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Farmwives, Domesticity and Work in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2013

KATIE BARCLAY*
Affiliation:
ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5005, [email protected]

Abstract:

Despite the growing significance of the ideology of domesticity and changing farming practices, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish farmwives continued to have an active economic role on the farm. The continuation of their economic role reflected wider cultural beliefs that saw work as central to claims to property ownership, reinforced by the growth in the language of economic and political rights during the nineteenth century, which shaped how men and women understood work, ownership and personal rights.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

Notes

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69. ‘Matrimonial Court’, Irish Times, 21st January 1876, reports 200–250 acres; ‘Law Intelligence’, Freeman's Journal, 21st January 1876, reports 128 acres.

70. ‘Wife's Complaint’, Irish Times, 20th March 1922.

71. These disputes may have reflected not so much a genuine difference of social expectations between spouses, but an attempt to demean women by making them perform work below their status.

72. ‘Wexford Breach of Promise Case- 450 Love Letters’, Irish Times, 25th January 1892; ‘Alleged Breach of Promise of Marriage’, Irish Times, 22nd September 1880; Royal Commission on Labour. The Agricultural Labourer. Vol. IV. Ireland. Part IV (London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1893), p. 19.

73. Between 1901 and 1911, occupied single women fell by nine per cent, married women by two per cent and widows by twenty per cent. Bourke, Husbandry, pp. 34–7.

74. Bourke, Husbandry; C. Curtin and A. Varley, ‘Marginal Men? Bachelor Farmers in a West of Ireland Community’, in Curtin, Jackson and O'Connor, Gender in Irish Society, pp. 287–308; Breatnach, ‘Role of Women’.

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