COMPARISION PAPER

Comparision Paper

Comparision Paper

In Erin's Daughters in America Hasia R. Diner (1983)draws attention to the fact that although women consistently and increasingly outnumbered men among nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to America-a circumstance which sets the Irish apart from every other immigrant group-historians of the Irish immigrant experience have focused almost exclusively upon the male minority. In remedying this neglect Dr Diner performs a service as invaluable as it is overdue. After describing women's social and economic status in nineteenth-century Ireland and analysing patterns of female migration between the Great Famine and 1900, she successively examines the economic adjustment of Irish immigrant women, their social problems, their family life, and their role in charitable organizations and religious orders. She shows that although Irish women were just as unskilled as their male counterparts they were able to gain a far more secure economic foothold in the United States because of their willingness to enter domestic service, an occupation which most native born women shunned. As late as 1900, three-fifths of all Irish- born women in the United States were domestic servants. Their relatively less arduous employment helped account for the remarkable reversal Dr Diner found, namely, that while in Ireland men generally survived their wives, Irish women in America came to outlive men by a considerable margin. An equally startling contrast was that although in the old country more boys than girls attended school, in America the reverse was true and moreover, female preponderance was greater in the higher grades. Migration seems to have significantly altered the relations between the sexes, with many male Irish immigrants losing their traditional status in the home. Even so, Dr Diner demonstrates the persistence of some characteristic Old World cultural patterns: the tendency, for example, for women to postpone or forego marriage and the maintenance of a strict gender separation in economic, social, and political activities. (Hasia 1983)

On some questions, however, Dr Diner is not entirely convincing. She treats Irish immigration as though it were exclusively Catholic and seems unaware that throughout the nineteenth century a substantial minority of Irish immigrants, male and female, were Ulster Protestants. Nor does she seem to realize that in the west of Ireland, the source of most female immigration, a knowledge of English was by no means universal. (Hasia 1983)

Then again, although Dr Diner claims that Irish women made greater economic and social progress than the women of other ethnic groups, she produces no comparative data to support such a conclusion. And while complaining that mobility studies which show that the Irish lagged behind native-born and other immigrant groups are based almost exclusively on census-data relating to male heads of household, she fails to show or even to enquire how her findings modify the picture. But despite these shortcomings this is still an important contribution to the study of Irish immigration.

Humbert S. Nelli's earlier books The Italians in Chicago (1970) and The Business; of Crime (1976) established his reputation as a leading interpreter of the Italian immigrant experience in the United ...