The Women

Ireland was the only country in Europe that women left in the same numbers as men, and often in greater numbers, travelling alone and young.

Everywhere else in nineteenth century Europe emigration was a male business and the women followed later, as wives. In Ireland the daughters went first and went by themselves.

They were not running from Ireland. They were running from an arithmetic that had nothing in it for them.

1886. The daughters read the figures

A daughter on a western farm owned nothing and would inherit nothing. She could marry out if her family could raise a fortune for her, and one fortune came into a house in a generation.

If there was no fortune, she stayed and worked.

Against that, domestic service in America paid a wage, board and lodging, and needed no capital whatever. A girl needed the passage money and nothing else. Later the same road led into nursing, teaching and clerical work, and in Britain overwhelmingly into nursing.

So they went. Mayo sent 175 women abroad for every 100 men between 1886 and 1905, up from 120 in the previous decade.

A woman who left had a wage of her own by the end of the month. A woman who stayed had neither wage nor land, and no prospect of either.

A correction worth making

The usual explanation of the Irish bachelor is that the women all left and there was nobody to marry.

It is not right. Irish emigration was close to even by sex overall, which is why the numbers of men and women in the country stayed near parity. [1]

What was extraordinary was not that Irish women left in greater numbers than Irish men. It was that they left in greater numbers than women anywhere else in Europe, and that they left alone.

So the West did not run out of women. It ran out of ways to make a home. The two are not the same thing, and the difference matters, because one explanation blames the daughters and the other looks at the land.

1961. What the imbalance became

The imbalance is real at the far end of life even though it was not there at birth.

Across the whole state in 1926 there were 123 single men aged fifteen and over for every 100 single women.

In rural Ireland in 1961, among people aged forty five to fifty four, there were 244 single men for every 100 single women.

That figure does not measure who was born. It measures who was left. The women of that generation had married, or they had gone. The men had done neither.

1911. The sister who stayed

The woman who did not go and did not marry stayed in the house, and the census has a phrase for what she did there.

Farmer's daughter.

In one house in Port, County Donegal, in 1911, two unmarried sisters are returned that way, living with their married brother who is the head of the family and the farmer. They are grown women in middle life and the census records their occupation as being the daughters of a man who is dead.

That is the census term for unpaid family labour, and the state had a category for it: relatives assisting. She milked, she cooked, she carried water, she minded the old people and later the children, and she was paid nothing.

Her security rested entirely on her brother's goodwill, and after his marriage on his wife's.

The fieldwork of the 1930s recorded the shape of her day without much comment. The women rose first to rekindle the fire. They milked, and the reason given for that was that they had smaller hands. One remark made to a visiting researcher has survived: women, be silent while we are talking about ploughing. [2]

When a daughter did inherit

Where there was no son, a daughter inherited, and the whole arrangement turned over.

She became the holder, and the match reversed. The incoming man brought a fortune, or he brought nothing and married in.

A man who married into his wife's farm carried a particular and slightly diminished standing in the parish for the rest of his life. There was a word for it in most places and none of them were compliments.

Which tells its own story about how the land and the marriage were understood.

1935. The bar, stated as what it was

For women in salaried work there was a separate constraint, and it belongs here as employment policy and nothing more.

A bar on married women continuing in employment applied to women national school teachers from the early 1930s. It was lifted for teachers in 1958. In the civil service it was formalised by statute in 1935 and removed in 1973. Local authorities, health boards, semi-state bodies, banks and many private employers ran their own versions, some into the mid 1970s. [3]

The effect is simple to state. For a woman with a salary, marriage ended her income.

So a schoolteacher in a country town and a farmer's sister three miles away were both being told, by quite different arrangements, that marriage and a living were alternatives.

1973. What changed for them

The marriage bar went in 1973. The marriage rate reached its highest recorded level in the same year.

By then a woman could hold a wage and a husband at the same time, and a man no longer needed a farm to make a home. Those two facts arrived together, and the arrangement that had held the West for a century stopped working almost at once.

The women had been the first to see that it did not work. They had been leaving since the 1880s.