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Women and the Irish Diaspora
Breda Gray
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Women and the Irish Diaspora
Breda Gray
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Women and the Irish Diaspora looks at the changing nature of national and cultural belonging both among women who have left Ireland and those who remain. It identifies new ways of thinking about Irish modernity by looking specifically at women's lives and their experiences of migration and diaspora. Based on original research with Irish women both in Ireland and in England, this book explores how questions of mobility and stasis are recast along gender, class, racial and generational lines. Through analyses of representations of 'the strong Irish mother', migrant women, 'the global Irish family' and celebrity culture, Breda Gray further unravels some of the complex relationships between femininity and Irish modernity(ies).
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1 âWomenâ, the diaspora and Irish modernity(ies)
Theories of modernity tend to assume that it is a âculture neutral operationâ in which reason, industrialisation and increased mobility transform all cultures (Taylor 2000: 365). In most of these theories âdevelopmentâ takes place through modernisation and âtraditionâ is displaced by urbanisation, industrialisation and the rise of scientific reason (ibid.). However, instead of displacing tradition, modernity produces it. This is because tradition only gains meaning as âtraditionâ through discourses of modernisation and change (Gibbons 1996). Neither can tradition be understood as unchanged remnants of the past in the modern because, like modernity, tradition is continually changing and taking on new meanings and significance (Benjamin 1973; Gilroy 1993a; Felski 1995). Instead of being the opposite of modernity, tradition is integral to it and is unevenly transmitted from the past and reimagined in the present (Gilroy 1993a). Although described as linear, progressive and liberatory, modernity brings with it contradictory social, political and cultural effects, often characterised as the âcondition of modernityâ (McCarthy, C. 2000). One effect of the progressive and modernising drive of modernity is its perceived threat to the familiar, which produces a sensibility of dislocation and ambiguity (Berman 1983).1 Home and belonging are rendered unstable in the conditions of modernity (see Chapter 4), so that the displaced and ambiguous subjectivity associated with migrancy is often posited as emblematic of modern subjectivity (Chambers 1994; Rapport and Dawson 1998).
Practices and institutions of modernity such as industrialisation, urbanisation and state craft have different histories, conditions of emergence and effects in different parts of the world (and even in different parts of the same country) so that instead of speaking of modernity, it may be more accurate to speak of multiple modernities. For example, in different modern societies, traditions and religious practice persist in diverse configurations alongside modernising forces and are often sustained by these forces. The question is how these different constellations of practices and relations to time might be thought in ways that do not constitute some as âbelatedâ (Felski 2000). Rita Felski argues that âwomenâs access to specific forms of modern subject- hood is indeed âbelatedâ precisely because they are constituted as such via the distinctly modern notion of separate spheres which renders it difficult for women to participate in public life (ibid.: 26).
Sociological accounts of modernity tend to rely on male exemplary figures and practices that are based on an autonomous male individual âfree of familial and communal tiesâ, while women are aligned with the domestic and with those aspects of tradition that the ânewly autonomous and self-defining subject must seek to transcendâ (Felski 1995: 2). Yet, the relationship between the feminine and modern cannot be understood purely in terms of the positioning of women as belated, marginal or absent because women appear unevenly and in contradictory ways in the self-understanding of modernity (Felski 2000; Lowe and Lloyd 1997). For example, the figures and practices of âthe Irish motherâ and âIrish woman migrantâ pervade twentieth-century Irish modernity and are exemplary of the contradictory interpellations and desires that have structured modern Irish subjectivities in the twentieth century. The focus here is less on filling the gaps and more on considering how the feminine and the positioning of women operate interrogatively in the discourses of Irish modernity(ies) (Wolff 2000: 47). The multiple, uneven and contradictory ways in which Irish women are constituted in the narratives of Irish modernity are examined alongside how their own narratives redefine it be revealing the multiple times, spaces and disavowed differences and similarities that mark it. Their narratives cast womenâs lives at the centre of the (ambivalent) discourses that constitute Irish modernity(ies).
The modern temporality of the ânewâ, which constantly reasserts itself against much of the evidence, is often figured in gendered terms. For example, the trope of the family figures a ânaturalâ division of gender and legitimates different notions of progress and the ânewâ (McClintock 1993). While âmen come to represent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalismâs progressive revolutionary principle of discontinuityâ, women become âthe atavistic and authentic âbodyâ of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and natural), embodying nationalismâs conservative principle of continuityâ (ibid.: 66). But gender does not always operate in such a clear-cut way as an organising metaphor for temporality in modernity. The âModern Girlâ in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s became a symbol of emancipation, progress and potential that challenged associations of Irish women with the rural, modesty and the home (Ryan 1998). Also, Irish feminists at the turn of the twentieth century and into the 1920s used modern narratives of progress to position women as agents of history and to challenge the meanings of categories of citizenship, equality, liberty and revolution (Ryan 1994; Valiulis 1995; Ward 1983).
Feminists, as Rita Felski argues, have represented themselves as liberatory agents of the ânewâ in ways that affirm modern chronological ideas of development and linear notions of time and often use modern metaphors of revolution and evolution to describe processes of social change (1995: 147). However, in recent years, feminists have critiqued these metaphors as instating a âmale-centered lineage of political modernityâ (ibid.: 148). By positioning themselves as liberatory agents of âthe newâ, feminists, as well as making visible their contribution to modernity, potentially reproduce it within its own terms. At the same time, feminist theory and feminist activism have identified the deeply contradictory rhetoric of modernity based on the complex experiences of women and how they are positioned in relation to âthe oldâ and âthe newâ, the âtraditionalâ and the âmodernâ. Although theorists like Walter Benjamin (1973), Marshall Berman (1983), Ajun Appadurai (1996) and Paul Gilroy (1993a; 2000) have in different ways, at different times and in different contexts, elucidated the multi-temporality of modernity, feminists have revealed the ways in which those aspects of modernity that are often represented as the positive and liberatory have in fact contributed to the subordination and marginalisation of some women. For example, the focus of much feminist thought and action has been on womenâs access to the public sphere as a means of individual and collective liberation. Although access has increased for many women, it has brought with it new practices of gender/sexual regulation and subordination often in and through discourses of womenâs liberation. Feminism is, therefore, both caught up with the logic of modernity as a thrust towards the ânewâ and liberatory, and central to revealing its multi-temporality and the operation of the ânewâ and liberatory as a regulatory cultural ideal.
Although traditionally associated with the time-space of the nation, by the end of the twentieth century modernity was increasingly being located in the more fluid times-spaces of the global and represented by metaphors of âliquidityâ and âscapesâ of mobility (Bauman 2000; Appadurai 1996). As the global gains significance as a framework for social life, so social theorists argue that new forms of sociality are emerging based on flows and mobilities. This emphasis on flows and mobilities is one effect of the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial, informational world that is also characterised as âmulticulturalâ (Featherstone and Lash 1995; see Chapters 3 and 6). Globalisation, seen by some as modernisation theory in disguise, began in and emanates from the West and is identified by some as a theory of Westernisation (Pieterse 1995). Jan Nederveen Pieterse tries to get around the problem of Eurocentrism in discussions of modernity and the global by suggesting âmultiplepaths to modernisationâ (ibid.: 48).
The idea of global modernity acknowledges the extent to which âthe globalâ has become the imagined context of action. Also, the placing of global and modernity together emphasises what Giddens (1991) identifies as the inherently globalising properties of modernity. Roland Robertson traces the shift to a consciousness of the world as a single place and to discourses of globality that refigure subjective and cultural matters including notions of âhomeâ, âcommunityâ and âlocalityâ within the context of the global (1992 and 1995). The local or national is not seen as in opposition or as a counterpoint to the global but as inflected by a global consciousness, discourses of globality and practices of mobility. The shift towards analyses of modernity as global represents an attempt to account for greater access to and velocity of mobility in the West at least. I argue that global modernity was emerging as a dominant mode of modernity in Ireland and in some elements of the diaspora in the late twentieth century. The social imagining of time, space and history that marked the âsolidâ, territorialised modernity of mid-twentieth-century Ireland was being displaced, to some extent at least, by more fluid notions of sociality marked by deterritorialised relations and an increasing consciousness of the global. My main concern is to investigate, through the accounts of migrant and non-migrant women, how these practices and formations are gendered and the implications for feminist politics. However, it is necessary at this stage to locate the categories âIrish womenâ and âthe Irish diasporaâ within a framework of Irish modernity(ies). My aim in the following section is to identify the significance of domesticity, the âIrish game of sexualityâ and womenâs migration in reproducing Irish modernity and modern Irish women subjects. In order to achieve this I examine how the ideology of the Irish Catholic family and domesticity2 has shaped Irish modernisation.
The Irish game of sexuality on âcontrolledâ and âglobalisedâ modernities
As noted in the introductory chapter, specific practices and technologies of the domestic, sexuality and migration produced âregimes of truthâ that constituted the category âIrish womenâ in certain circumscribed ways.3 A âcontrolled modernityâ (Wills 2001) developed in Ireland from the mid- nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, which positioned Irish women as nurturing, asexual mothers firmly located in the realm of the home and the domestic. Rural Irish womenâs lives until the 1970s were associated with unremitting hard work, subordination to men on small farms and oppression by the Catholic Church so that emigration was seen as holding the promise of liberation from a sterile country (for an alternative view, see Bourke 1993).4 With large numbers of young single women emigrating, the Catholic clergy identified emigration to British and US cities as threatening womenâs moral well being, religion and national identity (Ryan 2001).5 By the end of the twentieth century, traces of this âcontrolled modernityâ remained, but a global Irish modernity was gaining ground and producing new icons and practices of Irish femininity. Public discourses of migration, at first glance, seemed less gendered than in the past. Young women as well as men were being constructed as mobile and career-oriented âyoung (Irish) Europeansâ. Global Irish modernity is gendered in less obvious ways than the âcontrolled modernityâ of early twentieth-century Ireland. Although some work has been done on questions of women and modernity, the gendering of the modern as global has received much less critical feminist attention. This chapter traces the gendered formations of Irish modernity in the twentieth century as a basis for discussion of how global Irish modernity is gendered in the womenâs accounts discussed in subsequent chapters.
The dominance of agriculture in the Irish economy until the 1970s reproduced an economic imperative to maintain the small farm âregardless of the cost to individual family membersâ (Kennedy 2001: 5). Those practices central to the modernisation of Irish agriculture from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century such as postponed marriage, celibacy and migration were negotiated within families (Inglis 1998a). Irelandâs economic âprogressâ in this period can be seen as having increased familial obligation and communal loyalty rather than promoting individualism or self-expression (Miller 1993).6 A bourgeois nation-building project based on rural oriented economic imperatives provided the impetus for the promotion and circulation of an asexual family-centred ideology of Irish society (McCullagh 1991; see also Kennedy 2001). This ideology naturalised social inequalities and helped to manage the tensions and injustices within and between families brought about by the inheritance system, the exploitation of family labour by parents and, perhaps most emotively, by emigration (McCullagh 1991). The stem family inheritance system, with one son inheriting the entire farm, meant that other family members, particularly single daughters, were forced to emigrate. Because emigration was âan enforced requirement rather than a free choiceâ it was âa potential source of resentment and tensionâ (McCullagh 1991: 206).7 The government Commission on Emigration and other Population Problems, which reported in 1954, emphasised the lack of socio-economic infrastructure in rural Ireland to keep women there, but did not recommend changes to the stem family inheritance system.8 The accounts of women taking part in this study testify to the intra-family tensions, classed and gendered selves that familial negotiations of migration continue to produce (see Chapter 4).
Modern notions of progress, hygiene and domesticity were integral to the bourgeois Irish stem family and, by the end of the nineteenth century, were promoted by both the Catholic and Protestant Churches, although a Catholic nationalist ideology predominated (Wills 2001). The âdomestication of Irish societyâ, Clair Wills argues, was driven by social mobility and an alliance between Protestant middle-class and official Catholic nationalism around âthe need for the âpurificationâ of lower-class cultureâ (ibid.: 44). Redefinitions of womenâs domesticity identified the status of wife and mother as modernisers (Abu-Lughod 1998). Based on notions of scientific management, the home became the âorderly household of the modern nationâ and the site where children were reared and trained as the future citizens (ibid.: 1998: 9). It was in the home that nation building and a politics of modernity came together to position women as the âcivilisersâ of future generations. Bourgeois sexual norms were enforced by devaluing partnerships other than marriage and by policing womenâs reputations. The professionalisation of housewifery represented a means of drafting women into the project of raising citizens and reproducing bourgeois ideals, with womenâs public personas being interpreted by their effectiveness as housewives and mothers in the private sphere. Discourses of scientific domesticity, although confirming womenâs place in the home, also gave them âa quasi-professional statusâ (ibid.: 12) paving the way into the professions of nursing and teaching for Irish women in Ireland and in the diaspora.
While the ideal of domesticity was encouraged across Europe (Beaumont 1999; Clear 2000; McClintock 1995), in Ireland the concomitant ideal of privacy, which is understood as constitutive of the modern bourgeois individual, was discouraged (Wills 2001). The disavowal in Ireland of modern individualism based on free choice of marriage partners, privacy in sexual practices, romance, pleasure and desire, was based on the perceived threat to the stem family system, social duty and the continuity of land settlement (ibid.). So the reproduction of a territorially rooted, land-obsessed Irish culture relied on an attempted suppression of individualism, companionate marriage and the overt expression of sexual desire. Companionate marriage, in which the individual can expose and work on a sense of individual self, is seen as central to the development of the liberal individual (Taylor 1989 in Wills 2001). Yet, as Wills notes, different sites of familial intimacy, such as intimacy between siblings and other familial relations (identified by Scheper Hughes in her controversial West Kerry study in the mid-1970s) may (albeit via different dynamics) also contribute to the development of the individual self.
Paul Gilroy suggests that âthere are two private spheres rather than oneâ; the space of sexual intimacy is identified as a profane privacy while the relationship between parents and children constitutes the other more âwholesomeâ site of intimacy (2000: 189).9 Of course one could add relationships between siblings as another âwholesomeâ site of privacy and intimacy. Following Gilroyâs argument with regard to black identity, these âwholesome and profane privaciesâ can be seen as competing loci in which the meanings of Irish identity were established (ibid.). Indeed, it could be argued tha...