The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891-1923

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The role of women in the rural economy in the West of Ireland altered dra matically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Joanna Bourke's important 1993 study, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1890-1891, argues that Victorian reform agencies? specifically, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), the Irish Agricultural Organ isation Society founded in 1894, and later, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction founded in 1899?intentionally displaced the role of women in the rural economy by removing female labor from the fields and rel egating it to employment in the home.2 However, Bourke's contention that the CDB was guilty of imposing an enforced housewifery on the women of the West fails to consider other powerful forces at work in Irish society; it would be more accurate to state that the CDB's major role in effecting a shift in women's economic roles was that it enhanced already existing mechanisms of paid female employment. Rural life in Ireland presented two distinct economic zones in the later half of the nineteenth century. The West was submerged in varying degrees of rela tive and absolute poverty, while the East enjoyed the spoils of better land, bet ter transport, and better market facilities.2 Philanthropists highlighted the plight