After the Great Famine (1845-1852), Irish women migrated to cities near and far, encountering new challenges like managing childbirth without their traditional communities while living in overcrowded urban housing. Some poor Irish women turned to institutions like workhouses and lying-in hospitals as spaces for giving birth. This article examines how poor Irish women chose where to give birth and compares the strategies they deployed to gain admission to two urban institutions: the South Dublin Union workhouse and the New York Asylum for Lying-In Women. While Irish workhouses only allowed 'destitute,' unmarried women to enter the institution alone, the Lying-In Asylum in New York required patients to be 'respectable' and married. To contend with locally contingent and differential admission restrictions, I argue that Irish women developed 'scripts' for performing qualities like respectability or destitution based on the specific entry requirements of a given institution. As they emigrated, they adapted these scripts to each local and institutional context, showing transnational dimensions of collaboration between Irish women. Even while emigration and shifts towards institutional childbirth led to the loss of many birthing traditions, Irish women asserted their own agency and carried strategies abroad in order to create the best possible conditions for childbirth.
Modern Ireland lacks a comprehensive history of maternal mortality. With the mid-twentieth century advent of what Northern Ireland's leading gynaecologist labelled 'a social obstetric conscience', maternal mortality came to increased levels of prominence. This coincided with the introduction of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 but reducing the rate of maternal mortality took decades in Northern Ireland (NI), with the decline being often slower than in other constituent parts of the United Kingdom (UK). This article collectively assesses successive government reports conducted into maternal mortality in Northern Ireland to gauge the medical profession's views of and approaches to maternal death. With a particular emphasis on factors that were deemed preventable, the impact of the National Health Service, the reduction in birthing options available to women, as well as habitual notions of female culpability encompassing expectant mothers, handywomen and midwives, are analysed for the first time in this period of Northern Ireland's history.
In 1925 the Medical Women's Federation (MWF) decided it was paramount to create a clinical picture of what menstruation 'should' be like for the average girl. The Federation joined forces with two other professional organisations, vastly expanding the scale and scope of their investigation. The research, which took the form of one large survey and one subsequent smaller survey, found a picture of a healthy and capable adolescent, for whom menstruation was rarely a significant problem. This was in stark contrast to the popular understanding of menstruation as physically and intellectually incapacitating. The surveys showed that menstrual 'disability' was often caused by a lack of education, and a lack of 'menstrual infrastructure'. They suggested that infrastructural and educational shifts were needed to enable girls to menstruate without shame and discomfort, only then could older ideas about menstruation as 'disabling' be disproven. The Federation used its growing cultural capital as a large group of medical women to perform this paradigm shifting research on a large scale, and went on to disseminate their findings to the medical profession and the wider public, lobbying for infrastructural changes.
This article examines how minority language status and gender shape the identities and experiences of women working in Irish language broadcasting in Ireland between the 1970s and 2020s. It considers how women negotiate the dual minoritisation of being minority language speakers and women working in broadcasting. Drawing on interviews with ten women, at different career stages, the article identifies three key themes. First, women benefitted from the expansion of Irish language broadcasting especially after the establishment of Irish language television in the 1990s, finding career paths outside of those commonly available to Irish speaking women. Second, women championed Irish language broadcasting, as it sustains Irish language communities. They saw the provision and funding of it as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion issue, more so than gender. Finally, some women were reluctant to suggest gender inequality in Irish language broadcasting but paradoxically relayed personal experiences of gender inequality especially as mothers in work, and structural issues related to gendered pay disparity. While the issues of pay disparity and women's care roles are prominent in scholarship on media work, there has, to date, been little examination of how gender intersects with minority group status in Ireland. This article addresses that gap.
This article analyses the networks that were developed by Irish-born women in colonial Australia as they approached childbirth in the 1860s. Although previous historical scholarship has concentrated on the distress and disadvantage that Irish women faced, this article suggests that instead, many of these women consciously established and accessed formal and informal support as they planned for their maternity care. This article uses two data sets from the Australian colony of Victoria to analyse Irish women and their networks of maternal care. One group of sources is narratives of birth attendants recorded through inquests into maternal deaths. While these testimonies of tragedy provide vivid detail of networks of care, they cover only a small number of births, so the records of the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital, a charity hospital serving the poor of inner-city Melbourne, are also analysed. These particularly complete hospital records, although they do not usually include lengthy narratives of births, do include information on a larger number of women than the inquests.
