Women And The Irish Diaspora

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.

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.

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.

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.

Notions of diaspora are central to contemporary debates about 'race', ethnicity, identity and nationalism. Yet the Irish diaspora, one of the oldest and largest, is often excluded on the grounds of 'whiteness'. Outsiders Inside explores the themes of displacement and the meanings of home for these women and their descendants. Juxtaposing the visibility of Irish women in the United States with their marginalization in Britain, Bronwen Walter challenges linear notions of migration and assimilation by demonstrating that two forms of identification can be held simultaneously. In an age when the Northern Ireland peace process is rapidly changing global perceptions of Irishness, Outsiders Inside moves the empirical study of the Irish diaspora out of the 'ghetto' of Irish Studies and into the mainstream, challenging theorists and policy-makers to pay attention to the issue of white diversity.

This book brings together a series of articles which provide an overview of the Irish Diaspora from a global perspective. It combines a series of survey articles on the major destinations of the Diaspora; the USA, Britian and the British Empire. On each of these, there is a number of more specialist articles by historians, demographers, economists, sociologists and geographers. The inter-disciplinary approach of the book, with a strong historical and modern focus, provides the first comprehensive survey of the topic.

"During the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries Ireland had a proportionately greater out-migration than did any other European nation...Irish persons made up large proportions of the populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States."--book jacket.