Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 by Tara M. McCarthy (review)

Scholars of Irish America are a rare breed, and those who specialize in women even rarer. Within the field of history, for years only Hasia Diner’s study of immigrants, Erin’s Daughters in America (1983), and Janet Nolan’s history of teachers, Servants of the Poor (2004), represented Irish American women. But female historians are catching up. Maureen Fitzgerald’s Habits of Compassion (2006) traces the impact of Irish Catholic nuns on the New York welfare system, and Suellen Hoy’s award-winning Good Hearts (2007) looks at their legacy in Chicago. More recently, Margaret Lynch-Brennan renewed the focus on domestic service in The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840–1930 (2014).

In Respectability and Reform, Tara M. McCarthy draws on all of these works, as well as on an impressive array of autobiographies, periodicals, manuscript collections, newspaper articles, and original archival sources to fill another gap in Irish American women’s history: their roles as activists in promoting women’s rights to unionize and to vote, as well as their contributions to the movement for Irish nationalism in the Ladies’ Land League. The role of Irish American women in labor reform and suffragism is known to some, but the influence of the Land League is relatively unfamiliar. Yet McCarthy argues that this short-lived organization served as a “watershed for Irish American women’s participation in public life.”

The Ladies’ Land League became prominent in the 1880s. By the end of 1881, membership had grown to 17,000; by the 1890s, its members’ desire for a voice in the Irish American community not only forced other organizations to add women’s auxiliaries, but also introduced discussions of gender among American Catholics and expanded women’s educational and public roles. McCarthy introduces its leaders: Katharine O’Keefe O’Mahoney, a teacher who founded the first Ancient Order of Hibernians Ladies’ Auxiliary; Maria Dougherty, an unmarried milliner who led the Worcester Ladies’ Land League; and Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas, a populist orator who supported the Irish national movement and famously urged her followers to “raise less corn and more hell.” Involvement in these organizations incorporated working-class Irish women into the American reform tradition, opened up roles for women in the public arena, and exposed them to “larger debates about land reform, labor issues, and women’s rights.” Their involvement often led to clerical condemnation and threats of excommunication; nevertheless, they persisted.

Respectability and Reform is organized into three parts, each of which presents the Irish American women working in the labor reform, nationalist, and suffrage movements, respectively. Among women’s studies scholars and labor historians some of these names will be familiar, but not many; altogether, McCarthy introduces more than a hundred activists. At the same time, she illustrates the correlation between female labor leaders, nationalist organizers, and suffragists, for involvement in the first two groups inevitably led to the belief among Protestant and Catholic activists that suffrage was essential to protect women’s rights.

The first chapter establishes the reasons for Irish women’s large-scale emigration to America and their ubiquity in the workplace, a history that resonates in subsequent works by Irish and Irish American women writers. The tendency of young Irish American women to work as domestic servants recalls Maeve Brennan’s New Yorker stories, which mocked the cultural disconnect between upper-middle-class women and their Irish servants. In Industrial Valley (1938), Ruth McKenney exposed discrimination against immigrant women working in factories, while the preponderance of Irish American female teachers and their difficulties assimilating were humorously detailed in Myra Kelly’s short stories, Little Citizens (1904), The Humors of School Life (1904), Wards of Liberty (1907), and Little Aliens (1910). Mary Anne Sadlier’s numerous domestic novels published in the late nineteenth century supported priestly counsel to Irish American women to remain “pure and pious, domestic and submissive”; conversely...