Myrtle Hill

Women into non‐traditional sectors: addressing gender segregation in the Northern Ireland workplace

The horizontal segregation of the workforce along gender lines tends to assign women to lower paid, lower status employment. Consequently, schemes to address segregation have focused on preparing women to enter non‐traditional occupations through training and development processes. This article examines models to encourage women into non‐traditional employment, focusing on the Women into Non‐Traditional Sectors (WINS) project in Belfast, Northern Ireland. However, changing women to suit a hostile work environment assumes women to be the problem, whereas it is the barriers that women face in undertaking non‐traditional jobs that need to be changed. It is concluded, therefore, that while models such as WINS can be successful in assisting women into non‐traditional sectors, change processes to make workplaces more accessible are a more pressing and appropriate approach to de‐segregating the workforce.

Watchmen in Zion

In his study of the history of millennialist traditions, Hillel Schwartz noted that ‘At the end of the eighteenth century apocalyptic beliefs could be found among Bavarian illuminati, Scandinavian Swedenborgians, Polish and Russian Occultists in St. Petersburg, Spanish Jesuits, American Shakers, New England Congregationalists, Seneca Indians, Appalachian Methodists, Welsh Baptists, and the more excitable Freemasons.’1 It was, of course, revolutionary activity in America and France, overturning both secular and religious regimes, which led to this upsurge of interest in ‘the signs of the times’. To live in the midst of such profound change stimulated extreme emotions of hope and despair. For those pursuing an ideal of political progress, the belief that a new age was dawning and that institutions of ‘tyranny’ were about to collapse injected fervour and an unprecedented level of optimism into campaigns for political reform. At a time ‘when the Bible was a common frame of reference’,2 this newfound confidence in the inevitability of social and political progress was reinforced by a surge of interest in prophetical writings linking the contemporary situation with the onset of the millennium.3 Thus American puritans saw the ‘Mark of the Beast’ in the Stamp Act imposed by Britain, cast George I in the role of Antichrist, and believed the War of Independence to be part of a prophetic plan to free God’s people.

History and Politics

‘Historians like simplicity’ declare the editors in their introduction to a collection of essays which sets out to demonstrate how the convoluted interactions of motivation, experience and personality challenge any such notion of an uncomplicated narrative pattern. The subject of the book is converts and conversions in (mainly) eighteenth-century Ireland, and given the well-documented acknowledgement of the significance of religious identity in Ireland—past and present—it is somewhat surprising that such an in-depth exploration of this controversial aspect of faith has received relatively little scholarly attention. While religious belief and practice are deeply personal matters, shaped by theological conviction, the social, economic and political consequences of religious identification—particularly in this time and place—carried much greater significance for individuals and their families. The introductory chapter concerns itself with historiography and definitions and it employs Lewis Rambo’s anthropological model as a tool to explore how ‘the total transformation of the person by the power of God is best understood’. This typology identifies a range of stages in the conversion process which, it is stressed, is not a one-off event but a process over time, with context considered as the stage most relevant to the Irish situation. While these stages provide a useful framework within which to make sense of conversion at macro and micro levels, the editors stress that the book’s major aim is to stimulate a greater appreciation of the varied and multi-faceted nature of the Irish experience of this phenomenon. Although a further editorial intention is ‘to move the debate on from the traditional focus upon the penal laws’, that context is, of course, highly significant, and Charles Ivor McGrath assesses the extent to which the legislation itself was concerned with conversion, either directly or indirectly. Analysing the intentions of the legislators, McGrath demonstrates their commitment to, at least, ‘a general encouragement of conformity’, while confirming that their actual success in this area was limited. This overview of the substance and chronology of the laws as they were clarified and strengthened over time, and in response to ongoing political and military events, usefully sets the scene for what follows. Thomas Power’s concern is with the theology and liturgy of conversion from Catholicism to Anglicanism, and his essay focuses on the various doctrinal differences inherent in the rejection ‘of one world view for another’. However, he also draws attention to the difference between orthodox expectations and the reality of experience, noting in particular the survival of popular or unofficial religious belief and practices which challenged official teaching, in addition to different levels of theological literacy and, indeed, commitment. The following three essays focus on specific time periods critical to the evolution of denominational histories. Mapping the ‘theological anxiety of Puritan conversion’ during the disruptive years of the English Civil War, Crawford Gribben demonstrates how the charismatic subjectivity