Earl Grey’s Irish Famine Orphans (96): early draft (2)?

Continuing from the previous post.

I now have a clearer idea of where these recently found scraps of paper came from; they date from the 1980s, as my interest in this particular area of research became more serious. Yet there’s no mention of my taking the subject out of the academy, and appealing to family historians for help.

Some of the scraps relate to my doubts about venturing into women’s history. I was obviously concerned about doing so. Brave? Stupid? Naive? Obstinate? This all seems apparent from what I jotted down.

 Here is a random selection of my jottings.

 ‘Women’s participation in the flight from Ireland in the 19^th century has not always been appreciated, or given the attention it deserves‘.

‘It may seem reasonable to assume that destitute young Irish females, victims of the Great Famine, inmates of Victorian workhouses, were among the wretched and oppressed of the earth. But it would be wrong to lump them all together indiscriminately as powerless and passive victims of patriarchal society’. From an early date, I was determined not to deny the famine orphans any agency.

‘Don’t start from an ‘a priori’ position, either forcing or distorting evidence to suit one’s ends, or failing to apply the canons of rigorous self-criticism’.

‘What was the structure of their oppression? Were they passive victims of government instrumentalities—selected, inspected, packed and freighted, indentured and apprenticed, and protected, by a succession of remarkably paternalistic bureaucrats’?

‘Patriarchal values formed part of their cultural background and instinctively some women reacted to the subjugation which these implied. Rebellious or so-called refractory behaviour in a workhouse, or on-board ship to Australia might be interpreted in such a light. Perhaps, too, the decision to emigrate’.

‘Yet however plausible the argument that disaffection with the patriarchal society in which they lived encouraged women to emigrate, there still remains the difficult distance between plausibility, and establishing that this was in fact so’.

‘19^th century Irish newspapers cast females in the classic Madonna-Whore mould. Female convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land were ‘pariahs of their sex, condemned of the law and outcasts of the world’. Female orphans were idealized innocents, ‘rosy-cheeked’, ‘smiling’ and laying claim ‘to that unparalleled beauty for which the daughters of Erin are so characteristic’. But on board ship these rosy-cheeked innocents became ‘the sport and prey of brutalized mariners’, and were led down the road to perdition.

‘But what do stereotypical and patronising attitudes shown towards women in newspapers tell us about the regard with which women were held in society at large anyway? Arguably, not a great deal’.

Do you, dear reader, ever use writing as a way of clarifying your thinking? I imagine that was what I was doing here.

If you have a glance at either of the Cambridge University repository links below, you’ll see how far away from https://earlgreysfamineorphans.wordpress.com the subject of my doctoral thesis was. (Not that i was a total newcomer to Irish history).

I am extremely pleased that so much good material is available on ‘open access’ nowadays. Combat misinformation however and whenever you can…even if my own interest in ‘Jacques Rohault and the history of natural philosophy’ might be a sure fire cure for your insomnia.

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/c6f88cf8-14be-48ed-8d42-04599888238f

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11460

I’ve come across a few more typed pages that date from around the same time as these scraps of paper. They deal with the question why so many Irish women left Ireland in the 19th century. I’ll share them with you in the next post. My experience with http://www.tintean.org.au has shown me that posts can, and should sometimes, be short.

…and could hear her saying, yet again, and very clearly, and so late in the day, that she’d changed her mind ...

(from Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day, Faber and Faber, 2023.)

P.S. A landmark commemoration of the Famine orphans will take place in Williamstown 19 November commencing at 2pm.

Disclaimer. ChatGPT is responsible for the description of this post.