Abstract
Almost coinciding with the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger economic story of success, recent decades have witnessed how politicians, scholars, and writers started to vindicate the contributions of the Irish diaspora and, by extension, those of Irish emigrant women in the construction of Mother Ireland. The chapter attempts to illustrate how the contemporary Irish short story written during these years was depicting disheartening or happy-ending stories about emigration, exile, and return, being at times regressive in its outlooks, and at times setting the stories of their heroines in the here and now. Here, due to the readings of these creative works, a more nuanced picture of Irish women's emigration is offered and this goes beyond the conceptualizations of those women who left the Irish shores as vulnerable, ignorant, poor, pregnant, or sexually deviant, while the phenomenon of immigration itself is understood in relation to variables such as class, age, education, nationality, and religion.
TopIntroduction1
Nowadays, it has become almost a cliché to say that women were ‘invisible’ in the past or that they have been ‘written out’ of (male) history” (Cullen, 1985, p. 254) no matter the subject under consideration. It would be wrong, however, to consider Ireland to be a special case for the way women were marginalized, pigeonholed into specific roles, and erased from the historical records. Emigration, indeed, is one of those issues where the historical erasure of Irish women persists, and where “[their] experiences are peripheral or completely ignored in many general accounts of migration and the Irish diaspora” (Redmond, 2018, pp. 2–3). Those previously involved in the study of this connection created between migratory movements and community, culture, identity, and place have done this while neglecting gender’s dimensions and ignoring in this way the uniqueness of each experience when dealing with the phenomenon. Current studies on Irish women and international migration (Gray, 2004; MacPherson & Hickman, 2014; Nolan, 1989, O’Sullivan, 1997; Walter, 2002) attempt to shed some light on the complex reasons that motivated women’s incessant exodus from the Irish shores to different parts of the world, such as Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Here, there is a questioning of the historical erasure women were and still are victims of or their secondary role in the phenomenon despite equating and surpassing at many historical stages men’s numbers. When represented,
Women have featured, albeit intermittently, in writings about Irish emigration long before historians – inspired by second-wave feminism – began to focus their scholarly efforts in that direction. However in the past Irish women emigrants were commonly found in the records of poorhouses, charities, or in censorious accounts depicting poverty or a lifestyle deemed unacceptable to the norms of respectable womanhood, bare-breasted, drunken, brawling, slatternly women. (Daly, 2016, p. 19).
What is more, apart from being depicted in a male world, historical information and data available present women’s lives that are frequently narrated in relation to the men surrounding these women, or where the latter are not active protagonists. Within this frame, the conceptualization of womanhood works on several layers, and their reading in history is hindered as “often women are not allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. … Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives” (Andrei & Hughes, 2016, para. 10). Therefore, the discourse on women’s emigration is gender-biased, because it is surrounded by assumptions according to which they only traveled abroad to join their male relatives or couples, and motivated to take this step only for economic reasons (Gregory & DeLaet, 1999, p. xv). As a consequence, many of the available accounts on women’s experiences of migration are incomplete and they might lack veracity on the grounds that they occlude and omit the wide variety of reasons which stood behind departures, the real circumstances in which the emigration processes took place and the role of these women in the construction of the mother nation-state Ireland and their host societies.
Nowadays, “over seventy million people worldwide, more than half of them women, claim an Irish identity, but of these only five million live on the island of Ireland” (Walter, 2002, p. 1). What these figures reflect is the scattering of the Irish population for the last two centuries and the magnitude of the event of Irish women’s emigration. Because of this, the concept of Ireland as a dispersed nation is a factor which must be considered and revalued, as emigration had and still has a direct influence on identity creation, in both national and diasporic citizens, in Ireland’s inventions (Kiberd, 1995) and reinventions (Kirby, Gibbons & Cronin, 2002).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Great Famine: The Hunger or An Drochshaol was the period from 1845 to 1852 when Ireland faced mass starvation and disease. The famine threw the Irish population into despair and produced a critical and unprecedented situation. There is a wide and very popular vision of the famine as being responsible not only for the demographic changes experienced by Ireland during the nineteenth century but for the economic, political, social and cultural watershed that followed the catastrophe, to the extent that historians talk about two well-differentiated Modern Irelands: Pre-Famine Ireland and Post-Famine Ireland.
de Valera’s Ireland: The period from 1959 to 1973 of the history of Ireland with Éamon de Valera serving as president. Following an autarchic economic model and an isolationist policy, and counting on the support of the Catholic Church, Ireland was to be shaped as a model for the entire world, as a country with devout, loving, chaste, modest and simple citizens who would excel in respecting the Word of God and His teachings, while rejecting any type of materialistic aspirations or carnal gratifications, considered sources of embarrassment, guilt, temptation, sin and impurity.
Celtic Tiger and Post-Celtic Tiger Short Stories: The short stories written between 1995 until today.
Celtic Tiger Ireland: A period also known as the Celtic Tiger, the Boom, or Ireland’s Economic Miracle. It represents years of unprecedented economic growth, excessive consumerism, and socio-cultural openness lasting from 1995 until approximately 2007, a date coinciding with the Global Recession.
Angel of the House: A collocation inspired by Coventry Patmore’s eulogy of the same name. The term was further coined to represent the very image of the ideal Victorian wife and mother, who dedicated her entire existence to adoring her husband and children and looking after their spiritual and physical well-being. This type of woman was characterized by having a rather passive role, and a life that revolved around social engagements, housekeeping, child-rearing, religion, and philanthropy.