Irish Women's Emigration to America: Models for Movers

By Íde B. O'Carroll

Models for Movers: Irish Women's Emigration to America is a unique collection of Irish women's oral histories spanning three waves of twentieth-century emigration to America in the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s. By combining a critical analysis of conditions for women in Ireland with women's own accounts of life at the time, the author Íde B. O'Carroll highlights the sheer necessity of emigration. If survival in Ireland was a tough proposition, especially for women, a place where patriarchs in families, church and state controlled women's lives, where education and paid work was limited, then America provided a lifeline to a relative freedom, and crucially, an opportunity to earn an independent income. After reading Models for Movers, we begin to appreciate just how far Irish society has come.

The oral histories detail how each woman created an independent life for herself in America, often in the face of multiple challenges there. As active agents, often supporting one another to leave, these Irish women are role models because they inspire us all to have the courage act. Whether it's Nora Joyce talking about life on the Aran Islands in the 1920s, or Terry Ryan describing inner-city Dublin in the 1950s and her battle with TB, or Lena Deevy's tales about working in Ballymun in the 1980s, these Irish women recount stories of scarcity and scant opportunities in Ireland at the time.

In America, they carved out new lives and possibilities for themselves in a place that enabled them to thrive and enriched the quality of their lives. Nora Joyce (1920s) followed in the footsteps of countless other Irish women in America by working in domestic service until she had managed to save enough money to buy a house, marry and start her own family. Largely self-educated during spells in TB hospitals, Terry Ryan (1950s) nonetheless found work as a secretary in America. She graduated with a degree from Northeastern University shortly before her husband and the father of her two children became its president. On the pretext of 'taking a rest,' Sister Lena Deevy (1980s) applied to and later graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Education. She became one of Boston's most respected Irish leaders.

Many Irish women emigrants aided one another to get to America in a system established originally in the nineteenth century - female chain migration. Aunts, sisters and cousins sent back the fare, firm in the belief that a life in America was far superior to what might be available to women at home in Ireland. This system of support continued into the twentieth century during the three waves of emigration recounted in the book: 1920s, 1950s and 1980s.

In her analysis, O'Carroll uses many examples to argue her case about the continuous control over women's lives exerted by the combined forces of church and state in Ireland, including during the crafting of the Irish Constitution, the unavailability of contraception and the failure to introduce the Mother and Child health care scheme and divorce.

However, at the heart of this book are the women's oral histories, the descriptions of ordinary/extraordinary women, an approach that brings to life the reality of women's lives in both places, in their own words. The approach was considered 'ground-breaking' at the time because of the absence of women from the story of Irish emigration. In fact, the Models for Movers tapes, photographs and papers formed the first holding on Irish women at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, the premier repository on the history of women in America.

In a time of renewed global migration, these oral histories provide a rich multigenerational tapestry of experience into which women leaving Ireland today, often for places other than America, can weave their stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Attic Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781782051589

Íde B. O'Carroll

Íde B. O'Carroll is an Irish-born social researcher and writer who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and summers in Lismore, Waterford. Since 2013, she has been a Visiting Scholar at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University.

Book preview

Models

for Movers

IRISH WOMEN’S EMIGRATION

TO AMERICA

Models

for Movers

IRISH WOMEN’S EMIGRATION

TO AMERICA

ÍDE B.O’CARROLL

First published in 2015 by Attic Press

Attic is an imprint of Cork University Press

Youngline Industrial Estate

Pouladuff Road

Togher

Cork

Ireland

First published in Ireland by Attic Press in 1990, ISBN 1-85594-008-6

© Íde B. O’Carroll 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

The right of Íde B. O’Carroll to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 to 2007.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78205-156-5

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Eavan Boland for permission to reprint her poem ‘The Emigrant Irish’, first published in 1983

Leland Bardwell’s poem ‘Exiles’ is from Dostoevsky’s Grave: Selected Poems, Dedalus Press, 1991

Typeset by Burns Design

Printed by Gutenberg Press, Malta

www.corkuniversitypress.com

Mary O’Carroll (l) and Ruth-Ann Harris (r)

DEDICATION

Re-issued in memory of Ruth-Ann Harris [1936-2012], pioneer in the field of Irish Studies in the USA and professor of History and my mother, Mary O’Carroll [1922-1999].

Image courtesy of freeimages.com

Nora Joyce’s niece Mary Buckley, Inis Meáin, c. 1926.

O’CARROLL COLLECTION, SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

FOREWORD

Models for Movers is a unique collection of Irish migrant women’s oral histories spanning three waves of twentieth-century emigration, skilfully brought together and contextualised by the author,Íde B. O’Carroll. The women’s voices speak to and against the regulated silences surrounding both emigration and Irish women’s lives. They also provide a multi-generational tapestry of experience into which women leaving Ireland today can weave their stories.

The contributors came from rural and urban areas across Ireland and settled mainly in the Boston area. As descriptions of the women’s efforts to create new lives, achieve fulfilment or challenge gender, class and ethnic norms, the narratives include the lows as well as the highs, the experiences of isolation and loneliness, as well as warmth and solidarity. Some highlight the factors that unexpectedly precipitated change in their lives, while others describe their political activism in pursuit of change. Together, these stories suggest movement from being held back to myriad forms of release in journeys marked by diverse configurations of constraint and opportunity. As Fionnuala McKenna’s narrative suggests, migration has the effect of ‘releasing a valve’.

In the quarter of a century since its publication, this book has been taken up in Ireland and abroad by general readers and by academic disciplines ranging from history and literature to sociology and geography, as well as in the interdisciplinary areas of Migration and Diaspora Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Irish Studies and American Studies. All of the oral histories collected in Models for Movers as well as the supporting research materials [tapes, transcripts, photos etc.] have been deposited in the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. This is the primary repository on the history of women in America and the O’Carroll Collection was the Schlesinger’s first holding on Irish women [see oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00833]. As part of this archive, the narratives are available to future researchers and are also a resource for exhibitions and media projects. For example, the O’Carroll Collection was used in the 2013 Schlesinger Library exhibition on women immigrants in the USA entitled ‘Stepping Stones for New Americans’ [see https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library/exhibit/stepping-stones-new-americans].

Via this archival and publishing project,Íde B. O’Carroll created an opportunity for women who were busy with day-to-day life and perhaps unaware of the significance of their personal journeys to give voice to what they saw as the most significant aspects of their migrant lives. As part of the public record now, these narratives weave often deviating but always vibrant strands into the fabric of Irish history. The narratives articulate Irish womanhood outside the silences and clichés, and challenge the complacency that sustains these. They speak of agency and sometimes victimhood, vision combined with practical concerns, autonomy and working lives, as well as family and motherhood. They highlight the complex economic, social, political and familial conditions of women’s movement. And, in poignant ways, they give voice to the wider emotional impact of migration, revealing the complex ‘emotions and feelings’ [see Rena Cody’s narrative] that are always part of the migration story.

This book is a natural companion to Hasia Diner’s Erin’s Daughters in America [1983], which examines the lives of the nineteenth-century wave of Irish women migrants to the US, and Janet Nolan’s Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 [1986], which addresses the ways in which Irish migrant women to the US encouraged their daughters into professional careers, and teaching in particular. Indeed many of the contributors to Models for Movers note their mothers’ role in spurring action and recognising their potential in life.

Models for Movers is a feminist project and, as such, is upfront in its standpoint. Unlike scholarship that claims ‘objectivity’ while implicitly shaped by particular concerns or agendas, O’Carroll makes the assumptions underpinning the conception of this project clear from the start. Her respect for and deep interest in the personal narratives of the women themselves is evident in how the women participants are introduced and the ways in which she privileges their voices. These voices bring together experiences of and reflections on migration in ways that make explicit and implicit links between the personal and the political.

The reissuing of Models for Movers by Cork University Press, under its Attic imprint, is both important and timely. The renewed attention brought to these narratives invites us to consider the ways in which changing patterns of migration and settlement, as well as shifting gender relations and politics of sexuality, are shaping contemporary Irish women’s migration. Together with her forthcoming companion book Irish Transatlantics, which is based on over sixty interviews with women and men who emigrated to the USA in the 1980s/1990s and are now living in Ireland, or America,Íde B. O’Carroll has compiled a rich and textured account of mobility between Ireland and the USA from the 1920s into the 2000s.

BREDA GRAY, PhD

University of Limerick, Ireland

Author, Women and the Irish Diaspora, Routledge, 2004

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Brigid Kennedy [later gilchrist], 1933.

O’CARROLL COLLECTION, SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During my work on the Models for Movers project, I was welcomed into the homes of many Irish women in America. Without their willingness to share the story of their lives, this work would not exist. To each and every one, especially the many who do not appear here, I offer my genuine thanks. Bridget Knightly and other colleagues at of the now-defunct Irish Studies programme at Northeastern University were keen supporters. Margaret Kelleher, then a graduate student at Boston College, was an important ally. Marie Daly of the New England Historic and Genealogical Society in Boston provided me with copies of interviews with Irish immigrants. Only for Mike McCormack of the Irish Echo newspapers, and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, we would not know about Bridie Halpin’s story. I offer a special word of thanks to photographers Caitríona Cooke and Sandie Allen who worked on the first publication, and to the team at Cork University Press, Maria O’Donovan and Mike Collins, who facilitated the publication of this revised text. I am particularly grateful to Breda Gray, whose foreword demonstrates that she understands my motivation for embarking on the Models for Movers project and my wish to present this new edition.

Several people who supported the project initially have since passed on, such as historian Dennis Clark of Philadelphia, who offered encouragement at a critical stage, and John Curran, of the Sound of Erin radio show in Boston.

I acknowledge the following institutions for allowing me to access their resources during the initial research: Northeastern University, Harvard University, Radcliffe College, Boston College, Boston University, Balch Institute for Immigration Studies, Philadelphia and Yale University. In addition, I acknowledge the help of staff at Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, in relation to Bridie Halpin’s papers. During work on this new edition of Models for Movers, I consulted the Attic Press archives housed at the Boole library, University College Cork and the O’Carroll Collection at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

I wish to thank two young Irish-born women who are taking the Models project in new directions in 2015. The first is Galway artist Lisa O’Donnell, who painted the cover image to this book during her time in New York. Lisa has just received a grant to paint photos in the O’Carroll Collection for a future exhibition; and Waterford-born actress Maeve O’Mahony, a recent graduate of Trinity College’s Drama School, who has devised a one-woman show based on the Models’ voices.

Finally, I would like to thank Derek Pyle, Annie G. Rogers and Mary Mullens Rogers, readers of the revised manuscript.

INTRODUCTION

This book was written more than a quarter of a century ago when I was a young, fiery feminist shocked by the absence of Irish women’s voices in accounts of Irish migration. At the time, there were very few primary sources available on Irish women immigrants in the United States of America. I saw oral history as a suitable source to fill that gap, a way of facilitating women with busy work and family commitments to document the story of their lives, women with little time to write journals or correspond with family in Ireland. By conducting this oral history project, I sought to respect Irish women’s right to narrate their histories in their own words and also address the imbalance that existed in the general story of Irish emigration to the USA.

The book emerged from a research project I completed for a Masters in History degree undertaken with the guidance of the late Professor Ruth-Ann Harris when she was Director of Irish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Like me, Ruth-Ann was an Irish Studies outlier. If I was the feminist with persistent questions that began with ‘Where are the women?,’ she was the Protestant as equally attuned to the exclusion of that experience in general accounts of ‘the Irish’ in America. Born to missionary parents in Liberia, and raised in Canada, she initially became interested in Ireland because of her marriage to the economist John R. Harris [of the Harris-Torado migration model], whose ancestors were Protestants from Donegal. In her scholarly work on Irish emigration, Ruth-Ann sought out the orange as well as the green, and questioned representations of the Irish experience at home and abroad. As my guide on this academic journey, her generosity knew no bounds. She opened her library, her home and her heart to this immigrant. I dedicate the re-issuing of Models for Movers to Ruth-Ann’s memory and to the memory of my mother, Mary O’Carroll.

My mother encouraged me to emigrate, to follow in my grandfather Denis Flaherty’s footsteps, and spend time in America. She wrote to me weekly, in the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper because telephone calls were out of the question, just way too expensive. Since I had given up a teaching job in Ireland to attend graduate school in America, her support was crucial, as was her belief in the value of recording Irish women’s histories in their own words.

Once Models for Movers was published in 1990, others supported what was then considered a novel approach to Irish immigration history, people who, like Ruth-Ann, recognised the rich vein that oral histories offered as an accompaniment to the often stark picture presented by numbers alone. I remember the late John Curran of the Sound of Erin radio show in Boston using the book on his Saturday programme. Geoffrey Keating, then Assistant Consul General at the Irish Consulate in Boston, hosted a gathering of the women involved in the project. Before the Mary Robinson days at the Áras, this was as close as many of us in the Irish diaspora got to being fêted by the Irish government. And finally, someone I met when I was a student at Harvard, the late Susan von Salis of Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, who arranged for the tapes and papers relating to the Models for Movers project to be housed at what is the premier archive on the history of women in America. It was Susan who named it the O’Carroll Collection.

For a small book, hastily put together to meet an Attic dead-line [because the original manuscript somehow got lost en route to the printers in Guernsey], it seemed to pack a punch. Unfortunately, it was not promoted in the US, and Attic failed to negotiate a US publisher. Yet, whenever I presented the women’s stories at Irish-related events in America, people snapped up the copies I had for sale. Unquestionably, the work needed a thorough editing, something I did not get a chance to complete. It was my responsibility to ensure that the women’s voices were presented in the best possible light. It was, however, my first experience with publishing. In that sense, I hope that this new twenty-fifth anniversary edition is an improvement on the original.

Not surprisingly, many of the women I interviewed from the 1920s emigrant wave have since passed on, women like Mary Terry Kelly from the Ring Gaeltacht in County Waterford. She was eighty-six when we met in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1988, to record her story. Another emigrant, Caitríona Cooke, from the ‘New Irish’ 1980s wave, took the photograph of us [on page 51 of this book], standing side by side outside Mary’s back door. Like many another young Irish woman throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mary had worked in domestic service in America, transitioning to different household practices, as well as places, far from home. In addition, her first language was Irish/Gaelic, not English, which must have been its own challenge, too. When we met, Mary no longer spoke Irish on a regular basis. I asked if she wanted to relay her oral history in Irish or English. In the end, she used Irish and English to tell her story, a conversation that I recorded on a small, black tape cassette recorder, a machine probably unrecognisable to many people now. As I write this introduction decades later, I remember the care with which Mary prepared a lunch for me and the questions she asked about the other women’s lives because she was curious about how they had fared in America. I also recall her love for her home place near Helvic Head, not far from Lismore, in Déise territory, a place I return to in Ireland each summer. Whatever lessons I learned through the publication of this, my first book, I am nevertheless proud that Mary’s story, along with the stories of other Irish women emigrants, are available to future generations.

Regrettably I did not get to interview Dubliner Bridie Halpin before she died in 1988. Nonetheless, I included her story in Models for Movers because it highlighted the argument I wanted to make about the value of using an oral history approach. We could have learned so much more about another fascinating woman’s life, and in her own words, if I’d managed to record her life history. From the documents we have available to us, we know that Bridie emigrated to the US bitterly disappointed with the terms of the Treaty. From her New York base, she nonetheless continued to work to bring about what she referred to as a ‘proper’ settlement to Irish affairs. We should be able to hear Bridie describe her reasons for going, to understand why she maintained connections with Republican leaders in Ireland. Instead, what we have is a small clutch of papers found in a suitcase under her bed after her wake. A revolutionary and an active member of Cumann na mBan, committed to political and social change in Ireland, she was imprisoned at the age of eighteen at the North Dublin Union and Kilmainham Gaol. This was a woman who corresponded with Maude Gonne McBride, someone to whom President de Valera sent Christmas cards. As 2016 approaches, when Ireland will mark the anniversary of the Easter Rising, I am grateful that we have Bridie’s words written in a little booklet she made from scraps of paper stitched together in prison over eighty years ago. These words speak to me of her confidence in her political position, her sense of her own agency, and her capacity to effect change, even from afar. One excerpt reads: ‘Never fear for Ireland for she has soldiers still. Up Us!’

Of course the story of Ireland’s emigration to America didn’t end in the 1920s. Irish women came in the 1950s, though in far fewer numbers, despite the massive exodus during that particular decade, mostly to Britain, and again, thirty years later, in the 1980s, when I conducted the Models project. In the various chapters in