Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women.

A lively and entertaining, if also at times incredibly sobering, read, Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women provides a richly evocative account of the experiences of Irish female emigrants who found themselves on the wrong side of the law in nineteenth-century North America. One of the central outputs of the AHRC-funded project led by Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918, which also produced an engaging and informative podcast, the book presents the culmination of years of archival research yet retains a light touch throughout. Indeed, as befits Penguin Sandycove’s more popular than academic audience, Bad Bridget deftly handles its archival material to create a remarkably accessible social history.    

The book begins with the by now familiar historical phenomenon of nineteenth-century Irish immigration to North America and the associated stereotyping of the Irish in their adopted communities. Noting the common usage of the name ‘Bridget’ in contemporary discourse to identify all Irish female emigrants to North America, Farrell and McCormick outline the dichotomous associations of this name – ‘pure and chaste’ St. Brigid, on the one hand, and her ‘blundering, drunken, quick-tempered’ counterpart, ‘Bridget McBruiser’, on the other (6). It is with the latter that Bad Bridget principally concerns itself, although the authors are quick to point out that neither stereotype accurately captures the reality of Irish women in North America or their lived experiences there. 

With ten chapters focusing on various crimes, including prostitution, drunkenness, child neglect, and murder, Bad Bridget structures itself around a series of detailed vignettes of individual Irish women, like Marion Canning, Ellen Nagle, and Carrie Jones. Their stories are supplemented by those of other Irish women who also appear in the records and who evidence the varied engagement with crime by Irish-born girls and women in North America. The evidence of their lives makes clear, as the authors argue, that ‘there is no singular Bad Bridget’ (10). The book’s case study approach prioritises the voices and experiences of the women themselves, highlighting the often dire social, economic, and familial circumstances in which they found themselves as well as their frequent resourcefulness in dealing with these circumstances. At the same time, it forefronts the discrimination these women faced and their oppression by prejudice, by Puritanical notions of propriety, and by those around them.

Particularly compelling – if also difficult to read – is the account in chapters two and three of unwed mothers who, for a multitude of reasons, either abandoned or murdered their babies, and mothers who struggled to care for their children. Farrell and McCormick observe that the bulk of Irish women emigrating from Ireland in the nineteenth century were unmarried. When they reached North America, many felt a sexual freedom they had not experienced at home; others were raped or subjected to sexual assault and abuse; still others arrived already pregnant, seeking escape from the shame and consequences of an extramarital pregnancy in Ireland. Many of these women found life as an unmarried emigrant mother untenable, however, and they turned to illegal abortions, desertion, infanticide, and adoption as alternatives. Rosie Quinn – the key case study of chapter two – was tried and found guilty of murdering her three-week old baby, having been reportedly turned away from a foundling hospital and in despair over her future as an unmarried mother.  

Other mothers who chose to raise their children often faced conditions of desperate want as well as the censorious judgement and unwelcome intervention of authorities. With married Irish women emigrants to North America likely to have five or six children compared to the two or three of native married women, as per the 1910 US Census, their chances of coming under the radar of social services were high, particularly when they were functioning as single parent units (70). Work demands and poor living conditions, amongst other things, resulted in high infant mortality, accusations of neglect, and the frequent forcible removal of children at the hands of newly professionalised child protection services. This was the experience of Annie Young, the focus of chapter three, who ultimately returned home to Ireland without her daughter, Marie, and wrote plaintively from Sligo expressing a desire ‘to know my little girl’ and feeling ‘very much uneasy about her’ (78). As an adult, Marie placed ads in local Boston newspapers searching for her birth mother and, while it is uncertain what response she received, the authors conclude that ‘[i]t is unlikely that Annie Young ever saw or heard her plea’ (83).  

The affective nature of Annie Young’s story as well as that of Rosie Quinn and the other women documented in these chapters is heightened by the banality of their experiences. The historical sleuthing performed by the authors and by which the voices of so many previously occluded women might be heard emphasises their shared conditions of hardship and discrimination, as well as the stringent, gendered notions of morality by which their behaviour was judged. While this was not peculiar to North America or to emigrant life – we have only to think of the Magdalene Laundries to find countless parallels for Annie Young in Ireland – it underlines the real risks of immigration, even when undertaken for the sake of opportunity, and contradicts what Farrell and McCormick call ‘[t]he dominant narrative of Irish emigration to North America [which] focuses on those who came from humble beginnings in Ireland and made a better life for themselves’ (5).  

Nevertheless, as later chapters in the book highlight, Irish women were frequently able to capitalise on the prospects afforded by a new life and a new identity (or several) in the expansive territories of North America. This was the case for career criminals such as Margaret Brown, or ‘Old Mother Hubbard’, Elizabeth Dillon, and Annie Reilly, amongst others, whose stories are told in chapter seven. When caught and taken into custody, many Irish female thieves and petty criminals found themselves subjected to bigoted behaviour driven by contemporary racial and ethnic hierarchies in which Irishness was sometimes equated to Blackness. Yet, as chapter nine makes clear, this association could never be a direct equivalence, and Irish women had an advantage in their whiteness, one that allowed them to ‘conceal [their] heritage in a way that a Black woman could not’ (213). More than that, the examples of Irish emigrant women like Ida King, who rejected her sister, Stella, for marrying a Black man, evidence their implication in prevailing racist perceptions and treatment of North America’s Black populations. 

Much more could be said about the stories told – and the lives consequently, if virtually, resurrected – in these pages. Suffice it to say, however, that this is a valuable work of social history that offers a vibrant reconstruction of a familiar terrain – Irish immigration to North America – from a fresh and enlightening perspective, that of Irish female criminals.   

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Christina Morin is Senior Lecturer in English and Assistant Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick. She is the author of The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018) and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011), and has co-edited a special issue of the Irish University Review on ‘Irish Gothic Studies Today’ (2023; with Ellen Scheible) as well as the collections Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Marguérite Corporaal, 2017) and Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions (with Niall Gillespie, 2014).