Ulster's Men joins a growing body of academic work on Ulster unionism. McGaughey's book analyzes Ulster in the early twentieth century through the lens of its hegemonic Protestant unionist notions of masculinity, including fraternal organizations, military service, and the general ways that northern men wielded power over other men. McGaughey concentrates on the deployment of prescriptive and idealized masculine identities in the public sphere rather than on the actual relationships between men at the individual level. As the author admits, this excludes discussion of men within the household, a topic that would prove an interesting subject for further study.

The book traces changes in Ulster masculinities between the Home Rule crisis and the consolidation of the northern state. Some masculine characteristics consistently formed part of these identities: fortitude, discipline, military skills, and a willingness to defend community and hearth. With few exceptions, the hegemonic northern masculinity was also Protestant, unionist, and, for lack of a better term, “Ulster,” as opposed to “Irish.” Despite these continuities, McGaughey does identify key shifts in notions of Ulster masculinity. During the prewar Home Rule crisis, for example, idealized Ulster masculinity combined images of the Victorian gentleman with the romantic warrior hero. Edward Carson came to epitomize this masculine identity, despite his own lack of military service.

These identities exhibited some change during the war, when Ulster masculinity, as elsewhere, became associated with death and sacrifice. But the war also, as John Redmond and others had hoped, laid the foundations for greater Protestant-Catholic harmony among the Irish soldiers on the Western front. In one of the book's most intriguing sections, McGaughey details how the shared experiences of the 36th Ulster and the 16th Irish divisions—the former largely Protestant and the latter Catholic—provided an opening for more inclusive northern masculinities. At various times, Ulster Protestants expressed appreciation for the manliness of Catholics, whether fellow soldiers fighting in the trenches or Catholic priests ministering to fallen men. McGaughey argues that this mutual respect, however grudging, offered a possibility of changing the sectarian landscape in postwar Ireland. That possibility dissolved in a spate of violence and sectarian acrimony as the Irish revolution began, but “the development of private and popular fellowship within and between the Irish divisions deserves greater emphasis, particularly in the historiography of Irish and Ulster masculinities” (123). A good portion of the evidence for this wartime fraternization is derived from anecdotes detailing interactions between individual men. The chapter detailing this fellowship is one of the most interesting in the book, although it departs a bit from the prescriptive and public sphere–based model described in the introduction.

After the war, the dominant Ulster masculinity again became inextricably tied to Protestantism and unionism. Catholic sacrifice was written out of the hegemonic public memory of the war, and Ulster Protestant men took up the task of defending themselves and their homes against nationalist revolutionary activities. Victorian notions of honor receded in favor of celebrations of men's protective actions, however savage and violent. This led to the elevation of the B-Specials and the constabulary, particularly those men who had served in the war, as characteristically masculine Ulstermen.

Ulster's Men is at its strongest during the author's detailed and convincing gendered readings of the Ulster Covenant and the postwar shipyard expulsions. According to McGaughey, the ceremony at which Carson signed the Ulster Covenant epitomized masculine unionist resistance to Home Rule. The text of the covenant itself emphasized the lineal descent of Protestantism through the male generations, men's ability to defend their homes and communities, and the supporting role played by Ulster unionist women, who were not permitted to sign the men's covenant. The gendered reading of the covenant is an excellent example of both McGaughey's use of her analytical lens and her focus on prescriptive public models. McGaughey's reading of the shipyard expulsions is similarly illustrative, since the Protestant workers saw themselves as gritty, determined, hardworking, and employed, the latter category a way of making themselves more manly than unemployed Catholics. The reading of the shipyard riots also elucidates how ideas of Ulster masculinity could unite Protestants across class and prevent any sort of fellow feeling with working-class Catholics. This is one of many places in which McGaughey successfully integrates class into her analysis.

These examples show McGaughey's methodology at its most illustrative, but there were places at which similar sustained analysis would have been helpful. At times, McGaughey insufficiently highlights the gendered nature of her source material. For example, McGaughey tells the story of John G. Clarke, a unionist who complained about the behavior of the B-Specials. Clarke's complaint was ignored by the authorities and treated derisively by his Orange Lodge. For McGaughey, this demonstrates that “the social reality was that every man either had to be on the side of the Protestant hegemonic masculine order or face persecution from the networks of men whose beliefs were becoming the mandated status quo” (179). There is no evidence presented that the dismissal of Clarke's argument was gendered or that he was feminized or demasculinized by those who opposed his views. While this shows the disparate power relationships between Ulster men, the lines between “conflicts between masculinities” and “conflicts between men” get a bit blurred. It is not entirely obvious that those categories are synonymous, and the book would have been stronger in places had the gendered aspects of some of the evidence been analyzed more directly. Nevertheless, Ulster's Men is a solid work that adds much to our understanding of unionism. McGaughey skillfully brings out gendered elements of the dominant male unionist culture and the ways in which that culture used gender to subordinate female unionists and men who did not approve of the hegemonic forms of politicized masculinity peddled by the Orange Order and the broader unionist movement. This is a work that deserves a wide audience among Irish and British scholars.