By Charlotte Rich
Published in Women's History Review, January 2026.
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Abstract

After the Great Famine (1845-1852), Irish women migrated to cities near and far, encountering new challenges like managing childbirth without their traditional communities while living in overcrowded urban housing. Some poor Irish women turned to institutions like workhouses and lying-in hospitals as spaces for giving birth. This article examines how poor Irish women chose where to give birth and compares the strategies they deployed to gain admission to two urban institutions: the South Dublin Union workhouse and the New York Asylum for Lying-In Women. While Irish workhouses only allowed ‘destitute,’ unmarried women to enter the institution alone, the Lying-In Asylum in New York required patients to be ‘respectable’ and married. To contend with locally contingent and differential admission restrictions, I argue that Irish women developed ‘scripts’ for performing qualities like respectability or destitution based on the specific entry requirements of a given institution. As they emigrated, they adapted these scripts to each local and institutional context, showing transnational dimensions of collaboration between Irish women. Even while emigration and shifts towards institutional childbirth led to the loss of many birthing traditions, Irish women asserted their own agency and carried strategies abroad in order to create the best possible conditions for childbirth.