A complicated mortal who performed the “miracle” of abortion, the Brigid some pray to as a saint would be locked up in some US states now and still criminalised here in Ireland if her miracle didn’t adhere to arbitrary limits.
What do we understand of the complex lives of Irish women who have been criminalised? Particularly those who left Ireland to eke out a future across the Atlantic, only to be labelled “Bad Bridget” or “Drunken Kitty”, dragged through courthouses and jails.
Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women, a new book by historians Leanne McCormick and Elaine Farrell, reclaims the namesake, shedding light on the untold experiences of generations of Irish women imprisoned in North America from 1838-1918, who saw “their American Dream become a nightmare”.
The project was first shared through a podcast, with McCormick and Farrell bringing extensive research on the criminalisation of women, joined by the brilliant wit of Derry Girls star Siobhan McSweeney.
The “worst woman on earth”, as The New York Times described Lizzie Halliday, travelled over from Co Antrim as a child, becoming the first woman sentenced to execution by electric chair in the US, though she was given an insanity plea. Her sixth husband was found buried under the floorboards of their house.
At the heart of this riveting book, though, are insightful glimpses into the lives of Irish women who were criminalised for trying to survive, pickpockets and sex workers called “stargazers”, who built up communities and raised families, who escaped harsh reality through drink and divilment, who sang in streets and laughed in the face of authorities despite untold trauma, mocking systems that attempted to control them. Gems of detail are gleaned from years of trawling through court records, news reports and personal letters criss-crossing the Atlantic.
At a time when more than five and a half million Irish migrants crossed the Atlantic, women from Ireland were often the largest ethnic group in prisons across North America, outnumbering Irish men at times when it came to arrests. Irish women made up around 60pc of the female population in Toronto Jail between 1860 and 1881.
Many made the journey from Ireland alone, during times of famine and hardship, the sexual assault faced on the journey rarely spoken about. They worked, often as servants, to send money home. Remittances amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, made off the backs of many female workers.
When civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was awarded the key to New York City in the 1960s, she gave it to the Black Panthers, saying “the people who knew about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans”, who said “exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home.”
Those who climbed the social ladder in the “new world” swept stories of criminalised migrant women under the carpet, the Bad Bridget project tells us, sometimes by Irish Americans who use their heritage to deny racism and support policies criminalising migrant communities today.
Irish migrant women carved out a future through hard work, often work that was criminalised. Migrant women in Ireland today are being arrested for “brothel keeping”, simply for working together to keep each other safe, as many Irish women did in the U.S. to get by.
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Bad Bridgets got their own justice against abusive employers, who were unlikely to be held accountable, stealing their mistress’s luxurious coat and bonnets when their own were withheld to prevent them leaving.
Irish women and their children were judged in eugenic terms, with The New York Times reporting in 1874 that “a more unhealthy, feeble, pithless class of people” could not be found. But they also benefited from their whiteness, hiding their nationality because of discrimination faced as migrants. Little Women author Louisa May Alcott fired her Irish servant Biddy because the “faults of her race seem to be unconquerable”.
A deeply unequal society vilified these Irish women. Police were lavished with stocks from financiers, buying protection for their own wheeling and dealing. The wealthy rarely faced harsh sentences, with kleptomania among middle class women, while Bad Bridgets who broke the law to survive were locked away as an existential threat to social order. At the time, “women’s drinking was feared to cause the degeneration of society through the breakdown of domestic order”. Irish girls as young as 10 and women as old as 80 were imprisoned repeatedly for being drunk. In 1868, 10-year-old Irish girl Bridget Goulding was imprisoned for being drunk and disorderly in Toronto Gaol, where another 10-year-old girl was sent on her 10th arrest.
The prison system is shown to enforce respectability politics and patriarchy. Parents and husbands had daughters and wives imprisoned for acting out of their control. Ellen Nagle was one of many young women and girls at the advent of the 20th century who were arrested for the offence of “stubborness”, which the writers highlight was often a punishment for “perceived or threatened sexual immorality”, for being “wayward”, “incorrigible”, “willfully disobedient”, and “in danger of becoming morally depraved”, at a time when dance halls and department stores were seen as corrupting forces.
In the decades leading to De Valera enforcing a nation of “comely maidens” through a theocratic constitution, with thousands of “fallen” women incarcerated in religious institutions, Irish families were already disowning their daughters for becoming sex workers across the Atlantic, with one writing that they wished her dead, but would accept her being institutionalised for life, because she had “disgraced” them.
Criminalisation worsened struggles with addiction among Irish migrant women, who often drank to ease trauma and loss. The Bad Bridget writers note that religious and charitable authorities condemned these women, while the “possibility that taking children away from their mothers might encourage, rather than discourage, alcohol consumption was not often considered.”
Mothers separated from children described heartbreak that made them feel as if they would go insane, while forced to internalise the idea that they were “bad” women. Decades after their separation, the daughter of one Irish woman in the U.S. wrote to the Boston Globe searching for her mother, whom she was taken from by authorities as a baby. What of the migrant women separated from children and criminalised today? The project reminds us that the story doesn’t end with the lives documented through this book:
“Though much has changed since the days of the Bad Bridgets, some of these women still face some of the issues and prejudices we struggled with.”
