Moving spaces and changing places: Irish women's memories of emigration to Britain in the 1930s

Abstract

This paper engages with conceptualisations of place and space to explore the ways in which London has been constructed, encountered and negotiated as a series of racialised and gendered locales. The paper draws upon oral history narratives of 11 women who emigrated from Ireland to Britain in the 1930s. Arriving in Paddington or Euston station, these young women were confronted with a vast and seemingly unknowable city. The modern city can be interpreted as potentially liberating for young women as well as potentially threatening and dangerous. In this paper I explore the ways in which these women, now in their late 80s and early 90s, describe their youthful mobility within the city and their active negotiation of places and spaces. As live-in domestic servants these women inhabited an in-between space. Their 'home' place was also their workplace, thus the usual boundaries between work and home, public and private did not apply. Their free time was associated not with the familial, private, domestic place but with public spaces such as streets, shops, dancehalls and cinemas. However, these Irish women encountered the city not just as a gendered place but also as a racialised environment where their Irishness defined them as 'other', alien and outsider. In this paper I aim to discover not only how they encountered the city but also, and more interestingly, what strategies they used to actively negotiate the city in ways that sought to transform its vastness and anonymity into places that were familiar, manageable and enjoyable.