Women and Irish diaspora identities: Theories, concepts and new perspectives

By Manchester University Press

Bringing together leading authorities on Irish women and migration, this book offers a significant reassessment of the place of women in the Irish diaspora. It compares Irish women across the globe over the last two centuries, setting this research in the context of recent theoretical developments in the study of diaspora. This collection demonstrates the important role played by women in the construction of Irish diasporic identities, assessing Irish women’s experience in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. This book develops a conversation between other locations of the Irish diaspora and the dominant story about the USA and, in the process, emphasises the complexity and heterogeneity of Irish diasporan locations and experiences.

This interdisciplinary collection, featuring chapters by Breda Gray, Louise Ryan and Bronwen Walter, will appeal to scholars and students of the Irish diaspora and women’s migration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526112408

Book preview

PART I

Concepts and theories

1

Irish women and the diaspora: why they matter

Mary E. Daly

Resolving to do something to better the circumstances of her family, the young Irish girl leaves her home for America. There she goes into service, or engages in some kind of feminine employment. The object she has in view – the same for which she left her home and ventured to a strange country – protects her from all danger, especially to her character: that object, her dream by day and night, is the welfare of her family, whom she is determined, if possible to again have with her as of old. From the first moment she saves every cent she earns – that is, every cent she can spare from what is absolutely necessary to her decent appearance. She regards everything she has or can make as belonging to those to whom she has unconsciously devoted the flower of her youth, and for whom she is willing to sacrifice her woman’s dearest hopes. To keep her place, or retain her employment, what will she not endure? Sneers at her nationality, mockery of her peculiarities, even ridicule of her faith.¹

The poor Irish emigrant girl may possibly be rude, undisciplined, awkward – just arrived in a strange land, with all the rugged simplicity of her peasant’s training: but she is good and honest. Nor, as she rapidly acquires the refinement inseparable from an improved condition of life, and daily association with people of cultivated manners, does she catch the contagion of the vices of the great centres of wealth and luxury. Whatever her position – and it is principally among the humble walks of life the mass of the Irish are still to be found – she maintains this one noble characteristic – purity. In domestic service her merit is fully recognised.²

Women have featured, albeit intermittently, in writings about Irish emigration long before historians – inspired by second-wave feminism – began to focus their scholarly efforts in that direction. However in the past Irish women emigrants were commonly found in the records of poorhouses, charities, or in censorious accounts depicting poverty or a lifestyle deemed unacceptable to the norms of respectable womanhood, bare-breasted, drunken, brawling, slatternly women. John Francis Maguire’s account, written in 1868, can be seen as an attempt to provide a more positive alternative version. Maguire set out to examine how the Irish emigrants were faring in America, given the conflicting reports that were reaching Ireland; whether Irish-Catholic emigrants were abandoning religious practice, and how the Irish in America regarded the British government. Like many of his successors, he was concerned about the moral and physical dangers associated with city life, especially for young women, and with the consequences of a predominantly Catholic peasantry migrating to a country where Catholicism was a minority religion. Maguire wrote of the moral dangers that emigration presented for Irish women – both on the long sea passage, and when they reached America. He recounted how ‘a young and handsome Irish girl who was lately trapped into hiring, in a Western city, with a person of infamous character’, was rescued by an older, wiser Irish woman and taken to a refuge run by the Sisters of Mercy.³ Despite trumpeting the virtue of Irish women – one bishop described them as the ‘salt of the earth’ – he conceded that ‘in some, yet comparatively few, places in America a certain percentage of women of bad repute are necessarily of Irish origin’.⁴ However as further proof of their virtue and their contribution to the Catholic Church he wrote at length about the role of Irish religious sisters in founding and running Catholic hospitals, providing expert nursing care – including the care of soldiers during the civil war – and their involvement in Catholic schools and orphanages.

By the mid-twentieth century the locus of most descriptions of Irish emigrants had moved from North America to Britain: Britain was the principal destination for Irish emigrants from the 1880s, and with the introduction of restrictions on US immigration in the 1920s and the onset of the great depression in 1929, emigration to the USA fell sharply. Yet until the 1960s the profile of Irish women emigrating to Britain was not dramatically different to that of Irish emigrant women in the United States almost a century earlier: they continued to be concentrated in domestic service and hotel work (also mentioned by Maguire), though a growing number were migrating in order to train and work as nurses. In the mid-twentieth century Irish parents continued to dispatch daughters in their mid-teens to a foreign country in the expectation that their remittances would help support the family back home, and church and state continued to express fears at the moral dangers facing young Irish women living and working in alien cities. Maguire’s ‘person of infamous character’ was now succeeded by the unmarried Englishman who lured an unsuspecting Irish girl into a job as a children’s nurse, in a home that turned out to lack both wife and child.⁵ Whereas Maguire wrote of the need for congressional legislation to protect female passengers from sexual advances during the transatlantic crossing,⁶ Irish clergy were demanding that the Irish government should ban the emigration of young women under sixteen years of age.⁷

By the middle of the twentieth century, however, there was growing criticism within Ireland directed at the numbers of young single women who were emigrating and their motives for leaving. Insofar as emigrants had been criticised within Ireland in earlier times, the criticism did not specify gender, or it was directed towards men. By the mid-twentieth century however, while the ‘angels’ described at length by Maguire hadn’t entirely disappeared, the category was increasingly reserved for Irish nurses or religious sisters. Politicians, senior officials and clergy regularly expressed concern about the moral dangers to female emigrants, and many of these statements showed little confidence that these young women had the capacity to withstand these temptations.⁸ Part of this growing concern reflects a greater awareness of some of the more distressing aspects of emigration: English Catholic charities made Irish politicians and the Irish Catholic hierarchy fully aware of the numbers of single Irish women who travelled to England to give birth in search of anonymity, and these charities also made the Irish authorities fully aware of the costs of caring for these women and their infants.⁹ Another source of concern was the sharp fall in the numbers of women in rural Ireland: in 1951 there were 868 women per 1000 men, and the ‘flight of the girls’ was often blamed for the low rate of marriage.¹⁰ The gratitude that Maguire had expressed for the personal sacrifice made by many female emigrants was increasingly replaced by critical comments as to their motives. There was a growing opinion that Irish female emigrants were leaving for personal fulfilment, career ambitions or perhaps marriage. The Commission on Emigration summarised the position as