1 - Charting and Understanding Irish Women's Emigration in the Twentieth Century

Summary

Seasonal, peripatetic and permanent migrations have been made by Irish people to all parts of Britain for centuries. Women have always been part of the flow. This chapter will explore the background to twentieth-century female emigration to Britain, outlining the statistical evidence and analysing important geographical shifts in Irish migration. This highlights the extent and profile of female emigration. Finally, Irish women's experiences are examined in the context of established theoretical models which pose the question: how useful are such concepts in furthering our understanding of female migration?

Women's experiences of emigration in the nineteenth century have been better sketched than those of their counterparts in the twentieth. The historiography has focused on their compulsory migrations as paupers and convicted criminals, their independent migration to seek new opportunities, and their connectedness to families at home, often being the ones to send tickets and money to relatives in Ireland. Thus, emigration from Ireland was a long-established demographic feature of Irish life, yet it became an overtly political and moral problem when the Free State was founded in December 1922. Emigration, thought by many to be a colonial anomaly, was not eradicated upon independence. In fact, emigration increased, particularly, and most gallingly, to Britain, the former ‘colonial oppressor’. Emigration was a factor that marked the Free State, but for the wrong reasons in the eyes of its leaders.

Statistical Evidence on Irish Women's Emigration

Everything we know about the history of Irish women in the diaspora revolves around one cultural set of facts. One-half of the great Irish diaspora was female.

In 1920, Ireland was in a unique position in the world, not because it had been split into northern and southern territories, but because nearly half (43 per cent) of the population of the Free State resided in other countries. The 1926 Census of Population noted that in 1920–21 there were 1,037,234 Irish-born persons living in the USA, 367,747 living in England and Wales, 159,020 in Scotland, 105,033 in Australia, 93,301 in Canada, 34,419 in New Zealand, 12,289 in the Union of South Africa and 8,414 in India, giving a total of 1,817,457 persons born in Ireland or no less than 43 per cent of the population of Ireland.