Emigrant Women Research Articles

Sexualising emigration: Discourses of irish female emigration in the 1930s

This article examines the discourses and debates about women's emigration from Ireland in the 1930s. Drawing upon some of the numerous discussions of emigration in the Irish national and provincial press, I argue that women's emigration was represented through the lens of sexuality, reproduction, and maternity. The sexualisation of female emigration took place on three distinct but interconnected levels. First, the exodus of thousands of young, unmarried women was represented as a loss of ‘breeding stock’. A second related discourse focused on the sexual behaviour of these women when they arrived in Britain. My research also has uncovered a third, less-vocalised discourse. Some commentators claimed that a considerable number of Irish young women were being forced to emigrate because they were pregnant or had committed some other breach of sexual mores. Such ‘sexual deviance’ did not fit with the narrow sexual morality propounded by the Catholic Church and the state. To understand the discourses surrounding Irish women's emigration in the 1930s, I draw upon Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis's theorisation of the biological reproduction of the nation. I also suggest that women's role as ‘mothers of the nation’ was central to the nation-building project in the newly established Irish Free State. However, the image of the domestic, motherly Irish ‘woman’ simplifies the complexities of Irish women's experiences and their roles within various collectivities. A broader examination of women's role in relation to familial and local communities, as well as the nation, may help to illuminate some of the complexities around women's high rate of emigration.

Gendering the irish diaspora

This article discusses the gendering of diaspora at three different levels of analysis, first, in relation to contemporary theorising of diaspora, second, with regard to former President Robinson's representations, in the 1990s, of Irish identity as a diasporic one and, finally, with reference to the particularity of the ‘lived’ experiences of Irish women's diasporic lives. The tendency towards an asymmetric valorisation of movement over dwelling in theorisations, discourses, and practices of diaspora produces contradictory effects as Irish women emigrants are represented both in individualistic and progressive terms of achievement associated with movement, but also as connected to the national community and tradition through gendered kin relationships and obligations. The migration of Traveller women, on the other hand, because Travellers are excluded from the national and indeed the diasporic ‘imagined community’, is represented as deviant and regressive paradoxically making national borders even more significant when it comes to claims to belong. The accounts of diasporic Irish women discussed in this article are often painfully stretched between staying-put and moving out, individualism and the burden of responsibility for the maintenance of Irish culture and identity.

Space, authority and the female emigrant afloat

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, all emigrants travelling out to the Australian colonies experienced a range of measures designed for their protection. As well as physical protection, the future roles of single emigrant women, as paid domestic labour or, ultimately, as unpaid wives and mothers, required that the care accorded to them also took on social and moral concerns. This paper discusses the shipboard structures, particularly spatial arrangements, that were designed both to protect emigrant women in transit to the colonies and to protect the colonial investment.

A Woman without a Man is a Woman at Risk: Women at Risk in Australian Humanitarian Programs

Understandings of risk, derived from UN guidelines on gender, have been used to develop a category of targeted immigration, whereby the emigration of women from difficult circumstances, particularly areas of war and/or flight, is expedited. In Australia, this and other special categories are used to accept single women and women with children whose partners have been killed or are missing. In the context of discussion of immigrant policy and programmes, we critique the use of the category to facilitate migration and question the notion of risk as a state before, but not following, migration. The circumstances of immigration and resettlement suggest that women remain at risk, often physical as well as emotional and financial. This has implications for the provision and delivery of support services.

Prairie Madonnas and Pioneer Women: Images of Emigrant Women in the Art of the Old West

In the art of the American West, women have traditionally occupied a minor position. Compared to a surfeit of depictions of cowboys, braves, soldiers, miners, Indian chiefs, scouts, trappers, and traders, there are relatively few images of women; and when considering women who were not native to the plains and prairies, the field narrows still farther. Although literature and popular culture have given us numerous female types of the trans-Mississippi West (saloon and dance-hall girls, frontier mothers, helpless captives, schoolteachers, renegade female outlaws, wild-west-show women), art has virtually ignored all but the emigrant woman who traveled west in a covered wagon to establish a home on the prairie.

The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812-1914

������ //TTXo you think I shall ever be good enough for you to send me \J away? an Irish girl asked Sister Mary Eustace Eaton, a Sister of Charity and moderator of the Children of Mary Sodality at Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, in Dublin. For thirty-eight years, 1868 to 1906, Sister Mary Eustace had heard the same question hundreds of pure hearted young girls who, upon receiving the sodality's medal and blue ribbon, pledged to turn from worldly pleasures to give themselves to God.1 Most of these Children of Mary were in their early teens and came the homes of Dublin's working class. As they grew older and expressed a desire to become nuns, Sister Mary Eustace successfully placed them in convents outside Ireland—ones willing to accept a young woman with little or no dowry.2 These were located largely in foreign, English-speaking countries to which millions of Irish had fled after the Great Famine (1845-1851). By 1905 Sister Mary Eustace had found places for approximately 700 women Harold's Cross, several of whom later bore the name Sister Mary Eustace. About 400 of these Children of Mary became nuns in the United States.3 Sister Mary Eustace's work at Harold's Cross is only one example of what had become by 1900 an almost routine pattern of migration—young Irish women going out to the New World as nuns (professed Sisters, novices, postulants, or aspirants). The pattern began in the spring of 1812 when three Ursuline nuns traveled Cork to New York, where they estabhshed the first foundation of Irish women in the United States. Although they remained only three years, they initiated a practice that would become commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century. They also represented the first wave of Irish emigrant women who would come to the United States at the invitation of bishops and priests, often Irish, to establish new convents.4 The first wave lasted 1812 to 1881. It consisted of the estabhshment of sixteen foundations that did endure, ending with the arrival in 1881 of a small group of Presentation Sisters Fermoy, County Cork, in Watervhet, New York. But a second wave, which began in earnest during the late 1860s (and overlapped the first wave during the 1870s),

Servants and gentlewomen to the golden land: the emigration of single women from Britain to southern Africa, 1820-1939

Too often, the emigration of women has been treated as an adjunct to that of men, especially in the case of families travelling together. The emigration of single women, though widespread - particularly in the British Empire - has generally been neglected, or seen as only part of a larger story. In significant ways, however, the emigration of single women from Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries was distinct from the general movement. It was rooted, in the main, in those features of British society peculiar to their sex, and also in conditions in the colonies that made the venture possible for them. What factors would cause a woman to leave all she has known for the uncertainty and danger of a 'wild' colony half a world away? How did these women adapt to the unique circumstances of life in southern Africa?

Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920.

Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920.

Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920.

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.

Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland 1885–1920. By Janet A. Nolan. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Pp. xii, 133. $16.00.

Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland 1885–1920. By Janet A. Nolan. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. Pp. xii, 133. $16.00.

Ourselves alone: women's emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920

Ourselves alone: women's emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920

Women in 19th Century Irish Emigration

Nineteenth century Ireland falls neatly into two distinct periods: the period preceding and the period following the great famine of 1845–1849. The emigration of women during and after the famine is examined in this article. Changes in marriage and the spread of dowries is analyzed to distinguish between the roles of married and unmarried women. Options other than emigration are highlighted insofar as they constituted “choices” for women which avoided the decision, taken by some two million women, to leave their island home by emigrating.

Women and Imperialism: The Colonial Office and Female Emigration to South Africa, 1901-1910

The emigration of women to South Africa and the other parts of the empire had been periodically promoted throughout the nineteenth century, but it was that great imperial crisis known as the Boer War which gave such emigration an immediate political and patriotic importance. The emigration of women, especially single women, was increasingly viewed not only as a means of assisting unfortunate, superfluous individuals but as a way of strengthening the empire—a matter of imperial urgency. By 1901 the issue of female emigration had become a part, and some argued the most important part, of the larger question of how to secure the South African colonies to the British Empire in more than name. An organized program for sending single women to South Africa was therefore jointly developed by the Colonial Office and the emigration societies which had long been interested in this work. This alliance between the hard-nosed bureaucrats of Downing Street and the amateurish gentlewomen who ran such organizations as the British Women's Emigration Association seldom, as events proved, operated smoothly, contributing in part to its limited success. This attempt to stimulate the settlement of women in South Africa is important, however, in illustrating the national mood in the aftermath of the victory in South Africa, the increased involvements of women in imperial affairs, and the difficulties facing the advocates of female emigration.The origins of Joseph Chamberlain's, and hence the Colonial Office's, interest in female emigration is difficult to pinpoint. The preliminary report of 1900 of the Lands Settlement Commission chaired by H.O. Arnold-Forster drew the attention of the office to the demographic weakness of the British position in South Africa.

The Migration of French West Indian Women to Metropolitan France

The West Indian island of Guadeloupe, a French departement since 1946, has been undergoing rapid modernization encouraged by the national government. Part of this modernization consists of: the mechanization of cane and banana cultivation; the consolidation of sugar mills; the importation of clothes previously made by local seamstresses; the introduction of supermarkets employing few women, which compete with peasant markets in which many women make a poor living. These changes eliminate income producing work and force wholesale emigration of men and women to metropolitan France. The emigration is facilitated by a government agency which pays the way of the migrants to Europe and arranges for on-the-job training in semi-skilled labor for the men and service jobs for the women. Although the government's interest in migration is due in part to the cost of maintaining the poor at government expense, it is partly self-defeating. The emigration of women breaks the kinship network through which old people and children were traditionally helped. At the same time, a newly emerging settlement pattern is weakening the patron-client obligations which were part of the strategy of survival.