In the late nineteenth and twentieth century, 4 million women, especially young single women, emigrated from Ireland to various countries including The United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (Hayes and Urquhart 159). Donald Harman Akenson, author of “Women and the Irish Diaspora: The Great Unknown,” describes categories of fleeing women, which include: Young widows with children, married women with children, couples with no children, dependent females who were not yet marriageable, single women who can marry, women and unmarried women who were not able to marry (Akenson 162). Despite Akenson’s seemingly comprehensive conceptualization of Irish female immigrants, he fails to describe other dimensions of the emigrant as noted by Sharon Lambert, author of “Irish Women’s Emigration to England 1922-1960: The Lengthening of Family Ties.” These essays are discrepant when describing the experiences of Irish female emigrants, particularly in the categories of women who emigrated, their motivation for emigration, and their connection with family members following emigration. Regardless of these discrepancies, Lambert and Akenson agree that Irish female emigration was over sexualized.
The first discrepancy includes Akenson’s lack of mentioning unwed women and couples facing an unexpected pregnancy who were forced to emigrate for the sake of their families’ reputation. Lambert describes a study with the goal of determining women’s motivation to emigrate and in some of the documented stories, women cited that they emigrated to conceal pregnancies. In Irish society, sex was seen as taboo and women were not taught about sex, which caused some women to become pregnant without fully realizing their actions (Lambert 183). I...
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...ategory that emigrated from Ireland. This is a possible reason to account for their different approach to female immigration. Overall, though each of these readings depicts a sexualized view of Irish female independence they provide an image for the motivation behind female emigration.
Works Cited
Akenson, Donald. "Women and the Irish Diaspora: The Great Unknown" Trans. Array The Irish
Women's History Reader. London: Routledge, 2001. 161-167. Print.
Lambert, Sharon. "Irish Women’s Emigration to England 1922-1960: The Lengthening of
Family Tie." Trans. Array The Irish Women's History Reader. London: Routledge, 2001. 87-94. Print.
Ryan, Louise. "Sexualising emigration: Discourses of irish female emigration in the
1930s." Women's Studies International Forum. 25.1 (2004): n. page. Print.
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Johnson, James H. "The Context of Migration: The Example of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 3rd ser. 15 (1990): 259-76. JSTOR. Web. 26 Feb. 2012. http://www.jstor.org.>
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McCann et al. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994, 95-109).
... to Canada, however 70% of the emigrants did go to the U.S.A to work. The author states his facts on emigrants working in America as Ireland emigrants having no skills other than working in factories and on railroads. Women that could speak English obtained employment in America as servants of the rich. This article is a useful example in understanding the type of skills the Irish possessed after the emigration of the Irish to American and the jobs that the Irish obtained.