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.