Women And Irish Diaspora Identities

Bringing together leading authorities on Irish women and migration, this book offers a significant reassessment of the place of women in the Irish diaspora. It compares Irish women across the globe over the last two centuries, setting this research in the context of recent theoretical developments in the study of diaspora. This collection demonstrates the important role played by women in the construction of Irish diasporic identities, assessing Irish women’s experience in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. This book develops a conversation between other locations of the Irish diaspora and the dominant story about the USA and, in the process, emphasises the complexity and heterogeneity of Irish diasporan locations and experiences. This interdisciplinary collection, featuring chapters by Breda Gray, Louise Ryan and Bronwen Walter, will appeal to scholars and students of the Irish diaspora and women’s migration.

Bringing together leading authorities on Irish women and migration, this book offers a significant reassessment of women's place in the Irish diaspora. It compares Irish women across the globe over the last two centuries, setting this research in the context of recent theoretical developments in the study of diaspora. This collection demonstrates the important role played by women in the construction of Irish diasporic identities, assessing Irish women's experience in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. This book develops a conversation between other locations of the Irish diaspora and the dominant story about the USA and, in the process, emphasises the complexity and heterogeneity of Irish diasporan locations and experiences. This interdisciplinary collection, featuring chapters by Breda Gray, Louise Ryan and Bronwen Walter, will appeal to scholars and students of the Irish diaspora and women's migration.

Based on original research with Irish women both at home and in England, this book explores how questions of mobility and stasis are recast along gender, class, racial and generational lines.

Notions of diaspora are central to contemporary debates about 'race', ethnicity, identity and nationalism. Yet the Irish diaspora, one of the oldest and largest, is often excluded on the grounds of 'whiteness'. Outsiders Inside explores the themes of displacement and the meanings of home for these women and their descendants. Juxtaposing the visibility of Irish women in the United States with their marginalization in Britain, Bronwen Walter challenges linear notions of migration and assimilation by demonstrating that two forms of identification can be held simultaneously. In an age when the Northern Ireland peace process is rapidly changing global perceptions of Irishness, Outsiders Inside moves the empirical study of the Irish diaspora out of the 'ghetto' of Irish Studies and into the mainstream, challenging theorists and policy-makers to pay attention to the issue of white diversity.

Based on their oral testimonies, this book explores the attraction to religious life and experiences therein of over forty Irish nuns. Chiefly, it is a book about identity and an exploration of the ways in which religious women articulate a sense of self. Their accounts provide a means of investigating the disadvantaged position of women in Ireland during a particular period and the decisions some women made in response. Interpreting them as legitimate but overlooked stories of migration, the book probes the wider theme of social change in Ireland and productively explores the interrelationship of gender, religion, and diaspora, casting light on Irish culture and its neglected histories. Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad engages with several current debates surrounding Irishness, Irish womanhood, diaspora, and identity. Informed by a wide variety of methodological approaches and transcultural perspectives, it is truly interdisciplinary and makes a significant contribution not only to the study of Irish and Irish women's history but sociology, (Irish) cultural studies, post-colonial studies, feminist theory, and women's studies more generally. It will be directly relevant to modern Irish women's history study, Irish sociology courses, and courses exploring Irish and general em/im/migration. In addition, because of the methodology employed, it will prove useful to qualitative research methods and oral history courses.

At the turn of the twentieth century women played a key role in debates about the nature of the Irish nation. Examining women's participation in nationalist and rural reform groups, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of Irish identity in the prelude to revolution and how it was shaped by women.

For significant periods, the majority of Irish emigrants were women. This volume begins with an introduction which explores the connections between women's studies and Irish studies, and includes a women's history reinterpretation of the myths of the Wild Geese. Five chapters on the 19th century look at the motivations and work experiences of women emigrants to the United States, emigration schemes involving Irish pauper women, the experiences of Catholic and Protestant Irish women in Liverpool, and at female-headed households.

Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

Using an interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework this book examines the cultural, material, and symbolic articulations of Irish migration relationships from the medieval period through to the contemporary post-Celtic Tiger era. With attention to people’s different uses of social space, relationships with and memories of the landscape, as well as their symbolic expressions of diasporic identity, Heritage, Diaspora and the Consumption of Culture examines the different forms of diaspora over time and contributes to contemporary debates on home, foreignness, globalization and consumption. By examining various movements of people into and out of Ireland, the book explores how expressions of cultural capital and symbolic power have changed over time in the Irish collective imagination, shedding light on the ways in which Ireland is represented and Irish culture consumed and materialized overseas. Arranged around the themes of home and location, identity and material culture, and global culture and consumption, this collection brings together the work of scholars from the UK, Ireland, Europe, the US and Canada, to explore the ways in which the processes of movement affect the people’s negotiation and contestation of concepts of identity, the local and the global. As such, it will appeal to scholars working in fields such as sociology, politics, cultural studies, history and archaeology, with interests in migration, gender studies, diasporic identities, heritage and material culture.