Women, Forms of Exile and Diasporic Identities

Abstract

The last 30 years have seen an exponential growth in studies of diaspora and diasporic identity and, within this, there is an established body of work on the Irish diaspora, its history and cultural legacies. This chapter will survey these developments to set the scene for the author-based chapters that follow; it will pay special attention to the growing body of work on women and the Irish diaspora. The primary argument of the book is that a shift is discernible around the middle of the twentieth century: before that, representations of Irish emigration were largely, although not exclusively, male-centred, and the female figure demoted to an ancillary function in portrayals of the male emigrant experience; later in the century, this pattern is vigorously contested and the female experience becomes crucial, even defining in the work. Close attention to this work reveals that it speaks eloquently to some of the most pressing concerns of Irish feminism, and in some cases pre-empts many of the insights afforded by recent examinations of women in the Irish diaspora, and the larger field of Diaspora Studies. With that in mind, the later sections of this chapter offer my own, brief account of Irish female diasporic history; they do so with a view to building on feminist critiques of the history of woman as muse in the Irish literary tradition and, by association, the dilemma of the Irish woman writer who finds herself ‘outside history’, to borrow Eavan Boland’s phrase (1995, p. 123).