A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century IrelandBetween the years 1778 and 1784, groups that had previously been excluded from the Irish political sphere women, Catholics, lower class Protestants, farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes began to imagine themselves as civil subjects with a stake in matters of the state. This politicization of non elites was largely driven by the Volunteers, a local militia force that emerged in Ireland as British troops were