Breaking the Silence: Emigration, Gender and the Making of Irish Cultural Memory

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century the relatively new practice of telling, listening to and recording life narratives — variously described as oral history, oral testimony and oral life narrative — gained recognition as a useful mode of historical and experiential reconstruction. In Ireland, the development of an oral history approach to research led to the establishment of new sound archives and opened up fresh ways of narrating and engaging with lives lived in a variety of contexts (Beiner and Bryson, 2003). However, oral historical studies of Irish migration have tended to focus primarily on emigration, arrival and settlement, with little serious attention being devoted to experiences of staying ‘at home’ and the relationships between migration and gendered subjectivity. Taking a sociological rather than an oral historical approach, this chapter attends to staying-put as part of the dynamic of migration. More specifically, it examines the kinds of subjectivities produced in the life narratives of one woman who emigrated and another who remained in Ireland in the 1950s, during which time nearly half a million people left, with about two-thirds of these emigrating to Britain.1 The two narratives in question were recorded as part of Breaking the Silence: Staying ‘at home’ in an emigrant society, an oral archive project carried out by the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at University College Cork.2 The project’s aim was to document and archive individual experiences of staying in Ireland in the 1950s, while they were still available in living memory.