(April) 2011 - Irish Genealogical Website International

________________________________________________________________ Women in Irish Culture
numbers of women from Ireland in need
of their services. Unlike most other ethnic
groups, at least as many women as men
emigrated from Ireland after the famine.
In a country where the Know Nothing
political party was afoot promoting anti-
Catholic, anti-Irish sentiment, where Irish
immigrants were often treated with disdain
at best, the nuns were regarded as a blessing
of the first order. They accomplished a great
deal for many of them “...were formidable
personalities who brooked no nonsense
from God or man” providing the Irish with
physical assistance, education to equip them
for employment, and “...a sense of their
own dignity and their own rights.” 4 The
Sisters of Mercy brought education and
training to young women, not to prepare
them for marriage and life as homemakers
particularly, but rather to help them survive
economically. They reasoned that “...unless
women could support themselves and live
in dignity, their souls were in danger.” 5
In rural Indiana, Jane’s family had no Irish
nuns to remind them of their value, dignity
and worth. They were fortunate if a priest
came to visit once a month. But nonetheless,
they clung to the Roman Catholic church
like a lifeline. Irish-born men and women
traveled for miles to meet in each other’s
homes until proper churches could be built.
For women, the church community was the
place where they could find a social center,
a place where they could feel safe and truly
welcomed. In the 1860s, Jane met her future
husband at just such a church gathering.
Robert Enright, the son of Matthew Enright
and Ann James, had also emigrated with his
family from Ireland in 1851. Weavers from
north Kerry, they had fled the famine to
Indiana and had found jobs on the “public
works,” the network of canals that served as
transportation highways until overtaken by
the railroads in the 1860s.
As canal workers, Jane’s husband Robert
and his family had joined the thousands
of Irish men and women who lived and
worked along the canal routes. Low pay
Irish Genealogical Society International
Author’s grandmother, Mary Alice Enright
McClain (1871-1950), Jane’s eldest daughter,
in her “lace curtain” finery, 1896. Photo
courtesy of Colleen McClain.
and brutally hard work did not deter the
Irish from doing whatever it took to gain a
foothold in their new home. Women took
in laundry and lodgers and provided homecooked
meals to the exhausted canal crews.
Robert’s mother, Ann James, and his sister,
Ellen Enright, must have told Jane stories of
their experiences in that difficult life. Canal
workers were infamous for their feisty, some
would say rowdy behavior. Both women
and men stood up for their rights as canal
bosses pitted rival groups against each other
in the competition for jobs. Not only men,
but the women too, defended their right to
work on the canal and fought anyone who
threatened to deprive them of the only jobs
available to most of them. 6
An eyewitness account from a private
letter written in 1851 by a passenger
traveling on the Wabash-Erie Canal
in Indiana illustrates how surprised
most Americans were to encounter
such aggressive defense of their rights,
especially by the Irish women:
Last night just after I had retired we
reached a village, and pretty soon
after the boat had stopped I heard
loud talking and swearing. More and
more voices joined in, a good many of
them unmistakably Hibernian. Then
there were cries and shouts, a gun or a
pistol shot off, then a pandemonium. A
terrible fight was going on at the wharf.
There were twenty or thirty drunken
men, laborers on some public work,
and they were fighting, the Irish against
the Americans. I never was so terribly
frightened. You may be sure I was glad
when the boat began to move along.
What seemed terrible to me was that
there were women all mixed up in the
row, and they swore horribly! 7
While the Irish women who entered the
fray, brawling and swearing when their
family’s livelihood was threatened, may
have helped gain a toehold in the economic
fabric of America, they did little to inspire
acceptance by most Americans. But Irish
women continued to pour into the ports
of America after the famine, many of them
young single women, some as young as
14, looking for work as domestic servants.
These women were “independent, feisty
survivors” who continued the traditions of
their mothers and grandmothers by using
their income to help their families survive.
By the 1880s when famine again threatened
Ireland, the wages of women working as
domestic servants in America helped sustain
their families back home. 8
As live-in maids, these women quickly
learned what it took to gain some sort of
grudging acceptance from Americans. Like
their relatives in post-famine Ireland, they
shied away from early marriage or any kind
of premarital sexual dalliance practicing
what some have called a “grim puritanism.”
As part of a society intent on post-famine
survival, Irish women could be counted on to
practice celibacy and exercise the discipline
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