Irish Women And Irish Migration

For significant periods, the majority of Irish emigrants were women. This volume begins with an introduction which explores the connections between women's studies and Irish studies, and includes a women's history reinterpretation of the myths of the Wild Geese. Five chapters on the 19th century look at the motivations and work experiences of women emigrants to the United States, emigration schemes involving Irish pauper women, the experiences of Catholic and Protestant Irish women in Liverpool, and at female-headed households.

Based on original research with Irish women both at home and in England, this book explores how questions of mobility and stasis are recast along gender, class, racial and generational lines.

In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration. Using a wide variety of sources—many of which appear here for the first time—including personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration repots, Janet Nolan makes a sustained analysis of this migration of a generation of young women that puts a new light on Irish social and economic history. By the late nineteenth century changes in Irish life combined to make many young women unneeded in their households and communities; rather than accept a marginal existence, they elected to seek a better life in a new world, often with the encouragement and help of a female relative who had already emigrated. Mary Ann Donovan's journey was representative of thousands of journeys made by Irish women who could truly claim that they had seized control over their lives, by themselves, alone. This book tells their story.

Models 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. The author provides a critical gender analysis of Irish society during the three migration waves to illustrate conditions for women prior to departure. 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 to have the courage to act. The women's voices also speak to and against the regulated silences surrounding both emigration and the reality of Irish women's lives. Finally, they provide a rich multi-generational tapestry of experience into which women leaving Ireland today, often for places other than America, can weave their stories. This book used an oral history approach to documenting Irish emigration history - an approach considered 'ground-breaking' at the time. This revised twenty-fifth anniversary edition comes at a time of renewed global Irish migration. The Models' project materials formed the basis of the first holding on Irish women at the Schlesinger Library Harvard University, the premier repository on the History of Women in America - the O'Carroll Collection. Book jacket.

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.

Between 1600 and 1929, perhaps seven million men and women left Ireland and crossed the Atlantic. Ireland and Irish America is concerned with Catholics and Protestants, rural and urban dwellers, men and women on both sides of that vast ocean. Drawing on over thirty years of research, in sources as disparate as emigrants' letters and demographic data, it recovers the experiences and opinions of emigrants as varied as the Rev. James McGregor, who in 1718 led the first major settlement of Presbyterians from Ulster to the New World, Mary Rush, a desperate refugee from the Great Famine in County Sligo, and Tom Brick, an Irish-speaking Kerryman on the American prairie in the early 1900s. Above all, Ireland and Irish America offers a trenchant analysis of mass migration's causes, its consequences, and its popular and political interpretations. In the process, it challenges the conventional 'two traditions' (Protestant versus Catholic) paradigm of Irish and Irish diasporan history, and it illuminates the hegemonic forces and relationships that governed the Irish and Irish-American worlds created and linked by transatlantic capitalism.

This collection of essays demonstrates in vivid detail how a range of formal and informal networks shaped the Irish experience of emigration, settlement and the construction of ethnic identity in a variety of geographical contexts since 1750. It examines topics as diverse as the associational culture of the Orange Order in the nineteenth century to the role of transatlantic political networks in developing and maintaining a sense of diaspora, all within the overarching theme of the role of networks. This volume represents a pioneering study that contributes to wider debates in the history of global migration, the first of its kind for any ethnic group, with conclusions of relevance far beyond the history of Irish migration and settlement. It is also expected that the volume will have resonance for scholars working in parallel fields, not least those studying different ethnic groups, and the editors contextualise the volume with this in mind in their introductory essay. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

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.