Published
October 19, 1989. Have you ever thought about the
importance of women in American history? As a professor and student of marriage
and family life in the United States, I have always been intrigued with the
early emigrants and their patterns of migration to this country. Between 1820
and 1943, eight countries sent a total of 34 million people to America. They
were, in order of the highest numbers sent, Germany, Ireland, Great Britain,
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Canada and Sweden.
Eighteen other countries sent the
remaining 4 million emigrants, for a total of just over 38 million during the
123-year period.
People in America trying to locate
their ancestors may be interested in knowing that more than seven million Irish
people emigrated to the Unites States and Canada. In fact, the 1980 US Census
found that over 43 million Americans (19 percent) claimed Irish ancestry,
either wholly or in part.
The past few weeks, I have been
reading an interesting book titled “Erin’s Daughters in America” By Hasia R.
Diner. She has noted that the Irish emigration to America was comprised mostly
of single young men and women in their early 20s. In addition, the women
immigrants outnumbered the men. She wrote, “Beginning in the early 19th
century, the exodus from Ireland to the United States amounted to a virtual
tidal wave of human beings leaving one home and seeking another. That more than
half of these immigrants were women, that the migration constituted basically a
mass female movement, did not escape the notice of observers on either side of
the Atlantic. No other major group of immigrants in American history contained
so many women.”
“Among the Germans,” Diner noted, “a
group that arrived over the same span of years as the Irish, the women made up
41 percent of the total immigrant population whereas among the Irish, women
accounted for 52.9 percent. The contrast with other immigrants of the late 19th
and early 20th century presents an even more striking picture.
Southern Italian women, for example, comprised a mere 21 percent of migrants
from their homeland; in 1907, 13 percent of all Croatian arrivals were women;
and among Greeks only 4 percent of the newcomers were female. The only large
foreign-born immigrant population where men and women came in roughly equal
numbers were the Jewish emigrants, yet even here men still outnumbered women
slightly. Furthermore, a good portion of the new Jewish arrivals were children,
indicating that a large number of the immigrants were married and had brought
their young with them. The Irish immigrants were primarily still single women
and men. Only about 5 percent of all Irish immigrants were children, compared
with 28 percent of all Jewish immigrants.”
Hasia Diner also documents how Irish
women assisted each other in emigrating to America. She points out, “Much of
the migration occurred along female lines. Women brought over other women:
sisters brought sisters, aunts brought their nieces, cousins assisted one
another. In many cases migrating married couples set themselves up in the United
States under the auspices of the wife’s kin already here and settled near
them.”
“Women actively promoted migration
and traveled along what might be seen as female chains. They made the trips
together, they helped finance one another, and they met and greeted one
another. Although they certainly assisted male kin as well, particularly
brothers, the primary emphasis focused on their sisters and other female
relatives. Journeying to the United States to a sister, an aunt or a friend
became the typical pattern for Irish migrant women.”
If you think you are among the 19
percent of American who has Irish ancestry, you may be interested in reading
Hasia R. Diner’s book “Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in
the Nineteenth Century.” It was published in Baltimore by the Johns Hopkins
University Press in 1983.
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