Ourselves Alone by Janet A. Nolan

Author:Janet A. Nolan [Nolan, Janet A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Emigration & Immigration, Ethnic Studies, General, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780813183862
Google: oEooEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T04:21:28+00:00

. . . This girl was poor, she hadn’t a home,

Or a single thing she could call her own,

Drifting about in the saddest of lives

Doing odd jobs for other men’s wives,

As if for drudgery created,

Begging a crust from a woman she hated.

After bemoaning the fate of the poor servant, the song continues with her saga. Leaving service for marriage to an old but wealthy man, the former servant lives to rue her decision to seek security at all costs. The song concludes with this warning:

Is there living a girl who could grow fat

Tied to a traveling corpse like that

Who twice a year wouldn’t find a wish

To see what was she, flesh or fish

But dragged the clothes about his head

Like a wintry wind to a woman in bed?44

In addition, since the vast majority of the women leaving Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were unmarried and traveling without their families, they were more likely to be employed outside the home than were women in any other immigrant group in the United States. In 1900, while 73 percent of all Irish-born women in the United States had jobs outside the home, only 70 percent of the Scandinavian, 62 percent of the British, and 59 percent of the Italian female immigrants held paid positions in their new country in that year.45 For the Irish woman, emigration meant earnings. Though two-thirds of all women of working age in Ireland in 1901 had no wage-earning jobs, almost three-quarters of their sisters in the United States in 1900 were earning independent livelihoods.

High literacy rates among Irish female emigrants also helped these young women adjust to their new urban lives. Despite their status as unskilled servants, Irish women settling in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were more literate than were either their counterparts at home or the men and women in most other immigrant groups. Although only 86 percent of all the Irish and only 72 percent of the population of Connaught over age five could read and write in 1901, 97.4 percent of Irish immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1910 (more than half of whom were women from the west and southwest) could read and write in English. In fact, of the forty national groups counted by the U. S. government, only Scandinavian, British, Bohemian, and Moravian immigrants had higher literacy rates than did the Irish. Conversely, only one-quarter of the Jewish and only one-half of the southern Italian immigrants in those years were literate.46

High levels of both female literacy and employment abroad among Irish women during this period combined in the form of the all-important “letter from America.” Women’s work after emigration remained vital to the family economy and often made the difference between survival and destitution. By the 1890s over $5 million a year in the form of cash remittances sent by young women overseas maintained their families’ small, obsolete farms in rural Connaught and Munster.47 Farmers hoped to be “as rich as two Yankee letters,” and a woman remembered her childhood in the 1890s when “our horse died .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.