Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T18:06:43.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Farmwives, Domesticity and Work in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2013

KATIE BARCLAY*
Affiliation:
ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5005, [email protected]

Abstract:

Despite the growing significance of the ideology of domesticity and changing farming practices, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish farmwives continued to have an active economic role on the farm. The continuation of their economic role reflected wider cultural beliefs that saw work as central to claims to property ownership, reinforced by the growth in the language of economic and political rights during the nineteenth century, which shaped how men and women understood work, ownership and personal rights.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. ‘Louth Divorce Suit’, Irish Times, 10th March 1911.

2. Gráda, Cormac Ó, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 236–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Bourke, Joanna, ‘Women and Poultry in Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 25 (1987), p. 294Google Scholar.

4. Bourke suggests that around 1911, women received sixpence for a dozen eggs, but that they were often paid in kind, which could reduce the value of the eggs to as little as three pence a dozen. One chicken would lay around 110 eggs a year. Bourke, ‘Women and Poultry’, pp. 305–8.

5. van Nederveen Meerkerk, E., ‘Couples Cooperating? Dutch Textile Workers, Family Labour and the “industrious revolution”, c.1600–1800’, Continuity and Change, 23 (2008), 237–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘Women's Labour Force Transition and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 89117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth Century Britain’, International Review of Social History, 42 (1997), 2564CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janssens, Angelique, ‘The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate’, International Review of Social History, 42 (1997), 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, Mary, ‘Women in the Irish Workforce from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times’, Saothar, 7 (1981), 7482Google Scholar.

7. Shanley, M. L., ‘Suffrage, Protective Labour Legislation and Married Women's Property Laws in England’, Signs, 12 (1988), 6277CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, A., ‘“Pleasurable Homes?” Victorian Model Miner's Wives and the Family Wage in a South Yorkshire Colliery District’, Women's History Review, 6 (1997), 317–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Eleanor, ‘Women, Work and Collective Action: Dundee Jute Workers 1870–1906’, Journal of Social History, 21 (1987), 2748CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hughes, Annemarie, ‘Working-Class Culture, Family life and Domestic Violence on Clydeside, c.1918–1939: A View from Below’, Scottish Traditions, 27 (2002), 6094Google Scholar.

8. For discussions of working-class married women's work, see: Lewis, Jane, ed., Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Holley, J., ‘The Two Family Economies of Industrialism: Factory Workers in Victorian Scotland’, Journal of Family History, 6 (1981), 5769CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ross, Ellen, ‘“Fierce questions and taunts”: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914’, Feminist Studies, 8 (1982), 575602CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomes, N., ‘A “torrent of abuse”: Crimes of Violence between Working-Class Men and Women in London’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1978), 328–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goose, Nigel, ‘Cottage Industry, Migration and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 798819CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, P., ‘The Women's Harvest: Straw-Plaiting and the Representation of Labouring Women's Employment, c. 1793–1885’, Rural History, 5 (1994), 129–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Verdon, Nicola summarises this literature: ‘“. . .Subjects deserving of the highest praise”: Farmer's Wives and the Farm Economy in England, c.1700–1850’, Agricultural History Review, 51 (2003), 2339Google Scholar; see also Bouchard, G., ‘Through the Meshes of Patriarchy: The Male/Female Relationship in Saguenay Peasant Society (1860–1930)’, History of the Family, 4 (2000), 397425CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, ‘Women in the Irish Workforce’; Bourke, Joanna, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Horrell and Humphries, ‘Women's Labour’.

11. Howkins, A., ‘Peasants, Servants and Labourers: The Marginal Workforce in British Agriculture, c.1870–1914’, Agricultural History Review, 92 (1994), 4962Google Scholar.

12. Turner, M. M., ‘Very Small Farm Holdings and the Rural Economy’, Sociologica Ruralis, 31 (1991), 7281CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winstanley, M., ‘Industrialisation and the Small Farm: Family and Household Economy in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, Past and Present, 152 (1996), 157–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Bourke, Husbandry.

14. Breathnach, Ciara, ‘The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891 – 1923’, New Hibernia Review, 8 (2004), 8092CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duggan, C., ‘Farming Women or Farmer's Wives: Women in the Farming Press’, in Curtin, C., Jackson, P. and O'Connor, B., eds, Gender in Irish Society (Galway, 1987), pp. 5469Google Scholar.

15. McGregor, P., ‘The Labor Market and the Distribution of Landholdings in Pre-Famine Ireland,’ Explorations in Economic History, 29 (1992), p. 477CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History; Turner, M., ‘Rural Economies in Post-Famine Ireland, c. 1850–1914’, in Graham, B. J. and Proudfoot, L. J., eds, An Historical Geography of Ireland (London, 1993), pp. 293337Google Scholar.

16. Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, p. 258.

17. Freeman, T., Ireland, its Physical, Historical, Social and Economic Geography (London, 1950), p. 190Google Scholar. The percentage of population designated farmers is calculated from Guinnane's occupational figures from the 1911 census, see: Guinnane, T. W., ‘Intergenerational Transfers, Emigration, and the Rural Irish Household System’, Explorations in Economic History, 29 (1992), p. 462CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Irish acres are 1.62 British acres.

18. Clear, Catriona, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850–1922 (Manchester, 2007), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner ‘Rural Economies’.

19. Rich, E. E.et al, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volumes 4–5 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 666–7Google Scholar.

20. Turner ‘Rural Economies’, p. 318.

21. Breathnach, Ciara, The Congested District Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland (Dublin, 2005)Google Scholar.

22. Bourke, Husbandry; Jenkins, W., ‘Capitalists and Co-Operators: Agricultural Transformation, Contested Space, and Identity Politics in South Tipperary, Ireland, 1890–1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30 (2004), 87111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Gribbon, H. D., ‘Economic and Social History, 1850–1921’, in Vaughan, W. E., ed., A New History of Ireland, 6 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 284–5Google Scholar; Ó Gráda, Ireland, A New Economic History, pp. 290–2.

24. Bourke, Husbandry; Breathnach, Congested District.

25. Guinnane, ‘Intergenerational Transfers’, p. 467.

26. Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, p. 262.

27. Jordan, D., Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 74100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barclay, Katie, ‘Place and Power in Irish Farms at the End of the Nineteenth Century’, Women's History Review, 21 (2012), 571–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Jordan, D., ‘The Irish National League and the ‘unwritten law’: Rural Protest and Nation-Building in Ireland, 1882–1890’, Past and Present, 158 (1998), 146–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For women's role see TeBrake, J. K., ‘Irish Peasant Women in Revolt: The Land League Years,’ Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 6380CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. For an extended discussion of this see: Barclay, ‘Place and Power’.

30. Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1870 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1871), p. 4.

31. Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1873 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1874), p. 6.

32. National Archive of Ireland Convict Reference File F6 1918. For other similar examples see Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1871 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1872), p. 9 and Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1874 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1875), p. 4.

33. The complexities of both the attitudes towards and realities of landlord behaviour are explored in Vaughan, W. E., Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1877 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1878), p. 7.

35. Return of the Outrages 1870, p. 10.

36. Return of the Outrages 1877, p. 5.

37. National Archive of Ireland Convict Reference File W1 1918.

38. This phenomenon and the related fairy belief system are described in Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

39. ‘Summer Assizes Westmeath’, Irish Times, 18th July 1863.

40. ‘Limerick Spring Assizes’, Munster News and Limerick and Clare Advocate, 6th March 1875. In evidence, it appeared that Michael was a violent husband and his wife was acting in self-defence. His fairytale may well have reflected a need to explain his behaviour as much as hers, although it may also have been a way of reducing the ‘shame’ of being assaulted by a woman.

41. Bourke, Burning of Bridget Cleary and ‘Frightful Murder in the County of Galway’, Irish Times, 29th April 1887; Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1890 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1891), p. 3.

42. Breen, Richard, ‘Dowry Payments and Irish Case’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26 (1984), 280–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, K. H., ‘Peasant Marriage in Ireland: Its Structure and Development since the Famine’, Economic History Review, 14 (1962), 502–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, K. H., ‘The Land Legislation and Irish Social Life’, Economic History Review, 11 (1958), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Gráda, Cormac Ó, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925 (Manchester, 1994), pp. 180220Google Scholar, demonstrates that families tried to provide some inheritance for most children who remained on the farm.

44. Guinnane, Timothy, The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration and the Rural Economy in Ireland, 1850–1914 (New Jersey, 1997), p. 107Google Scholar.

45. Barclay, Katie, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (Manchester, 2011), pp. 83–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Davidoff, Leanore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987), pp. 214Google Scholar and 487; Treble, J. H., ‘The Record of the Standard Life Assurance Company in the Life Insurance Market of the United Kingdom, 1850–64’, in Westall, O. M., ed., The Historian and the Business of Insurance (Manchester, 1984), p. 107Google Scholar.

47. Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After, pp. 202–6.

48. For example, ‘Commission Court’, Ennis Chronicle and Clare Advertiser, 7th March 1803.

49. Barclay, Love, Intimacy, pp. 81–3, and for a discussion on the relationship between domestic violence and social class, pp. 182–6; Sperling, J., ‘Dowry or Inheritance? Kinship, Property, and Women's Agency in Lisbon, Venice, and Florence (1572)’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11 (2007), 197238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Osswald, H., ‘Dowry, Norms and Household Formation: A Case Study from North Portugal’, Journal of Family History, 15 (1990), 201–24Google Scholar; Sperling, ‘Dowry’.

51. Moran, G., ‘James Daly and the Rise and Fall of the Land League in the West of Ireland, 1879–82’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1994), 189207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 20.

53. Owens, R. C., Smashing Times: History of the Irish Women's Suffrage Movement, 1889–1922 (Dublin, 1984)Google Scholar; Ryan, L. and Ward, M., eds, Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin, 2007)Google Scholar.

54. ‘A Wail from a Widow’, Anglo-Celt, 2nd May 1868.

55. ‘The Great Unpaid: State Endowment of Motherhood’, Irish Times, 28th November 1922.

56. ‘Summer Assizes’, Irish Times, 31st July 1863.

57. ‘Family Dispute in Tipperary’, Irish Times, 22nd August 1911.

58. Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1875 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1876), p. 12.

59. Return of the Outrages Reported to the Constabulary Office during the year 1876 (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1877), p. 11.

60. Return of Outrages 1877, p.15.

61. ‘Longford Wife Murder- Sentence of Death’, Irish Times, 17th December 1891.

62. ‘Women, her Place and Power’, Irish Times, 24th December 1884.

63. ‘Bishop O'Dwyer and Women's Rights’, Irish Times, 19th February 1912.

64. Bunreacht na hÉirann, enacted by the People 1st July 1937, Article 40, 2.

65. MacPherson, James, ‘“Ireland begins in the home”: Women, Irish National Identity, and the Domestic Sphere in the Irish Homestead, 1896–1912’, Eire-Ireland, 36 (2001), 132CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

66. Kain, E. L. and Bolger, N., ‘Social Change and Women's Work and Family Experience in Ireland and the United States’, Social Science History, 10 (1986), 171–93Google Scholar; Kiely, E. and Leane, M., ‘“What would I be doing at home all day?: Oral Narratives of Irish Married Women's Working Lives 1936–1960’, Women's History Review, 13 (2004), 427–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. Royal Commission on Labour. The Employment of Women (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1893), pp. 328–9; Daly, ‘Women in the Irish Workforce’.

68. While the historiography uses the statute acre, it may be that the primary sources are referring to Irish acres.

69. ‘Matrimonial Court’, Irish Times, 21st January 1876, reports 200–250 acres; ‘Law Intelligence’, Freeman's Journal, 21st January 1876, reports 128 acres.

70. ‘Wife's Complaint’, Irish Times, 20th March 1922.

71. These disputes may have reflected not so much a genuine difference of social expectations between spouses, but an attempt to demean women by making them perform work below their status.

72. ‘Wexford Breach of Promise Case- 450 Love Letters’, Irish Times, 25th January 1892; ‘Alleged Breach of Promise of Marriage’, Irish Times, 22nd September 1880; Royal Commission on Labour. The Agricultural Labourer. Vol. IV. Ireland. Part IV (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1893), p. 19.

73. Between 1901 and 1911, occupied single women fell by nine per cent, married women by two per cent and widows by twenty per cent. Bourke, Husbandry, pp. 34–7.

74. Bourke, Husbandry; C. Curtin and A. Varley, ‘Marginal Men? Bachelor Farmers in a West of Ireland Community’, in Curtin, Jackson and O'Connor, Gender in Irish Society, pp. 287–308; Breatnach, ‘Role of Women’.

75. Neill, M., ‘Homeworkers in Ulster, 1850–1911’, in Holmes, J. and Urquhart, D., eds, Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840–1940 (Belfast, 1994), pp. 331Google Scholar; Gray, J., ‘Gender Composition and Household Labour Strategies in Pre-Famine Ireland’, History of the Family, 11 (2006), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. Bourke, Husbandry; O'Dowd, ‘Women in Rural Ireland’, p. 175; James, ‘Handicraft’.

77. Hughes, ‘Landholding and Settlement’, p. 124.

78. Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After, p. 154.

79. Wages calculated from Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, p. 237.

80. O'Dowd, Anne, ‘Women in Rural Ireland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries - How the Daughters, Wives and Sisters of Small Farmers and Landless Labourers Fared’, Rural History, 5 (1994), pp. 175–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For women's contribution to the pre-famine economy, see: Cullen, M., ‘Breadwinners and Providers: Women in the Household Economy of Labouring Families 1835–6’, in Luddy, Maria and Murphy, Cliona, eds, Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women's History in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Dublin, 1990), pp. 85116Google Scholar.

81. Congested Districts Board for Ireland. First annual report of the Congested Districts Board for Ireland (Dublin, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1893), appendix C.

82. Horrell, S. and Oxley, D., ‘Work and Prudence: Household Responses to Income Variation in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, European Review of Economic History, 4 (2000), 2757CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83. Bourke, Husbandry; Breathnach, Congested District; Clear, Catriona, Women of the House: Women's Household Work in Ireland, 1922–1961 (Dublin, 2000)Google Scholar; MacPherson, ‘Ireland begins in the Home’, pp. 131–52; O'Dowd, ‘Women in Rural Ireland’.

84. MacPherson, ‘Ireland begins in the Home’, p. 135.

85. Bourke, Joanna, ‘‘I Was Always Fond of my Pillow’: The Handmade Lace Industry in the United Kingdom, 1870–1914’, Rural History, 5 (1994), p. 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. Barclay, ‘Place and Power’.

87. ‘Wife's Allegations- Distressing Tipperary Case’, Irish Independent, 21st January 1924.

88. Brożyna, Andrea Ebel, Labour, Love and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 (Belfast, 1999), pp. 108–12Google Scholar; Raftery, D. and Parkes, S., Female Education in Ireland, 1700–1900: Minerva or Madonna (Dublin, 2007)Google Scholar.

89. For an example of the labour performed by the wealthy farmwife, see: Carbery, M., The Farm by Lough Gur (Dublin, 1973)Google Scholar.

90. Daly, ‘Women in the Irish Workforce’, p. 75.