1 The study of women in history is also pursued in ‘mainstream’ subjects at Trinity College, as illustrated by the topics of student essays published by the Trinity History Workshop. All three volumes so far contain articles on women in history.

2 Messenger, Betty, Picking up the linen threads: a study in industrial folklore (Austin, Texas, 1975)Google Scholar.

3 Lowe, W.J., The Irish in mid-Victorian Lancashire: the shaping of a working-class community (New York, Bern, Frankfurt am Main and Paris, 1989), p. 10 Google Scholar.

4 Otherwise, provision of the dowry for the Out-going daughter would typically have preceded receipt of that for the incoming daughter-in-law by several years, so causing systematic financial disorganisation, inconsistent with conventional equilibrium-models of the match.

5 Kennedy, Robert E. Jr, The Irish: emigration, marriage and fertility (Berkeley, 1973), pp 66–85 Google Scholar; Cosgrove, Art (ed.), Marriage in Ireland (Dublin, 1985)Google Scholar. Several recent studies have examined Irish female emigration, applying often dubious assumptions about the condition of women in Ireland: Diner, Hasia R., Erin’s daughters in America: Irish immigrant women in the nineteenth century (Baltimore, 1983)Google Scholar; O’Carroll, Ide, Models for movers: Irish women’s emigration to America (Dublin, 1990)Google Scholar; Robinson, Portia, The women of Botany Bay: a reinterpretation of the role of women in the origins of Australian society (Sydney, 1988), pp 83–122 Google Scholar.

6 Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Was Ireland special?: recent writing on the Irish economy and society in the nineteenth century’ in Hist. Jn., xxxiii (1990), p. 176 Google Scholar.

7 Idem, ‘The modernisation of the Irish female’ in Patrick O’Flanagan, Paul Ferguson and Kevin Whelan (eds), Rural Ireland: modernisation and change, 1600-1900 (Cork, 1987), p. 169.

8 In this model, the dowry is analogous to the payment of ‘tenant right’, upon surrender of control, rather than to a capitalised rent-charge.

9 Stivers, Richard, A hair of the dog: Irish drinking and American stereotype (Philadelphia, 1976), ch. 5Google Scholar. Irish-American female alcoholism, while less pervasive than that of Irish-American men, was even more excessive when compared with that of other ethnic groups.

10 Messenger, John C., Inis Beag: isle of Ireland (New York, 1969), p. 15 Google Scholar; idem, ‘Sex and repression in an Irish folk community‘ in Donald S. Marshall and Robert C. Suggs (eds), Human sexual behaviour: variations in the ethnographic spectrum (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972), pp 13-14.

11 Arensberg, Conrad M. and Kimball, Solon T., Family and community, in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 203 Google Scholar; Humphreys, Alexander J., New Dubliners: urbanization and the Irish family (London, 1966), p. 103 Google Scholar.