| Summary: | <p>This work examines the lives and wellbeing of Irish women in the United States from 1850 until 1914, encompassing the end of the famine and the age of mass European migration. Irish migration in this period has been the subject of a large body of research, but existing
studies have focused primarily on men, despite Irish female migrants often outnumbering male migrants in the late nineteenth century. The decision to emigrate in this period has frequently been explained by wage differentials between Ireland and destination countries, but this was only one factor in a multifaceted process. The importance of the family and the home is usually overlooked, despite their centrality to the decision to emigrate; and insufficient attention has been paid to how the experiences and circumstances of Irish émigrés changed over time. Most glaringly, the particular experiences of female migrants
have not been given sufficient attention, with the result that our knowledge of this exceptional group of women is scanty, and their seminal impact on the broader history of Irish emigration is underplayed.</p>
<p>This thesis takes a new and innovative approach to Irish emigration research, an approach which questions many of the assumptions underlying existing analysis. It does so in four main ways. First, this thesis places women at the centre of the analysis, considering their
life in Ireland and, for emigres, their life in the United States. Second, it adopts a broad approach to wellbeing that extends beyond the typical and androcentric focus on real wages. Third, it considers how the lives of Irish women evolved over their life course, as workers, wives, mothers and widows. Fourth, it adopts a multi-level approach which combines numbers with narratives. The former includes United States micro-census data which provides information on all individuals in 1880, allowing for a new, national and comparative picture of women’s lives. The latter includes parliamentary papers, newspaper articles,
philanthropic studies of urban life, and charity reports. Moreover, this thesis employs letters of Irish women, to extrapolate how these women themselves perceived their own lives. </p>
<p>Through this examination, this thesis shows the multidimensional nature of women’s wellbeing, and how women’s lives often deteriorated as migrant women aged. Although many women found independence and wellbeing in the US in their youth, many older women were left alone and destitute. Yet these women and their voices are central to our understanding of the history of Ireland, migration, and the making of the modern America.</p>
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