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Why do people migrate? Some go for economic reasons, some to escape from political or religious conditions which they find intolerable, some from a desire for adventure, some for various other reasons, but the most important cause of all is economic. Emigrants go from countries with a lower standard of living to countries with a higher standard, or they go because their particular occupation is overcrowded and prospects in it are bad.
D. Tait Christie, ‘International Aspects of Migration’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 6.1 (1927), p. 37.Dramatic language was often used in newspaper reports on women’s employment prospects in Britain, evocative of the rhetorical titillation we observed in Chapter 3 over the menace of the white slave trade. It seems that many could not abjure the theatrics in discussing emigration, and simple, dispassionate observations such as that of D. Tait Christie of the International Labour Office (ILO), quoted above, were few and far between. This chapter juxtaposes public discourses and personal recollections in exploring women's emigration and employment. The predominance of Irish female immigrants in occupations such as domestic service and nursing is mirrored by a dearth of research on the spectrum of Irish women's working experiences. This chapter explores alternative sources of information to sketch a broader picture of female emigrant employment in Britain while recognising the primacy of these occupational groupings by mining new source material on both.
Delaney has cogently argued that emigration was undertaken within the context of knowledge on available options and opportunities, including economic ones, something that was not only rational but also entirely normal:
Individual decisions were taken within a broader economic, social, and cultural environment, as migrants were not insulated from the wider society: in simple terms, they were influenced by what other people were doing, saying, planning, and discussing. Leaving home was a shared response to the situation in which young people found themselves, and was far from being deviant or abnormal behaviour, as so often was assumed by politicians and civil servants.
Within this rhetoric by ‘politicians and civil servants’, among others, assumptions based on gender also emerged, with many recognising the legitimacy of male economic migration but denying such motives for women.
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