nature of sectarianism in Scotland: sectarianism is deemed to be less relevant to women’s lives due to its almost exclusive framing as white, male, working-class and football-related (Scottish Parliament, 2011: 13).

Recently, however, the creation of an Advisory Group on Tackling Sectarianism in Scotland and over £9m of funding to 44 community-based projects have encouraged a shift in approach to addressing sectarianism by taking more seriously issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability and by moving beyond football to other spheres of social life where sectarianism might occur (Scottish Government, 2013). Nevertheless, women are still largely absent in political and policy constructions of sectarianism.

In the Community Experiences of Sectarianism study, for instance, it was found that the public manifestation of sectarianism was highly gendered and ‘overlaid with masculine attributes and behaviours’ (Goodall et al., 2015: 15). Participants more frequently described typically masculine cultures such as the familial and community role of men in transmitting and instilling sectarian values as part of an intergenerational ‘hand-me-down identity’ (p. 10). Although this high profile report partially acknowledged women’s potential roles in reproducing sectarianism, it suggested that women, while not entirely passive, were less likely to be active participants because they are less violent, aggressive and less prominent at public events. While we do not disagree with the report’s findings about women’s relative propensity towards violence and that football is male-dominated, we do think the report downplays different women’s roles in the reproduction of sectarianism in family and community life.

Goodall and Malloch’s (2013) research provides an interesting insight into women’s positioning as ‘victims’ of sectarianism who use ‘avoidance strategies’ for fear of their personal safety in public spaces (p. 174). Participants shared feelings of intimidation due to masculine displays of football-related aggression, which were thought to be heightened in the aftermath of Old Firm games. Some of the women also described their roles ‘behind the scenes’, in the private sphere of the home, using tactics to tempt their ‘men-folk’ away from potentially violent situations in public, through the promise of good food and a warm atmosphere after the match (p. 174). They also point out that when women are mentioned in public discourses about sectarianism, it is often in relation to their socially endorsed role to improve male behaviour or as victims of domestic abuse thought to be connected to football-related sectarianism.

Although women are partially acknowledged in the most recent work about sectarianism, women appear to only be present in these male-dominated contexts as passive victims who suffer the consequences of this ‘boy’s game’ in the form of intimidation and having to ‘manage’ the impact of their ‘working class men behaving badly’ (Goodall and Malloch, 2013: 75). It appears that women have largely been ignored as active agents in their own right and/or misrecognised primarily as ‘victims’ or ‘adjuncts’ to men’s behaviour. It seems that the hegemonic ways of framing sectarianism are unable to articulate and legitimise women’s distinctive perspectives and agency.

Engender (2014) found that where it existed, sectarianism was embedded in community and family life and argued that women’s agency was being overlooked in many approaches to tackling this issue. Participants spoke of parenting roles as the main place where sectarianism is learned and it was found that within familial contexts, women’s roles were often to ensure ‘girls conformed to gendered family expectations through the use of inclusion and exclusion’ in family and kinship networks particularly in relation to young women contemplating ‘mixed marriages’ (marriages between Protestants and Catholics) (Engender, 2014: 8–14). They concluded that women’s agency needed to be the focus in order to gain ‘a deeper understanding of the gendered systems and structures that enable sectarianism to be inculcated through everyday family and community interactions’ (p. 18).

Interestingly, in similar studies that seek to centre the views and experiences of women, a focus on the private sphere of family life seems to have better captured women’s participation in sectarianism (Scottish Women’s Convention, 2013). These gendered studies of sectarianism illustrate how women are active agents in reproducing and/or challenging sectarianism and demonstrate the importance of private and familial spaces as key sites for the performance of sectarian identities. Thus, to better understand the reproduction of sectarianism and how to combat it requires a redefinition of ‘the political’ by Scottish policymakers and practitioners by challenging the separation of the public and private spheres of social life. As Yuval-Davis (1997: 4) explains: ‘The public realm cannot be fully understood in the absence of the private sphere.’

We argue that adopting a feminist approach to researching sectarianism in Scotland requires an attentive focus on women’s agency and an awareness of dominant narratives which construct sectarianism as exclusive to hegemonic, white, working-class masculinities.

Before turning to empirical data on women and sectarianism, we first outline the methodology of our study.

Methodology

This article is based on findings from six interviews, from June 2011, with female practitioners of anti-sectarian education from Lindores’ Master’s dissertation. This later served as the pilot for her current PhD thesis focusing on ‘lay’ women’s intergenerational and intersectional experiences of sectarianism in everyday life. This article, however, presents the pilot findings from female experts of anti-sectarian practice who, at that time, did not appear to have considered women’s distinctive experiences of sectarianism beyond the public and male-dominated football spheres. It was only through exploring their own personal and private lives, during the interviews, that the nature of the political struggles women might face in family and community spheres became more apparent. This is worthy of reflection because while the participants occupied a social position which afforded them ‘expert’ status on anti-sectarian practice in public life, the most revealing data was in later discussions on their personal and private lives which, at first, they had not considered as relevant to the research interview. This speaks to the cornerstones of feminist scholarship demonstrating the need for ‘non-expert’ and everyday knowledge that confronts this artificial separation of social life into public and private spheres to reveal how they are ‘mutually dependent halves of the story’ (DuBois, 1983; Yuval-Davis, 1997: 4).

Feminist sociologists have a long-standing history of drawing attention to the gaps between personal experiences and the public systems or ‘ruling relations’ which construct knowledge in ways which do not reflect the realities of the different experiences of women (Ackerly and True, 2010; Smith, 1988). This concern led us to feminist standpoint epistemology and the concept of ‘conscious partiality’ (Harding, 1991; Mies, 1983). Standpoint epistemology recognises that all knowledge is socially situated and that power and privilege can hide behind methods, particularly when they attempt to present themselves as objective and impartial. It argues that the social world can be more fully ‘known’ from the subject position of the marginalised or oppressed and that this requires a ‘conscious partiality’ to give voice to their untold stories. This reduces bias by refusing to be impossibly neutral and strengthening standards of objectivity by replacing ‘the view from above’ with the ‘view from below’ to generate less distorted representations of women’s lives (Mies, 1984: 123).

We selected female practitioners of anti-sectarian education to interrogate the apparent focus on male-dominated, football-centric approaches. Research with female practitioners was positioned at the intersection between their knowledge and experience of both public discourses on sectarianism and their private experiences of social life. These were the few women working in the field at this time who were available during the research timeframe and willing to participate in the research. Two of the women identified with ‘Catholic’ backgrounds and four with a ‘Protestant’ upbringing. Despite the small sample size, the women lived, worked and were brought up in a range of areas across Scotland’s central belt. Their different perspectives are not intended to be representative but rather they contribute towards a framework of multiple realities shaped by their intersectional standpoints.

Their interviews generated over 10 hours of rich qualitative data and occurred across two different phases: the first was a semi-structured interview asking questions about their practice to learn how sectarianism was defined, what their public work involved and the experiences of the different people and communities that they engaged with. The second part (presented in this article) was a biographical narrative interview about their personal experiences of sectarianism. Open questions on their upbringing, family and relationships were aimed at inducing narrative and to ensure the process was participant-led and allowed for deeper, uninterrupted reflections as they constructed their story (Brannen et al., 2011). This two-phased interview approach compared the difference between how sectarianism was conceptualised in their professional public and everyday private lives. The first phase allowed participants to share familiar, well-rehearsed responses relating to their professional public life which built trust and rapport for the second more personal phase of the interview. This also set the context for the mismatch between the women’s public and private lives. It allowed reflection on the hegemonic masculinity of the discourse and the need for new ways of speaking about sectarianism that better reflected their different experiences as women.

Biographical narrative interviews – defined as the act of telling a life story – were selected because of their emphasis on everyday life and practices which can otherwise go unnoticed. They can also reveal how different participants understand their own and others’ identities and how they conceptualise sectarianism as an issue across changing locations and circumstances throughout the life course (Phoenix, 2014). Although narrative interviews are partial and performative accounts relying on memory and perspective, they are well suited to providing insights into the formation of perceptions and identities of interest to researchers of sectarianism because they intentionally place higher value on the processes of meaning-making in storytelling, rather than expecting narratives to serve as a ‘factual’ source of knowledge (Brannen, 2013). As our epistemology outlines, this conscious partiality also allows us to address a deficit in research specifically targeting women’s experiences. Reflexive accounts within our analysis are also supported through reference to comparative work to allow readers to openly assess the validity of our interpretations.

Each participant in the study has been given a pseudonym to protect her identity while still allowing the reader to trace, interpret and contextualise the narratives throughout the discussion of the findings.

Findings

We now present an overview of the findings from our pilot study on women and sectarianism in Scotland opening with descriptions of the women who participated:

The illegitimacy of alternative narratives on women and sectarianism

For most of our participants, this study was the first time that they had ever been asked to consider women’s experiences of sectarianism. Coming from a ‘very Orange household’ with a mother who was ‘very involved in the social aspects of the Lodge’, Laura highlights the ambivalent relationship that women appear to have with sectarianism:

I hadn’t really thought about it! (Laughs) A lot of my work has been about males … people focus heavily on football and things like that, like it’s a male issue. It wasn’t until you asked, I was like … ohhh women and sectarianism … now that’s interesting!

As Laura herself suggests, despite any potential sources of evidence to the contrary in her familial relationships, the hegemonic masculinity of the sectarian narrative in Scotland appears to be so ingrained that the very idea of women and sectarianism seems alien.

Similar to the ambivalence of the female participants in the Goodall and Malloch (2013) study and to the discursive deficits about sectarianism found by Goodall et al. (2015), the evidence gathered in our enquiry also seemed to support the idea that it was difficult to identify women as active agents in sectarian practices. Despite having started to negotiate the unfamiliar terrain of ‘women’ and sectarianism, at times using very detailed examples, at first many of our participants seemed to struggle to either articulate or accept that women and girls could be included in a discussion about sectarianism beyond the tropes of either trying to ‘fit’ them into a football context or minimising the role that they played. This problem of seeing women as sectarian agents might be because the private and semi-private spaces of family and community – with which women are still identified – are still not recognised and valued as sites for political struggles. Thus to define women as sectarian agents requires the politicisation of care work and the need to see mothering and motherhood as a public politics which shapes both private and public space (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017; Erel, 2011; Naples, 1992).

When asked to reflect on alternative narratives and roles in which women may have an agency to challenge or reproduce sectarianism Hannah states that women ‘nurture those who are round about them’:

As soon as you cross the threshold of somebody’s house it’s their rules so you decide the music, you decide what the conversation is, you decide … Women are integral to the families that these men grew up in who were or are perpetuators of sectarian attitudes and values.

She positions women as the guardians of the home while the men, who are brought up in this environment by women, are the ones she believes who are publicly perpetuating the attitudes and values associated with sectarianism. Women are thought to have an agency to ‘marshal’, ‘supervise’ and ‘enable’ the atmosphere and environment of the home presumably either to reproduce or challenge sectarian attitudes in familial and relational contexts. Therefore, to recognise women’s sectarian identities and behaviours requires a more nuanced and situated understanding of sectarianism and attending to the different ways it is (re)produced depending on the site in which it is mobilised. As long as the dominant policy narrative about sectarianism constructs it as violent disorder in public space perpetuated by white working-class men, its (re)production in feminised private and semi-private spaces will continue to be obscured and delegitimised.

Interestingly, even after articulating alternative and feminised manifestations, some participants still seemed reluctant to accept this as valid way of talking about sectarianism. Laura, in particular, appeared to feel that sometimes women or girls did not necessarily understand or express sectarianism as ‘passionately’ as their male counterparts. However, she shared an experience working with a group of young Catholic girls from Lanarkshire on a cross-community project to a Protestant area in Northern Ireland. She explained that the girls had worn ‘bright skinny jeans’, one pair of ‘green’, one ‘white’ and one ‘gold’ and were skating round the ice-rink side-by-side laughing before she realised what they were doing and called them off the ice. In a further incident, another group of the girls had bought ‘tricolour’ badges and pinned them to their purses, apparently causing a group of local boys to throw stones at the mini-bus as they left a fast-food restaurant. Laura was eager to minimise this incident explaining that she felt that the Scottish girls did not understand the impact that their actions would have in Northern Ireland:

So it was all girls and it was very clear what side of the fence you were on with that group. But the girls didn’t understand sectarianism they didn’t know what it was, it was just something they had heard. They never really knew much about it. They thought it was all a laugh and a joke to do certain things cos they didn’t realise the impact that would have in that community. They didn’t even have a clue of the implications – even though you’re trying to explain to them – but it just wouldn’t have happened in Scotland, you know, as severe as that, although … (tails off) Well, you see, the girls they just didn’t understand … so … I tended to find that the girls had … (tails off) They didn’t really know what it was all about but they knew that it was there. The guys they seem to have more of an understanding about it.

Laura’s reluctance to recognise the behaviour of these girls has parallels with Deuchar and Holligan (2008), who found that Scottish girls seemed ‘less informed’ about religious divides, overlooking their potential to be active agents in producing bigotry and prejudice (p. 10). Laura minimises the validity of linking girls to sectarianism when she claims that they were not ‘as passionate about it’ as boys and that they did not understand it as well as their male peers. The crucial point to note is that her idea of passion seems to sit alongside the hegemonic framing of sectarianism as a male-dominated, football-related passion. Deuchar and Holligan and our participant Laura are perhaps talking about women and girls while still trying to fit them into the football frame, delegitimising their equally passionate behaviours clearly demonstrated by their provocative and potentially dangerous choice of clothing and badges. Perhaps there is also an unwillingness to accept how women as active agents might also reproduce problematic beliefs and engage in harmful and prejudiced behaviour.

In a study of girls and violence in Scotland, Brown et al. (2001) highlighted the importance of repositioning girls as agents by allowing them to define ‘what counts’ as violence and how this fits into their social worlds and daily lives (p. 40). They found that girls’ actions and experiences of violence involved ‘subtle and coercive kinds of behaviour, which often did not involve physical contact but which carried violent intent’, aggressive behaviour that was often ‘non-verbal and symbolic … within the context of friendships’ and ‘which aimed socially to exclude other children’ (pp. 41–43). As they argue, by shifting the paradigm of ‘what counts’ as legitimate manifestations of a social issue, such as sectarianism, to fit with the lives of women and girls themselves requires a challenge to theories, policies and practices based on masculinist presumptions which would otherwise minimise and neglect the experiences of women and girls as active agents. Laura’s example supports this line of argument and raises an important point for future research on sectarianism in Scotland which attempts to also include and validate the actions and experiences of women and girls.

Towards a feminised sectarianism: Women policing women’s behaviour in private space

Countering the dominant narrative about who is a sectarian agent and how sectarianism is mobilised necessitates us taking seriously the private and semi-private spaces of the home and community life as sites of political struggle. It also requires us to understand care work as political behaviour which can reproduce sectarianism through women’s attempts to control other women’s choices in marriage and the upbringing of children. As we will demonstrate, familial and kinship relations are an important site in the reproduction of sectarian values that are too often overlooked because of the masculinist frame of associating sectarianism with football and physical violence. Studies on the high proportion of intra-Christian ‘mixed marriages’ in Scotland often suggest that these marriages should lead to a reduction in ‘sectarian discrimination and conflict’ by reducing the ‘social distance between sectarian groups’ and undermining the ‘inter-generational transmission of religion and perhaps … the persistence of sectarian attitudes’ (Raab and Holligan, 2012: 1935–1950). However, the evidence gathered in this enquiry highlights the need for more in-depth qualitative approaches that investigate the actual lived experiences of those who do inter-marry and the impact that this has on their familial and kinship relations. Clare draws our attention to this need when she explains that:

More so now that we are older, people from our [non-denominational Protestant] school who are engaged or married or going to be married to somebody [from] a Catholic school, there is massive politics. And actually the venom in some of the comments … is unbelievable from both sides.

While intra-Christian relationships were common, all our participants noted that once a couple decided to marry and have children, this seemed to activate seemingly latent sectarian conflict and resistance in family and kinship networks – especially among women. Laura explained how at the start of her relationship with a Catholic man he was ‘willing’ and ‘able’ to come to a community function in the local Orange Hall. Now married with children, Laura appears to be both reproducing and seeking to counter sectarianism in her struggles about where to send her daughter to school:

I’ve a wee girl and I’m thinking I’m no sending her to a Catholic school (laughs) and I’m thinking … why am I saying that I’m no sending her to a Catholic school? And I don’t have a reason! I’m no a Catholic so I don’t follow the Catholic religion, so that’d be my excuse for saying that … but if that was the nearest and best school I’d still have to struggle in my mind because I’m worried about what my Mum’s gonna say!

Understanding how sectarianism is situated and how it produces a particular kind of logic depending on where it is mobilised and who is mobilising it matters to examining how a feminised sectarianism is (re)produced. Here, sectarianism, from someone who is supposed to ‘know better’, is activated through a kind of self-censorship (‘I’m worried about what my Mum’s gonna say!’) which can also be seen as a deflection of responsibility for what seems to be her adherence to sectarian prejudice and bigotry.

The narratives from our participants seem to point to the ways in which other women in their families policed their choice of partner and the rearing of their children. Their relationship choices seemed to involve more ‘venom’ and ‘fuss’ when a longer term commitment such as a marriage or partnership was involved. This sectarian policing of relationships happened in ‘heated conversations’ and involved ‘massive politics’ over their ‘power to choose’ a partner from a different ethno-religious group. Clare comments on the way in which language was used in these contexts:

The language [about women’s relationships] isn’t educated or rational, it’s rude and sectarian and it turns into language you would hear at a football match, it does resort to that. It is the same culture, it is just that we women are not watching people kick a ball about. The way women feel about it – it is sectarian language they are using and it is sectarian feelings they are having too.

Some participants also revealed that the sectarian social pressure exerted by female family members would not only be confined to the choice of partner, but might also extend to choices over where the marriage ceremony would take place. Laura described how certain Protestant family members’ feelings were so strongly against mixed relationships that they had actually refused to attend her cousin’s wedding ceremony which took place in the Catholic Church. Her grandmother, a Protestant, even refused to look at the wedding photographs taken inside the church:

Any of the photos in the chapel she just rushed past them and then she was like, more slowly, ‘oh they’re lovely’ [referring to the photos not in the chapel] but then back to the ones in the chapel, she rushed past, rushed past, and then ‘oh they’re lovely’ to photos not taken in the chapel again! (She demonstrates her grandmother’s behaviour while laughing)

As we noted earlier in this article about how violence among women and girls should be contextualised in their everyday lives, feminised sectarian violence manifests through coercive behaviours that control other women’s choices of romantic partners and childrearing decisions. As Clare pointed out, women do not ‘have to stab each other [after a football match] in order for [sectarianism] to be an issue’.

A feminised sectarianism can also be seen in the treatment of those women who had crossed the socially defined boundaries of ethno-religious identity. These women appeared to be pressurised to reconsider their choices or, at least, to raise their children in line with their own ethnic group’s ‘values’. The interviews also revealed examples whereby women had felt rejected by the community they had left behind or, in other cases, shunned from the new ethno-religious family group which they had joined through marriage. Hannah highlighted an example of the ‘sacrifices’ that women in mixed marriages might have to make, in order to ensure the best interests of their children as part of their new community. She explained that women in her family had:

Converted from Protestant to Catholic because they have made that oath to have their … children brought up in the Catholic faith and so to enable and facilitate their children’s faith they converted!

As we can see, it is the women who are depicted as feeling the need to make sacrifices in the relationship in order to ensure that their newly adopted values are upheld and that they can participate fully in their new community. In a related example, Christine described how women may feel the need to have their mixed relationships, ‘in private, in a way that has actually meant they have had to give up one side of the family or both sides’.

Although Dianne, as a Catholic woman who had married a Protestant, challenged the norms by proceeding with her marriage against the wishes of her family, she talked of the resistance she had faced from other women. She recognised that not all women would be prepared to make sacrifices or feel strong enough to resist familial pressure:

I see women in these circumstances being the messengers so we have to talk to women to get women to think ‘what is it you’re actually passing on, why do you feel that, why do you feel you should be restricted by these same expectations?’ Their expectations are so low for themselves that they would force that onto somebody else. … Traditionally the woman is seen to be loyal, seen to be holding up everything, so when you’re holding everything up you can’t let it go because then everything just falls. You’ve got that pressure to keep holding, and also you feel a responsibility and then if you’ve got kids. … So it’s very difficult and it’s very difficult to speak about the difficult things – because if you do that, that gives outsiders an excuse to sort of … what’s the word I’m looking for … to attack you! So it’s like if you’re showing weakness they’ll attack it. Women in a sectarian context have got to keep it all afloat, do you know what I mean? Because of the structure for men and women, women are the ones who are going to be experiencing that personal pressure.

This picture of women as the loyal guardians of each ethnic group’s identity and their role in protecting, maintaining and reproducing these boundaries is explored by Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1993) in their discussion of ‘racialised boundaries’. They argue that:

The boundary of the ethnic is often dependent on gender and there is a reliance on gender attributes for specifying ethnic identity; much of ethnic culture is organised around rules relating to sexuality, marriage and the family. A true member will perform these roles properly. (p. 113)

This socially constructed and feminised role also seems to fit with the women’s narratives in terms of the pressure they experienced (and sometimes exerted on other women) in order to ensure conformity with the prescribed relationship rules of their ethno-religious group. The politics involved in these relationship choices demonstrate how sectarianism has both a private and public face and how these multifaceted manifestations of sectarianism contribute to its reproduction in Scotland.

Conclusions

Sectarianism in Scotland is so heavily associated with football and white working-class men’s lives that it is rare to find research that is attentive to the lives, actions and experiences of different kinds of women. The findings from our study challenge the male-orientated paradigm of sectarianism which has historically dominated policy and research in this field. We have demonstrated how women experience and reproduce sectarianism on paradoxical terms. They simultaneously discount their experiences of practising sectarianism yet give extensive examples from their everyday lives of how sectarianism is maintained and reproduced through the policing and control of women’s relationship and childrearing choices. Given these examples, the initial difficulty that the women experienced in articulating their experiences of sectarianism is perhaps best understood in terms of the power of the hegemonic discourses that frame sectarianism as almost exclusively male and working-class, which in turn produces a discursive deficit about women’s role in the (re)production of sectarianism. Our findings problematise the notion that sectarianism is ‘a boy’s game’ and that women only experience sectarianism as ‘victims’ or ‘adjuncts’ to men’s problematic behaviours. Rather, we argue that policy, practice and research on anti-sectarianism must attend to and take seriously the different manifestations of sectarianism, particularly feminised sectarianism which takes place in the private and semi-private spaces of the home and community. Any research agenda on sectarianism in Scotland must take women’s agency seriously by centring women and their experiences in public and private spaces. Otherwise, women’s experiences of and resistances to sectarianism will continue to be minimised, silenced and misrecognised.