User:BrownHairedGirl/List of women Members of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom for Northern Irish constituencies

Women have been eligible to stand for election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom since 1918, when the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act provided that "a woman shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage". Between 1918 and 2017, a total of 489 women were elected as Members of Parliament (MPs). The first of Northern Ireland's ten woman MPs was elected in 1953.

History
The first woman elected to the Commons was from then unpartitioned Ireland: Constance Markievicz, returned for Dublin St Patrick's at the 1918 general election. As a Sinn Féin member, she followed her party's policy of abstentionism, and did not take her seat in Westminster.

In 1918, Ireland had 105 seats in the UK House of Commons, thirty of them in the six counties (Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone) which in 1921 became Northern Ireland. After the creation in 1921 of the devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland, Northern Irish representation at Westminster was reduced to thirteen MPs at the 1922 general election. This number was reduced to twelve at the 1950 general election, and — after the imposition of direct rule in 1972 — increased to seventeen from the 1983 general election.

No woman stood for election to Westminster in any Northern Irish constituency until the 1945 general election, when Noreen Cooper was one of the two unsuccessful Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) candidates in the 2-seat Fermanagh and Tyrone constituency. By 1950, six women had been elected to the 52-member House of Commons of Northern Ireland, but Northern Ireland had sent no women to Westminster.

The next woman to stand was a unionist who became Northern Ireland's first woman MP. Patricia Ford was the daughter of Sir W. D. Smiles, the UUP MP for North Down, great-grand-daughter of the parliamentary reform campaigner Samuel Smiles, and later grandmother of the explorer Bear Grylls. Her father died in January 1953 when the ferry MV Princess Victoria sank, and Ford was selected to stand in the resulting by-election. She was elected unopposed.

Ford had a difficult start at Westminster. In her first week, she had described in the Sunday Express two other women MPs snoring in a rest-room during a late-night sitting, and was had to apologise to the Commons for this breach of parliamentary privilege. Thereafter she focused on women's interests, campaigning on pensions for police widows, and working with other women MPs to present a petition on equal pay.

At the 1955 general election, Ford retired from Parliament, but Patricia McLaughlin became the first woman to win a contested Westminster election in Northern Ireland.