In spite of Irish political leaders’ hopes of curtailing emigration in the decades after the foundation of the Irish Free State, emigration remained a constant of Irish life. While much has been written about twentieth-century Irish migration, as Jennifer Redmond observes in Moving Histories: Irish Women's Emigration to Britain from Independence to Republic, too many histories focus exclusively on the male experience. The life of the “Irish navvy,” the archetypal male economic migrant who loomed large in both the Irish and British cultural imagination, has too often been taken to represent the whole of the Irish immigrant experience in Britain, to the exclusion of the experiences, careers, and personal lives of Irish women who traveled across the Irish Sea.

In a well-researched and stimulating study, Redmond places Irish female migration at the center of the story of Irish emigration to Britain in the first half of the twentieth century and seeks “to demystify the female experience of migration to Britain” (3). She succeeds admirably in this goal, analyzing competing public and private discourses regarding the migration of Irish women from the establishment of the Free State in 1922 until the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1948.

Irish political and religious leaders condemned emigration as an unpatriotic act, akin to desertion of the Irish state. Particular odium was directed at Irish female migrants. The prominent place of women among Irish emigrants in Redmond's words “evoked lamentations, ire and at times sheer panic” (20). Indeed, the migration of Irish women to Britain was seen as a “double betrayal”: “depriving Ireland of families while populating another country” (132). Commentary in the Oireachtas (the legislature), the press, and religious tracts contended that in contrast to the best and brightest of Irish men, the “worst” Irish women were migrating (8). Redmond demonstrates the stark dichotomy between the often heated and negative public rhetoric regarding Irish female migration and the lives and experiences of Irish female migrants.

To the political leadership of both Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920s and Fianna Fáil in the 1930s, women constituted a cornerstone of nation building in independent Ireland. Irish women were considered “ideal homemakers, as evoked in the 1937 Constitution”; in contrast, women who traveled across the Irish Sea were manifestly seen as failing to fulfill that role (205). Furthermore, within this gendered discourse, Irish female migrants were regarded as particular vulnerable and unable to cope with the depravity and moral temptations that allegedly awaited them in Britain. Redmond identifies a “hyperbolic discourse” surrounding Irish female bodies, which depicted “female emigrants as young, foolish, inexperienced and perhaps seeking (mis)adventure through their migrations” (74, 80). In spite of a lack of evidence, Catholic welfare agencies, for example, regarded female migrations as under threat from “white slavery” in the interwar period (79).

The reality of Irish women's migration to Britain was “less salacious” and “more mundane,” as female migrants tended to embrace rather than reject traditional family roles. (8, 10) While Irish politicians and clerics feared that Irish women would marry Protestant Britons and lose their Catholic faith (a phenomenon popularly known as “leakage”), in reality most viewed Catholicism as an important component of their Irish identity. Whether through “genuine piety or continued cultural conformity” emigrants “did not radically alter their behavior across the water . . . exhibiting a lifelong dedication to the Church” (148, 159). In contrast to public fears, female migrants who left Ireland to hide an illegitimate pregnancy were in the minority, while more Irish women pursued the “‘normal’ route of courtship, marriage and then children” than became pregnant outside of marriage while working in Britain (116, 123).

Redmond foregrounds the historical reality that Irish female migrants, in common with most emigrants worldwide, left their homeland for economic reasons (189). Overall, Irish women found life in Britain to be “economically empowering” while also providing much greater opportunity for marriage than in Éire (231). While the majority worked as nurses or in domestic service, Irish women found employment in Britain in a range of fields. In contrast to Irish men, who clustered mainly in unskilled occupations, Irish women “experienced greater career mobility,” benefiting from a more diverse service sector in Britain that relied heavily on female labor, occupying white-collar positions that were unavailable to men, and taking advantage of training for specialized occupations, such as nursing, which was more readily available for women in England than it was in Ireland (170, 190). Redmond's research suggests that during the Second World War, Irish women's involvement in women's army auxiliaries, such as the Women's Land Army, was more extensive than previously supposed (221).

Moving Histories is based on wide-ranging research in over two dozen government and church archives and manuscript collections in Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as extensive consultation of newspapers, government statistics, and published print sources. Redmond's comprehensive bibliography is of great value to anyone seeking to research twentieth-century Irish migration. Although first-person testimonies from Irish female migrants are relatively scarce (Redmond notes her inability to solicit interviews with Irish women who had migrated to Britain), she makes good use of extant interviews and oral history collections.

One of the book's strengths is not only its exploration of the public and private lives of post-1922 Irish migrants, but also how it integrates the history of Irish women's migration to Britain into the history of the Irish Free State. In doing so, Redmond offers a challenge to Irish historical scholarship, which has too often “marginalized [women's] experiences to special chapters or fleeting references” (243). In the process, building on previous scholarship such as Mo Moulton's Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (2014), she also helps to illuminate how the histories of Britain and the Irish Free State remained intertwined after 1922.

Redmond notes that the lives of Irish female migrants in twentieth-century Britain are in need of more sustained investigation. Moving Histories provides a firm foundation for the further exploration of these expatriate Irish lives and how they continued to link Britain and Ireland.