MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
Latest editorial
Eye-opening account of Irish women's exodus to Britain
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Moving Histories: Irish Women’s Emigration to Britain, from Independence to Republic
by Jennifer Redmond
(Liverpool University Press, £24.95)
MORE Irish women than Irishmen have over the years emigrated from Ireland and, in this new history from the 1920s to the 1950s, Jennifer Redmond uses an important array of new sources — culled from newspapers, archives, oral histories, statistics and personal accounts — to tell their story.
The Irish Constitution of 1922 enshrined religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens but it also lauded the “traditional” Irish woman as wife and mother and not the feisty women of the Irish Citizen Army or the Suffragettes.
After independence, women emigrants outnumbered men and in the immediate post-WWII period and the 1920s, more than eight out of 10 went to the US. But after the latter brought in restrictions, by the 1930s virtually all went to Britain. In the north of Ireland these figures were reversed, perhaps reflecting more job opportunities for women.
Similar stories
TOM GALLAHUE argues that asking what role Irish diaspora educators can play in shaping Irish unity is to ask a deeper question about democracy itself
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
The independent TD’s campaign has put important issues like Irish reunification and military neutrality at the heart of the political conversation, argues SEAN MacBRADAIGH
Corbyn and Sultana’s ‘Your Party’ represents the first attempt at mass socialist organisation since the CPGB’s formation in 1921, argues DYLAN MURPHY