Irish American Women Research Articles

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

The gendering of diaspora: Irish American women teachers and political activism

ABSTRACT This article examines the way in which Irish American women teachers used education as a platform to extend the reach of their social and cultural capital, enabling them to subvert patriarchal and imperialist ideologies and, embracing subjectivity, assume key leadership roles in a range of associations fundamental to organised feminism. Drawing on a tapestry of primary sources, it interrogates how these gender transgressors successfully resisted the patriarchal ideology of nineteenth century American society, subverting essentialised notions of womanhood. Two women are examined over the course of this article, Margaret Haley (1861–1939), teacher and labour leader and Julia Harrington Duff (1859–1932), teacher and educationalist activist. Focussing on the ways in which Irish American women teachers enhanced their social mobility in and through education allows for a re-reading of the historiography of diaspora, establishing the educational and historical record within diasporic spaces as deeply gendered as well as women's role therein inherently agentic.

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In a New Yorker article anticipating the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland in August 2018, James Carroll reflected on the recent report produced by a Pennsylvania Grand Jury that identified one thousand children (and speculated that there were thousands more) who were abused by three hundred priests over a seventy-year period across six dioceses. Comparing the United States with Ireland, he claimed that “the Irish wound is deeper still.” Citing the revelation that nearly eight hundred infants had died at and had been secretly buried in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, Carroll concludes: “there had been monsters not only among the priests but among the sisters” (emphasis added).1 Carroll inadvertently identifies, here, one of the most significant differences in Irish compared with US (particularly, but not exclusively, Irish [End Page 185] American) cultural depictions of the clergy in relation to the abuse scandals that have been revealed over the past twenty years. US literature and culture has dramatized many predatory priests—several of them with Irish names— in narratives that deal predominantly (Spotlight [dir. Tom McCarthy, 2015]) or only tangentially (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [dir. Martin Mc-Donagh, 2017]) with clerical abuse.2 However, nuns are largely represented not just as innocent of the crimes perpetrated by their male counterparts in the clergy but as themselves beleaguered targets of the Catholic Church’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and/or as heroic defenders of the victims of sexual abuse. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable (2004), set in 1964, a righteous school principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, succeeds in having a priest she believes to be a child molester moved to another parish. While the play ends with Sister Aloysius expressing serious “doubts” over her own actions, her concern for the welfare of the child, Donald Muller, is never in question.3 Moreover, the play is dedicated to “the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.”4 Meanwhile, in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017), former students of the Baltimore teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, speculate that the nun was murdered in 1969 because she had evidence that a fellow teacher at Archbishop Keough high school, Father Joseph Maskell, had been abusing teenage girls. These examples exist in stark contrast to representations of nuns in Irish culture, in which the “evil” or “sadistic” nun was immortalized at least as far back as 1992 when Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed débuted at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. In February 1996, RTÉ screened the (now infamous) Dear Daughter documentary (dir. Louis Lentin) built upon testimony from Christine Buckley and other victims of abuse at the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin. Since then, we have seen cinematic and literary representations such as The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan, 2002)5, Sinners (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2002), Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) Christine Falls (2006), Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009), adapted as Philomena (dir. Stephen Frears, 2013), all of which portray Irish nuns as complicit—and sometimes active participants—in the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of women and children. This contribution to the forum will consider two recent novels by Irish American women writers, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017) and Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions (2017), which present their readers with nuns who take liberal, if not radical, views on a range of Catholic doctrinal issues such as suicide, contraception, marital infidelity, and homosexuality. While they engage, to an extent, with clerical abuse (and [End Page 186] Sullivan does this more directly than McDermott), both novels ultimately uphold Mary Gordon’s claim that “[a]t least since the priesthood was first shaken by the sexual-abuse scandal two decades ago…America’s nuns have been the de facto leaders of the country’s liberal Catholics, especially those more interested in social justice than in holding the Vatican’s line on sexual politics.”6 The question I want to consider...

Shifting Identities: The Influence of Sex and Religion on Irish American Women Autobiographers

Shifting Identities: The Influence of Sex and Religion on Irish American Women Autobiographers Sally Barr Ebest (bio) Any research on Irish American identity begins with Charles Fanning. His seminal study The Irish Voice in America (1990/2000) not only detailed the characteristics of Irish American literature—an emphasis on family, community, religion, nationalism, and politics—but also argued that these traits endure. In the ensuing years, however, questions have risen about this endurance of Irish American traits. In a 2003 study of six Irish American novelists, Shaun O’Connell notes that “nationality, language and religion no longer clearly determine identity in a world of instant communication, easy mobility and cultural internationalism.”1 Jennifer McClinton-Temple’s 2013 examination of three recent Irish American autobiographies exemplifies how these traits have changed, adding feelings of paralysis and insularity to the definition. Similarly, in Irish-American Autobiography (2016), James Rogers suggests that identity includes a growing interiority expressed in a sense of difference, feelings of abandonment, spiritual homelessness, silence, or secrets, often—but not always—due to the impact of the Catholic Church. Autobiography is the perfect medium to trace these shifting identities. In Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson maintain that the genre creates multiple selves as a result of self-reflection throughout the composing process. Rather than presenting a static or universal persona, autobiography becomes an amalgamation as authors shape their identity out of shapeless subjectivity. Consequently, life writing may be viewed as both cultural and literary artifact since it represents society and the self. Autobiography defies generic definitions, because there are at least 64 different types.2 One type of life writing, the serial autobiography, is usually published as chapters or volumes focusing on different periods of the author’s life; however, because life stories tend to span decades or eras, they may be revised (as Mary McCarthy did) based on additional information or self-reflection.3 They may be written in first, second, or third person. Mary Karr and Mary Cantwell generally write in the first person; however, they shift to the second person when discussing sex. Depending on their age or subject matter, the authors may change voices or points of view.4 McCarthy is the naïf in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood but a cynic in Intellectual Memoirs; Mary Karr is a foul-mouthed [End Page 169] adolescent in The Liars’ Club but an older and wiser mother in Lit. Between Just Kids and The M Train, Patti Smith morphs from itinerate artist to widow, yet remains a poet. Autobiography opens up space for creative as well as political explorations;5 as a result, this genre is the ideal site for marginalized groups such as women and ethnic minorities. For Irish American women—often marginalized by a patriarchal church and society—such work has been empowering. Like their Irish foremothers, these women have used life narratives not only to establish their identity but also to place it within the context of their changing socio-religious culture.6 This is particularly true for serial autobiographers. Mary McCarthy (b. 1912), Mary Cantwell (b. 1930), Patti Smith (b. 1946), and Mary Karr (b. 1955) composed multiple volumes of bildungsromane tracing different stages of their personal development. Their plots include “escape from a repressive family, schooling, and a journey into the wide world of urban life with a series of mentors, romantic involvements, and entrepreneurial ventures,” which for some women culminate in an unhappy awareness of “gender-based limitations.”7 By writing memoirs covering multiple decades, these authors illustrate how identity has shifted from external to internal markers; rather than explore family, community, religion, nationalism, or politics per se, they discuss their sense of paralysis, insularity, and difference as well as feelings of abandonment and spiritual homelessness. In every case, sex is the common denominator, the nexus in a Venn diagram conjoining family and religion. This connection is most evident in second memoirs recounting the authors’ middle years, which focus on sex and erotic pleasure, issues previously excluded from accounts of Catholic girls’ lives. By addressing such topics, these writers reveal the Church’s view of extramarital sex as illness or disease and of women as sexualized, inferior beings...

Agency and Activism in Irish American Women’s Memoirs

Agency and Activism in Irish American Women’s Memoirs

Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920

Book Review| July 01 2019 Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920. By Tara M. McCarthy. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. xiii + 321 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Patricia Kelleher Patricia Kelleher Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Patricia Kelleher is Professor of History at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on gender, class, and ethnicity among nineteenth-century Irish Americans. She has published articles in the Journal of Women’s History, Éire-Ireland, and the Journal of American Ethnic History. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2019) 38 (4): 92–95. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.4.0092 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patricia Kelleher; Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2019; 38 (4): 92–95. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.4.0092 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Tara M. McCarthy. Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920.

Tara M. McCarthy. Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920.

Reverse Currents: Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-imperialism, 1916–24

Reverse Currents:Irish Feminist and Nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and U.S. Anti-imperialism, 1916–24 Elizabeth McKillen (bio) During the easter rising of 1916, British troops arrested pacifist and suffragist Francis Sheehy Skeffington while he was out trying to prevent looting on Dublin streets, executed him without trial, and covered up their actions by burying him without notifying the family. They had apparently not counted on the indefatigable detective skills of Francis's wife Hanna, who soon used social networks and political skills cultivated during her career as a suffragist to uncover what happened to her husband. With the assistance of Sir Francis Vane, a sympathetic British officer, Hanna soon forced the arrest and court martial of Captain John Bowen-Colthurst, who had issued the command to execute Francis.1 She also traveled to Britain and convinced Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to launch a broader inquiry into the incident. Yet Sheehy Skeffington proved dissatisfied with the results of both the court martial and the inquiry, and she soon "made up [her] mind … to go to America and to tell [the] story of British militarism to every audience in the States that I could reach."2 Over the course of the next eight years, Sheehy Skeffington spent extensive time in the United States on lecture and fundraising tours on behalf of Irish independence; she also published widely in the [End Page 148] American and Irish American press. Sheehy Skeffington's roles in shaping the Irish nationalist and suffrage movements during this period have received significant scholarly attention, but this article seeks to shed new light on her activism by exploring the ways that she contributed to intellectual currents within both Irish America and the American left on questions of imperialism and U.S. foreign policy.3 Erez Manela in his classic book The Wilsonian Moment emphasized the importance of a transnational flow of Wilsonian ideas about national self-determination in inspiring anticolonial rebellions in such diverse countries as China, Egypt, India, and Korea during the World War I era. Yet, as subaltern theorists have recently insisted, the intellectual flow of ideas was often a two-way street, and marginalized actors from colonial areas sometimes exercised surprising influence over larger and more powerful nations by using their institutions, media, and diaspora networks to disseminate their own ideas.4 For no group was this more true than the early twentieth-century Irish, who enjoyed the benefits of a sprawling and politically influential Irish immigrant community in the United States. An older literature on Irish America detailed the efforts of its leaders and politicians to shape U.S. foreign policy formulation with respect to Ireland and explored some of the disagreements that developed between Irish American nationalist leaders and visiting Irish male rebels such as Eamon de Valera.5 The role of Irish women lecturers [End Page 149] who came to the United States in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion, however, has only recently received attention. To date, most studies of women lecturers have focused on their success in raising funds for the Irish rebellion and in publicizing the Irish nationalist struggle. Some have also detailed the ways in which these women interacted with Irish American women and encouraged an expansion of female organizational activities within Irish America. Catherine Burns has explored the ways in which both Irish and Irish American women used American patriotic rhetoric to justify their Irish nationalist work. The contributions of Irish women lecturers to ongoing debates about key U.S. foreign policies, however, remain largely neglected.6 Yet many Irish female lecturers, Sheehy Skeffington included, remained in the United States for long periods of time [End Page 150] and proved to be quite popular speakers and political strategists. Although both Irish and Irish American women nationalists emphasized their loyalty to the United States, U.S. intelligence agents engaged in extensive surveillance of their activities because they feared their subversive influence in undermining U.S. foreign policies.7 Sheehy Skeffington's aim during her first lecture tour in 1917–18 was primarily to expose British brutality and raise funds for Irish independence, but her lectures intersected and clashed with President Wilson's policies during World War...

Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 by Tara M. McCarthy

Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 by Tara M. McCarthy

The ‘Wrongs’ of Women: Sex and Sexuality in Irish American Women's Writing

A key trait distinguishing the writing of Irish American women from that of their male counterparts is a strong feminist bent often expressed in stories featuring sex and sexuality. In ignoring these characteristics, Irish studies scholars have disregarded a trait established by Irish women writers in oral traditions as early as 600 and in written English since 1685. Much of this material was categorized as the ‘Wrongs of Woman’, a phrase used to describe stories about physical and sexual abuse. These same themes can be traced in the writing of Irish American women since the late nineteenth century. By focusing on these ‘wrongs’, Irish American women have not only carried on the tradition begun by their foremothers; they have also battled patriarchal bonds on three fronts: religion, which created such bonds; society, which reinforced them; and politics, which tries to recreate and re-impose them. A complete understanding of Irish American writing therefore depends on recognizing and adding the contributions of these women to the definition of the literature. This essay defines that cohort, then provides a historically contextualized examination of their literary attempts to address the ‘wrongs’ of women inflicted by religion, society and politics from 1899 to the present. In so doing, this discussion demonstrates the role played by Irish American women writers in promoting, protecting and perpetuating the rights of women in the United States and around the world.

Divided Loyalties: Irish American Women Labor Leaders and the Irish Revolution, 1916–23

Divided Loyalties: Irish American Women Labor Leaders and the Irish Revolution, 1916–23

The banshees: a literary history of Irish American women

The banshees: a literary history of Irish American women

Woman Suffrage and Irish Nationalism: ethnic appeals and alliances in America

Nationalism first brought Irish-American women into a political struggle in the late nineteenth century, a role that did not go unnoticed by suffragists, who reached out to Irish-Americans through sympathy with the Home Rule movement. These connections also continued into the twentieth century as the crisis of World War I converged with revolutionary nationalism and the final push for suffrage in America. A small group of nationalists and suffragists worked together and sought alliances in an environment where Irish-American men wielded political power and Irish-American women continued to be active in the nationalist movement beyond the Ladies' Land League era.

Linguistic correlates of Irish-American and Italian-American ethnicity in high school and beyond

Young Irish-American and Italian-American women from South Philadelphia were recorded in their senior year of high school and then in their freshman year of college. Despite the relative longevity and increasing cultural integration of the Irish and Italian communities in South Philadelphia, some linguistic differences obtain in the Philadelphia English of women from these two groups. In the 1970s (Labov, 2001), the only Irish or Italian ethnic effect on Philadelphia vowels was found in Italians’ relatively retracted bow/boat and boo/boot. This was supported in the present study for boat, for which Italian-Americans are less fronted than Irish-Americans. Yet other ethnolinguistic differences were unexpectedly also found in the speech of these young women. For instance, Irish-American women and ‘tough’ Italian-American women exhibited more retracted bite-nuclei than their peers. Ethnicity also conditions the alternation between alveolar and velar variants of suffixal (ing), with Irish-Americans more likely than Italian-Americans to use the non-standard alveolar variant. However, the strength of this effect on (ing) attenuates after high school, when ethnicity becomes a less salient component of the speakers’ self-presentation. The article discusses the importance of bringing ethnographic observations to the study of within-White ethnicity, and emphasizes the dynamic nature of ‘ethnicity’ as it is constructed and re-constructed across the individual lifespan.

Sisters of secession: the unclaimed legacies of two Southern American Irish women

Mary Austin Carroll (1835–1909) and Florence Jane O'Connor (dates unknown) were both Irish American women of fervent religious belief who are unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The first objective of this piece is to introduce them and to give an account of their work. As a nun, and later a superior in the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, Mary Austin Carroll's work has sometimes been lost to her own preference for anonymity. Her literary production and importance arguably eclipse more celebrated male pro-Confederate contemporaries like Father Abram J. Ryan. For her part, Florence O'Connor's singular work, The Heroine of the Confederacy, provides critical insights into how Irish American women naturalised Catholicism in the South and reconciled it to Lost Cause remembrance. This essay attempts to place these women within the larger context of Southern Irish Americans with Confederate sympathies and argues for the lasting significance of their literary and rhetorical legacies within American Irish histories.

Too smart to be sentimental: contemporary Irish American women writers

Too smart to be sentimental: contemporary Irish American women writers

Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America

Armed with Irish national school educations that provided skills in needlework, cooking, fine laundry, good spelling, and nice penmanship, young single women emigrated to America when post-famine Ireland had little to offer them. Prepared to seize the best opportunities their school-learned skills afforded, they found servant positions in upper-class homes. Once married—usually to a countryman—they encouraged their daughters to make the most of their own opportunities by becoming teachers. Sons could go early into the work force; daughters stayed in high school and went to normal school. This generation of Irish American women became a substantial proportion of urban public school teachers, and the girls' accomplishments became family advances. The mothers had been servants of the rich. The daughters became “servants of the poor.” Janet Nolan chronicles women who followed a path from the national schools of Ireland to the public schools of Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago in the half century surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The cities had differences, but each had a large Irish population, and in all three Irish American women were the largest single ethnic group among public school teachers. In Boston, they were one-quarter of the teachers by 1908; in San Francisco, almost half by 1910; in Chicago, they were perhaps 70 percent in 1920.

Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America (review)

Reviewed by: Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America William H. Mulligan Jr. Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America, by Janet Nolan . Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, pp. 191. $45 (cloth), $18 (paper). Janet Nolan's Servants of the Poor adds to the growing literature on the role that women played in Irish assimilation and social mobility in the United States. Women's experiences need to be included, centrally, in the study of the Irish Catholic experience in America before; it is good to have this important point so effectively brought to the fore yet again. The Irish-American women public school teachers studied here offer information both on women's lives and on the dynamics of Irish assimilation. Focusing on the experience of Irish women [End Page 158] as National School teachers in Ireland, and in three cities with significant Irish populations—Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco—Nolan develops a series of in-depth accounts to support the provocative thesis that women, especially those who became public school teachers, played a critical role in the movement of Irish Catholics into the American middle class. Significantly, Nolan also argues for shifting the focus of investigation from male education, employment, and career paths to those of Irish immigrant females when studying mobility in both Ireland and the United States. An especially important aspect of this book is Nolan's attention to the experience of women as National School teachers in Ireland. She establishes that teaching school was already an avenue of upward mobility open to, and used by, women in Ireland, prior to emigration to the United States. In fact, she demonstrates that individuals who began preparing to be National School teachers in Ireland sometimes pursued the same career in the United States, or that their daughters did. Historians have seldom explored the continuities between emigrants' experiences in Ireland and in their new homes; Nolan demonstrates the value of such an approach. One small point regarding the title: "servants of the poor" may not accurately describe the work of the teachers discussed in the book. When one takes into account the literature on high school attendance during the period covered, especially the early years, it may be more accurate to describe these women as servants of other young women who aspired to upward mobility and middle-class status. In no way does that diminish the contribution that Servants of the Poor makes to studies of the Irish in America: to suggest a broad area for future research, and to show clearly its potential benefit., is a major accomplishment. Copyright © 2005 The University of St. Thomas

These Traits Also Endure: Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Women Writers

Where are the contemporary women novelists in Irish Studies? Why is no one writing about them? A cursory review of the top journals in the field suggests a decided lack of interest. Sampling six issues of Eire-Ireland from 1994 to 1999, totaling sixty essays, yielded only seven about women, none of them novelists. A review of seven issues of New Hibernia Review between 1998 and 2002 found four essays about women out of a possible sixty-one. Of these, only one focused on a novelist. This is not the editors' fault, for at conferences and symposia the primary focus continues to be male writers and historical figures. Nor did the nineteenth century prove more interesting than the twentieth. In Erin's Daugh ters in America (1983), Hasia Diner chronicles the nineteenth-century emigra tion of women from Ireland to the United States, and lanet Nolan continues the story in Ourselves, Alone (1990). But theirs is an historical view apparently unshared by literary critics. Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes's edited collection Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism (1979) features women in two out of ten chapters: one covers women's perspectives from Betty Smith to Mary McCarthy; the other critiques the work of Elizabeth Cullinan. Ten years later, their reader, Modern Irish-American Fiction (1989) devotes six of its twenty-two short stories to works by women: Betty Smith, Mary McCarthy, Mary Curran, Flannery O'Connor, Maureen Howard, Elizabeth Cullinan, and Mary Gordon.1 Not until Charles Fanning s survey of Irish-American fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s, The Irish Voice in America (1990), was there any extended, critical, contextualized discussion of contemporary Irish-American women writers.

Race-ing Toward Civilization: Sexual Slavery and Nativism in the Novels of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Alice Wellington Rollins

The ongoing work of restoring lost nineteenth-century women writers to the American literary canon often yields the added benefit of bringing to light experiences of ethnic groups left out of the dominant narrative of American identity. The opportunity to compare ethnic American literatures can provide fascinating new approaches to better-known authors like Pauline Hopkins, whose literary concerns extend beyond the social and domestic needs of her own African American community. Hopkins interrogates the very foundations of equality and democracy as the United States turns into the twentieth century, frequently flirting with nativist discourse as she does so. Conversely, the Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture holds one of the few extant copies of an 1888 work by Alice Rollins entitled Uncle Tom's Tenement; this critically un-examined and seemingly forgotten novel uses abolitionist language to describe the plight of Irish American women. As an Anglo-American middle-class woman writing about an Irish immigrant minority, Rollins invokes rhetorical strategies comparable to Hopkins's. Both Hopkins and Rollins engage nativist discourse but more prominently deploy slavery as metaphor, either to highlight the ongoing vulnerability of African and Irish Americans in a hostile United States or to expose the roots of tenement poverty. The fraught issue of female sexuality epitomizes such vulnerability; voicing the political desires of under-represented racial and ethnic groups, particularly women, suggests that only pluralism and equal access to government can guarantee equal protection. Certainly, these two authorial agendas resist disavowals of African and Irish American capacity for self-government, not uncommon among Anglo-American politicians of that era. Hopkins, nonetheless, proceeds to empower her African American heroines without hesitation while Rollins proves more likely to appeal to Anglo-Americans on Irish women's behalf. Imitating Harriet Beecher Stowe, then, Rollins's moral logic preserves the distance between middle-class women of her own caste and scenes wherein social boundaries dissipate, leaving women of color vulnerable to sexual exploitation by Anglo-American men. Anglo-masculine claims to power include a discourse of sexual purity that requires sexual self-restraint. Racist depictions of Irish and African American sexuality, projecting stereo-typically lascivious and disorderly sexual conduct upon racial or ethnic citizens, denied either group the capacity for self-government or participation in American national politics. Hopkins's and Rollins's demand for racial, ethnic, or gender inclusion in national politics, therefore, challenges exclusively Anglo-masculine claims on power. Although they treat the ambiguous racial and ethnic status of African American and Irish American heroines quite differently, Uncle Tom's Tenement, Contending Forces, and Hagar's Daughter exceed the specific interests of Black or Irish Americans. They prescribe standards for civic duty and that apply to the nation as a whole, challenging doctrines of Anglo-masculine supremacy by associating sexual exploitation with Anglo-American political and economic power. Hopkins and Rollins subvert claims made in Anglo-masculine discourse (especially nativism) as they work to include women and non-Anglo-Americans in the pluralistic their literature demands. The manner in which each writer deals with racial identity is quite telling. As she parallels Ethiopian and Anglo contributions to civilization in a modern America, Hopkins prophesies a great future built on the tradition of Ethiopianism; her critique of Anglo-American exclusivity applies only to the oppression of blacks and does not concern other ethnic groups like the Irish. While Hopkins inverts stereotypical racial categories, frequently vilifying whiteness, Rollins inserts Irish Americans into the discursive place conventionally occupied by black slaves in abolitionist discourse. …