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Sep 25, 2020 · The typical Irish woman immigrant settled in an East Coast city. In her search for employment, she almost invariably landed in domestic service--especially true of those who settled in New York. In 1860, for example, 94.5 percent of employed Irish women living in Kingston, New York, were domestic servants. 4. She was a very logical fit for such ...
Working Conditions. In the nineteenth century, most new immigrants were unskilled laborers. Many found jobs in the factories of New York City, Buffalo, and other cities around the state. Jobs were plentiful in the industrializing American economy, but the low pay, long hours and deplorable conditions fell far short of the immigrants ...
- The Importance of The Letter Home to The Irish
- Irish Women in 19th Century America
- The ‘Awful Lonesomeness’ of Domestic Service
- The Irish Women’s Letter Home
- ‘It Is We Who Are Really Paying The Rents Over There!’
- Chain Migration
- References
Why would the trans-Atlantic letter be more important for the Irish than for other nationalities? One reason was timing. Irish immigration to America peaked in the wake of the Great Famine that devastated the old country starting with the failure of the potato crop in the autumn of 1845. Over the next ten years, more than two million Irish fled Ire...
One of the ironies of nineteenth-century Irish immigration was that, on coming to America, the almost wholly rural Irish—scorned as “dirt diggers” and “bog trotters”—became city dwellers. Together with German newcomers, the Irish dominated immigrant arrivals through much of the nineteenth century. By 1870, the two groups represented a full 70 perce...
As for girls from other countries, few came unattached to husband or family, and cultural proscriptions discouraged them from living in strangers’ households. During the American Civil War, a travel writer observed, “vast numbers of Irish girls had found employment as servants in families.” The numbers were indeed vast, particularly in the largest ...
What can we say about the letters they wrote? The first thing to note is their sheer volume. As early as the 1830s, the Irish of New York alone were sending through Liverpool 300,000 letters per year.This was eleven times the number they received in return. When the Famine struck, the numbers rose dramatically. An American missionary touring the Ir...
If “all the many” remittances did not come from women, then most did. While men included money with their letters, women were singled out for contributing what one historian called “the lioness’ share” of money sent home, a portion estimated at 80 percent in 1861.No wonder then that one Protestant head of a Massachusetts household lamented what he ...
If money in the American letter was an eloquent argument for emigration, the enclosure of a prepaid ticket was even more persuasive. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, more than 40 percent of all remittances came in the form of prepaid tickets, and “American money” would pay for three-quarters of all Irish emigration. Historians have...
Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850-1900 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 162. Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Oxford, 1997), 136. Mark Wyman estimates that from one-quarter to one-third of all European migrants to the United States returned home permanently for the period 1880-193...
Between 1881 and 1924, two million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States, fleeing persecution and seeking freedom and economic opportunity. Some came from small, traditional shtetls, while others had already migrated to urban centers in Eastern Europe and encountered radical movements such as the Socialist Labor Bund.
Mar 13, 2019 · Activists formed the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903 as the first national association devoted to organizing women workers. Labor leaders Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Leonora O’Reilly, along with settlement workers Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, created the league of activists after the American Federation of Labor closed ranks and left ...
New-York Historical Society. May 9, 2019. in Women at the Center. All the Single Ladies: Women-Only Buildings in Early 20th-Century New York. Editor’s note: Back in March, historian Nina Harkrader joined us at the Center for Women’s History for a salon conversation based on her forthcoming book about women-only residential buildings in New ...
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May 2020. As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, we should also celebrate the major strides women have made in the labor market. Their entry into ...
