Mad in Pursuit Notebook
Women: Irish Emigration's Bold Leading Edge
Originally written 17 Mar. 2005, updated 2 Jan 2025
No such thing as an Irish-American princess!
The Irish have a matriarchal society—the women are in charge.
I didn't need a book to tell me this but it's nice to have your observations validated.
I'm reading Irish America: Coming into Clover by Maureen Dezell, who compares the Irish-American mythology with the data.
Tin Pan Alley and Chauncey Olcott's sentimentalized songs about Irish mothers (see "Mother Machree") would have us believe that the ideal Irish woman was a meek carbon copy of the Blessed Mother.
Olcott's pop culture paeans to wide-eyed feminine duty and devotion captivated the American imagination in the early twentieth century. By that point, Irish-American womanhood had been honed by a generation of dauntless single women, immigrant widows, mother superiors, and superior mothers—any number of whom had more in common with the fearsome labor leader Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones than Mother Machree.
Social scientists describe Irish culture as matriarchal, and mothers hold considerable if not singular sway in Irish American families. Unmarried women command far more respect than in other ethnic groups. Irish girls are raised to be respectable, responsible, resilient—and rarely with any expectation that they're going to be taken care of. For better or worse, there is no such thing as an Irish American princess.
Dezell also makes the point that what distinguishes the Irish immigration was that it was largely female. By 1900, immigrants from European nations like Italy, Sweden, and Greece were dominated by men, who often returned to their native lands. But 60% or more of the Irish who emigrated to the United States were single women.
Irish women had enough of their repressive native culture. They picked up and they came to stay. Then they sent for their sisters.
I see this pattern in my own family.
🚢 Mary Gardiner (my GG2) came with her brother to New Orleans in the mid-1800s. When he died of yellow fever, instead of returning to Ireland, she made her way north to the boomtown of St. Louis.
🚢 Great-grandmothers Ellen Gibbons and Maggie Keville got off the boat in New York and kept heading west for Chicago and its new opportunities.
🚢 Grandmother Bridget Dunne was sent for by her sister and arrived in St. Louis ready to work for a rich Central West End family. Dezell describes her perfectly:
...the Irish servant girl was a sociocultural phenomenon. Tens of thousands of peasant farmers' daughters who had spent their lives in peat-heated cottages bid their families good-bye, sailed across the Atlantic in steerage, and months later were serving squab from Limoges china in Boston's Back Bay or polishing silver in Fifth Avenue homes.
Women who came over alone had no choice but to go to work. Domestic service was backbreaking labor but the Irish women were diligent. They saved their money, they sent for their sisters or supported their parents, and they contributed generously to the Catholic Church, which built a huge infrastructure of schools and social services agencies.
The side benefit was learning how to leave behind their culture of poverty.
Irish servant girls gleaned a sense of social currency along with the wages they earned in wealthy homes, learning what sort of books, music, and manners belonged in a respectable family's home—and, more significantly, just how much an American education could buy.
This was no secret. About the time Bridget Dunne was learning to cut crusts from delicate cucumber sandwiches, English immigrant Sarah Price had six handsome carpenter sons to marry off. My dad told me that her fondest hope was that each would marry an Irish girl trained in domestic service. Five of the six did just that. Her son Ernest married Bridget's sister Helen. Her son Walter married Bridget. And, yes, the women were in charge.
Return to Mad in Pursuit's Family History Hub for more facts and timelines.
All pages in this website by Susan Barrett Price are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.