For Horace Plunkett, the impression that the Irish are womanly charts the colonized subject's debilitating internalization of an imperial stereotype. Plunkett was a pioneer of Irish agricultural reform, a unionist MP for Dublin, and, later, a Free State senator. Like Matthew Arnold, he combined an enthusiasm for the virtues of Celts with a firm unionism. His comment invokes the common confluence of race and gender in imperialist discourses that equates femininity with racial inferiority and political subordination. Plunkett assumed this equation rather than questioning it, and his masculinism was widely shared among British imperialists and Irish nationalists alike. A major strand of British imperialist discourse labelled the Irish feminine and therefore inferior, dependent and weak nationalists often disavowed femininity and asserted a compensatory and exaggerated masculinity. What is at stake, of course, is not “femininity itself,” but the ubiquity and tenacious force of the linkages between femininity, racial or national character, and colonial status.