Bounty, Moderation, and Miracles: Women and Food in Narratives of the Great Famine

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the travel writer Arthur Young wrote in his celebrated A Tour in Ireland that, "The men dig turf and plant potatoes and work for their landlord, and the women pay the rent by spinning."¹ Young's observation was partly correct, but oversimplified, for it failed to recognize the full spectrum of Irish women's work. Although a division of labor did exist at the time, it was certainly not cast in stone. Further, women's various economic endeavors did more than "pay the rent"; it would have been more accurate to say that they were essential to survival.² When necessary, women not only cared for homes and children but also compacted dung, gathered turf, and set and dug potatoes along with the men.³ They wove, spun, tailored, and made nets. Some Irish women even begged to support their families.⁴ Women cooked, but they also produced and sold food, which brought in much-needed revenue to rural households. Rearing pigs and poultry and churning and selling butter were, in the main, women's work, and often lucrative.⁵

More important, women functioned at the intersection of food, gender, and status in nineteenth-century Ireland. Sources gleaned from traditional oral narratives and contemporary archival and published accounts showcase the complexity of Irish women's relationships with food—as well as with scarcity—during the period of the Famine and beyond. Such records disrupt the woman-as-victim trope that has dominated Famine representations and historiography, and suggest instead that during the crisis of the 1840s, some Irish women used their associations with food to not only feed their families, maintain communal ties, and uphold tradition, but also to lay claim to power and influence.

Food—its production, its consumption, the spaces associated with it, and the cultural practices surrounding it—held particular significance and meaning for Irish women, shaping their worldview and informing their day-to-day habitual behaviors and the ethics of their operating principles. Like other agricultural societies, prefamine Ireland was a place where women were central to "both keeping and reshaping cultural traditions through the food they produce[d]."⁶

Before the Famine, rural Irish women's labor and food practices were located primarily in the domestic sphere. "Home life in rural Ireland," Margaret Lynch-Brennan writes, "centered around the hearth, teinteán, with its floor-level turf (peat) fire that was never completely extinguished, a new fire being kindled every day from the embers of the old."⁷ Hubs of rural household work and activity, the kitchen and the hearth were the places and spaces where food was prepared; they signified not only nourishment and survival but also "the social life of the house."⁸ In these women's domains, wives and mothers managed the territories of the kitchen, oversaw food preparation, and attended to how food would be distributed. In this latter regard, they performed surprisingly well, for as K. H. Connell attests, their charges were "admirably nourished": in the sixty years before the Famine, the overall population doubled in size, largely as a result of the nourishing potato which, consumed with milk, amounted to the family's mainstay. An old Donegal man recalled of his boyhood in the 1870s that it was "spuds, morning, noon and night."⁹ In all likelihood, the one from whom the receiver got the praties was the woman of the house (bean a tí) upon whom it fell, along with her numerous additional chores, to ensure that her family and her guests were fed.

Of equal if not greater significance is the fact that to be hospitable was "an obligatory and integral part of social life in rural Ireland."¹⁰ The Irish hearthside was synonymous with hospitality, and again it was the woman of the house who was in charge.¹¹ The rural bean a tí bore the responsibility, both literally and figuratively, for keeping "the home fires burning."¹² E. Estyn Evans writes in the classic study Irish Folk Ways (1957) that when a...