Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

Abstract

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.

Keywords:

• personal lives
• memories
• life stories
• secrets
• embeddedness
• connectedness

Notes

 1. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America (1983). Other examples include Pauline Jackson, ‘Women in Nineteenth Century Irish Emigration’ (1984); Lynn H. Lees, Exiles of Erin (1979); and Robert E. Kennedy, The Irish (1973).

 2. Irish Women : Our Experience of Emigration (1984).

 3. O'Carroll, Models for Movers.

 4. Conway, The Faraway Hills are Green.

 5. Oral histories of Irish women in the USA were used by Janet Nolan in Ourselves Alone (1989) to supplement an account which drew primarily on ‘raw numerical data gathered from Irish and American census and emigration reports, as well as … the more literary evidence found in emigrant letters and oral histories’, arguing that ‘like the proverbial picture, numbers speak more loudly than words’ (7). She used examples from the Connecticut Oral History Project (Irish Interviews, 1–26 May 1975, Center for Oral History, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT).

 6. For example, in the path-breaking work of Thomas and Znaniecki whose The Polish Peasant in Europe and America was first published in 1918–21, and in C. Wright Mills's classic study The Sociological Imagination (1959).

 7. Harrison, ‘Editor's Introduction: Researching Lives’, xxiv.

 8. Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire.

 9. Ryan, ‘I'm Going to England’.

10. Ryan, ‘Moving Spaces’, 69–70.

11. Lennon, McAdam, and O'Brien, Introduction to Across the Water.

12. Ibid., 9.

13. Bryman, Social Research Methods, 393.

14. Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, 15.

15. Ryan, ‘I'm Going to England’, 42.

16. Harte, ‘“Somewhere beyond England and Ireland”’, 293.

17. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 27.

18. Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, ix.

19. Olsen and Shopes, ‘Crossing Boundaries’.

20. Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 7.

21. Ibid., 8.

22. Lennon, McAdam, and O'Brien, Across the Water, 11, emphasis added.

23. Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography, 4.

24. Lennon, McAdam, and O'Brien, Across the Water, 14.

25. See Bourdieu, Photography, for a discussion of the social functions of family photography.

26. Gilsenan, Roberts, and Walsh, The Irish Empire.

27. A parallel may be drawn here between the placing of the volume in the middle of the series and the location of Irish Women and Irish Migration (1995) in the middle of Patrick O'Sullivan's ‘The Irish Worldwide’ series of printed volumes, signifying its acceptance as a legitimate field of representation (McWilliams, Women and Exile). This contrasts with the furore about, and very belated inclusion of, a volume of women's writing in the Field Day collection (Bourke et al.).

28. As academic adviser, I had suggested key themes for the programme. In her proposed ‘treatment’ the director Dearbhla Walsh decided ‘to tell the untold stories of the female experience of emigration and place these in their social, economic and historical contexts’ (unpublished research document, 27 July 1998).

29. Smart, Personal Life, 17–26.

30. The thesis is expounded by Giddens, Transformation of Intimacy; Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity; and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization; see Ray, Individualisation and the Third Age.

31. Smart, Personal Life, 1.

32. Ibid., 3.

33. Ibid., 45.

34. Gray, ‘“Too Close for Comfort”’, 45.

35. Ibid., original emphasis.

36. Smart, Personal Lives, 37.

37. Harte, The Literature of the Irish in Britain, xvi.

38. Morrison, Things My Mother Never Told Me.

39. Harte, ‘“Somewhere beyond England and Ireland”’, 293.

40. Morrison, Things My Mother Never Told Me, 12.

41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Walters (accessed 14 June 2012); ‘Brit Actress and Comedienne’, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0910278/ (accessed 14 June 2012).

42. Walters, That's Another Story.

43. The General Household Survey 1974–1996/97 showed that 76.4% of the second generation in England and Wales had one non-Irish-born parent. Hickman, Morgan, and Walter, Second-generation Irish People, 14.

44. Described on Wikipedia as ‘an English novelist, short story writer and critic’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel (accessed 21 July 2012).

45. Mantel, Giving up the Ghost, 36.

46. Ibid., 152.

47. http://literature.britishcouncil.org/hilary-mantel (accessed 21 July 2012).

48. ‘Tales of Belonging’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/07/britishidentity.immigration (accessed 21 July 2012).

49. Guardian, 7 April 2008.

50. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/series/otherlives (accessed 15 June 2012).

51. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jul/04/bridget-moran-obituary (accessed 21 July 2012). Another example is Sheila Finch, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/sep/22/tradeunions (accessed 18 August 2012).

52. Walter, ‘Including the Irish’.

53. Szalwinska, The Sunday Times, 24 September 2011.

54. Purves, Review of Grief, 13.

55. Smart, Personal Life, 108.

56. Ibid., 112–20.

57. See detailed analysis of the issue of PFIs (Pregnant from Ireland) by Garrett, Social Work and Irish People in Britain, 21–51.

58. Buckley, ‘Sitting on your Politics’, 122.

59. The Irish 2 Project, ‘The Second-generation Irish: A Hidden Population in Multi-ethnic Britain’, was funded by an ESRC grant (R000238367), and directed by Professor Bronwen Walter. Co-researchers were Professor Mary J. Hickman, Dr Joseph Bradley, and Dr Sarah Morgan. Fieldwork locations were Banbury, Coventry, London and Manchester in England, and Strathclyde in Scotland.

60. Banbury Citizen , 1 December 2000, 1.

61. The man in question was given a pseudonym which reflected his ‘English-sounding’ name from his adoptive parents.

62. Guardian, ‘Family’ section, 31 December 2011, 7.

63. Clare Flowers, personal communication, 2 March 2011.

64. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/1996/oct/17/labour.uk (accessed 21 July 2012).

65. Sixsmith, ‘No More Guilty Secret’.

66. Kellaway, ‘Loyal Hunt of the Son’; Cooke, ‘Mummies Dearest’; Palmer, Review of Mother Country .

67. Merritt, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.

68. McGregor, personal communication, 18 August 2008, emphasis added.

69. Lambert, Irish Women in Lancashire, 4–6.

70. See, for example, Ryan, ‘Moving Spaces and Changing Places’, 69:

Most of the 11 women had initially become involved in the study through an advertisement in the Irish Post. Thus they were largely self-selected and, although they represent a range of experiences and backgrounds, I cannot claim that they accurately reflect the diversity of all Irish women migrants.

71. For example, Ryan, Migrant Women, Social Networks and Motherhood, 300:

I recruited the [25] participants through advertisements in Irish newspapers in Britain, the Irish Post and Irish World, through Irish organizations such as the Federation of Irish societies and snow balling. I sought older participants who had migrated as single, childless women and who subsequently became mothers in Britain.

72. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 124.

73. There are many more examples, of course, of characters in novels who emigrated from Ireland because they were pregnant outside marriage, a number of which are discussed by Ellen McWilliams in chapter 1 of Women and Exile (2013).

74. For example, Rachael Flynn, ‘Points of Departure’.

75. For example, Sarah Strong, The Rian Art Project.

76. For example, Lambkin and Meegan, ‘The Fabric of Memory’.