Love, Sweat, and Tears: Irish Women's Survival Strategies and the Resilience of the Irish Community

It is often thought that the Great Famine and the subsequent migration to America facilitated the severing of family ties among the Irish.  Popular perceptions, aided by the work of some historians, envision Irish immigrant families as disintegrating in the face of abject poverty, prejudice, and rampant epidemics in the slums. The most vulnerable group among these immigrants was thought to be female-headed households. If Irish immigrants did, in fact, constitute a mass of disorganized, unattached individuals fighting for raw survival in the ‘alienating’ environment of New Orleans, a port city, then manifestations of this situation, such as the lack of family connections or family loyalty, should be evident.  However, my research shows that this was not the case.  Rather, the evidence points to the need not only to re-evaluate the traditional presentation of Irish immigrant family life in the antebellum period, but also more specifically, that of female headed-households (FHH).                      

This talk outlines how demographic reconstructions of neighbourhoods and comprehensive analyses of household compositions can demonstrate the existence of stable households as well as varieties of family structures with closely knit family ties within the spatial framework of a maturing ethnic community. FHH comprised only a surprisingly small portion of these households, and the women employed pro-active coping mechanism in order to keep the family together, often with the assistance of other FHH.