In our ever-increasing list of boundary crossings we find two significant representations
of them, and their influence on Irish-American history in Hasia Diner's Erin's Daughters in America. The first is best shown
in the contrast between Deirdre of the Sorrows wanton advance on Noisiu in the Tain, and the acceptance of rigid gender
separation and strict sexual mores in post-Hunger Ireland and Irish-America. The Catholic Church is the primary antagonist in this
devolution of sexual interrelations as we learned in The Serpent and The Goddess. A barrier initially crossed by the Celtic
warrior culture, but soon buttressed by the Church in order to maintain this male hegemony. Secondly, and in regards to Diner's
spin more importantly, is the barrier not crossed by Irish women, largely the economic power in Irish-American communities,
the male world of politics and the waiting hands of the suffragette movement.
The effectiveness, with which the Church dimmed the fire Gaels of old carried about in their loins, shows most tellingly in the
gender separation so rampant after the Great Hunger. Hasia Diner suggests this sprang form the infected soil of the Great Hunger,
but it is obvious that the issue of rigid sexual mores and gender separation goes further back, lying squarely somewhere in the
Church's skeleton closet. The segregation into separate spheres of activity is reflective of the division between matrifocal and
patrifocal shown as milk/kin and blood/king in Condren, appearing as home/church and pub/pollbox in Diner. The psychiatrists
Oplar and Singer suggest a correlation between male schizophrenia and female dominated families. Diner suggests two of the
reasons contributing to this situation in America are "... the father no longer exerted the same degree of authority connected with
the transfer of land" And he "...lost the power associated with the transfer of skills and expertise." This alienation from the power
he so firmly held in his pre-immigration existence leaves him little alternative but to succor himself a stool at the nearest pub,
inevitably exacerbating the family's economic situation. If as Andrew Greeley asserts, the "forceful Irish matriarch exists in
America" than it is no wonder that the papers were filled with depictions of the desperate plight between the sexes within the
framework of Irish family patterns.
In the title Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics we are given three distinct paths by which the Irish dealt with these
gender/sexual dichotomies. In the first the Saints we see those who embrace the cloister and achieve the segregation through
celibacy. The Scholars as represented by Irish women schoolteachers, achieve the separation by embracing the typically celibate
life of a career in Education. This leaves the bulk of Irish immigrants Schizophrenia, where the inherent illogic of this gender
segregation appears as destructive spousal relationships. "Observers of all kinds stressed the extremely high level of tension in the
Irish homes of urban America which sparked into domestic discord and ignited into violence with striking frequency." As Padraig
pointed out the confessional made effective emotional communication between the sexes a barrier no to be straddled, a boundary
not to be crossed. How far from Deirdre's exclamation of desire the Gael has plummeted in their 'submission to the ecclesiastical
authorities'.
The primary reason for the immigration from Ireland to America was economic survival. In America it was the women of Ireland,
not their male counterparts who received the better end of the bargain. Men migrated largely due to the single inheritance system
implemented to deliver the Irish Catholics out of Ireland and open up the land for cattle grazing as we saw in Paddy's Lament.
Women on the other hand either immigrated to achieve an economic stability they had little chance of at home or they were intent
on their family's survival by escaping impoverishment. "Irish women migrated not as depressed survivors of Famine, in the main
they made the journey with optimism, in a forward-looking assessment that the could achieve a status they never could at home."
This optimism was to be a boon in America, insuring their economic advance, yet the foundation remains an objectification and
commodification. of the feminine.
To view women as an economic commodity is the inevitable outcome of centuries of denigration at the hands of the Church. It
painful to see Irish women as so much cattle in regards to marital contracts; the profaning of a sacred symbol used in matrifocal
cultures worldwide. It is economics in the lack of a dowry, which forces so many colleens to immigrate to attain this promise of
'liberation' in America, an economic freedom which the British refused to allow in Ireland. In a trashing of the Victorian model of
feminine passivity Irish women aggressively asserted themselves in the marketplace whether it was to pick and choose their rate
of pay and contract in domestic service jobs or organizing labor unions for garment workers and teachers. In the latter they
mirrored the efforts of Connolly and Markievicz to elevate the place of the working masses in Erin and internationally.
It is a shame they were unable to make the same 'salmon leap' and embrace the suffragettes in America, which their sisters had
done in Erin. It would have reversed centuries of male oppression at the hands of kings and priests. As Lucy Stone said in 1888,
"We know that whatever tends to broaden women's minds and to interest them in public affairs renders them less blindly
submissive to ecclesiastical influence." As Diner points out it is a historic irony that these strong-minded Hibernian women could
not see in the feminist ideas of the 'new woman' a corollary to their own goals for economic parity and security. This can be seen
specifically in the equal-pay for equal work desired in teachers and textiles unions, and the addressing of spousal abuse, desertion,
and widowhood which went along with Irish marriages through the activities of sisterhoods and charity societies.
In conclusion one problem I had with the Diner's work revolved around the derogatory stereotyping of the Irish. It is difficult to tell
whether she is sincerely sympathetic to the Irish for the sake of the Irish, or if the feminist perspective is her primary focus. Every
time she mentioned 'semian' in relation to Irish men, Cornelius, Zera and their human changeling from the movie Planet of the
Apes came into my head. The first hundred pages of the text are sonorous sociology, redeemed only when we get to the
anti-suffragette colleens and their fallen/pure sisters. Her note on source section though gives a good description of a method to
incorporate multiple field sources in a historical analysis.