In the last twenty years women’s history has emerged as a major field of scholarly inquiry. An extensive literature has accumulated on the history of women in western Europe and North America, and the contribution which women have made to many different aspects of western society has been rediscovered. New areas of study have been developed as the gender differences in men’s and women’s lives have been recognised and researched. The expanding secondary literature has also led to a lively debate about the purpose, methodology and theory of women’s history. A central focus of discussion has been the relationship between women’s history and mainstream history. Initially research on the history of women tended to work within the parameters of traditional history: to be fitted into its ‘empty spaces’. But dissatisfaction with the male-centred and patriarchal nature of the predominant historical discourse has led women historians to seek out new methodologies and to argue that consideration of history from the perspective of women, as well as of men, is a major challenge to the whole nature of historical inquiry. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in the United States, put it, women’s history

What is exciting about looking at women’s history in nineteenth-century Ireland is the great wealth of material which is available for study and research. Yet very little relevant work has been published. The reasons for this neglect are manifold, and include a basic indifference on the part of most academics to the role played by women in Irish history, which has resulted in the general exclusion of women from historical discourse. The lack of courses recognising the history of women has further relegated their study to the periphery. In Ireland historians, and particularly historians of women, have yet to establish a narrative and an explanatory and interpretative framework which includes Irish women. Through the work of historians in other countries, we have various conceptual frameworks within which to operate and many hypotheses to test with regard to the situation of women in Ireland. The areas for research are extensive. Here I intend to look generally at a number of aspects of women’s lives which have been investigated to some degree and to suggest sources which can be used to extend these investigations. I also wish to look at other issues which have received no attention but which would add considerably to our understanding, not only of women, but of the complex realities which made up nineteenth-century Irish society.

The population of Ireland in the eighteenth century experienced serious dearth on twelve occasions. Four of these crises resulted in famines and eight in subsistence crises. The four famines all took place in the first half of the century; the second half experienced only subsistence crises. Because of this, it is sometimes argued that the late eighteenth century enjoyed a ‘gap in famines’. The value of this concept has been questioned because it understates the persistence and impact of dearth at a regional level, but it is also vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the nature and impact of all twelve crises.

The main difference between a famine and a subsistence crisis centres on their contrasting demographic effects. Famines invariably produced substantial increases in mortality; the major famines of 1740–11 and 1845–9, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, while smaller famines, such as those of 1727–9, 1800–01 and 1816–18, which were manifestly less costly in human terms, nevertheless resulted in thousands of deaths. Subsistence crises, on the other hand, caused comparatively little loss of life. We are not currently in a position to identify the precise demographic impact of individual episodes of harvest failure in the late eighteenth century, but based on current understanding it is believed that overall associated mortality levels were low. We can, however, enhance our understanding of dearth in this period by tracing the causes, course, impact and response to individual harvest crises. The purpose of this paper is to describe the crisis of 1782–4; it reveals that harvest failure during the so-called ‘gap in famines’ weighed heavily on both urban and rural populations, but that mortality was kept within acceptable bounds by the efficacy of the poor relief deployed to combat distress. Relief was at its most sophisticated and efficient in urban areas.

Between 1879 and 1882 a mass agrarian movement, led by the Irish National Land League, became a strong, all-encompassing force in Irish life for a brief but crucial period. This movement, one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe, has been treated as a nationalist movement, with emphasis of study placed on the role, contributions and aims of the league’s national leaders. These men, seeking their own varieties of self-government, saw the land movement as means to a political end. To them the land agitation provided a stepping-stone to national independence. It was the Irish peasantry, however, motivated primarily by economic considerations, that provided the driving force behind the movement, and at this level Irish peasant women made major contributions to the agrarian revolt. In this study the Land League movement is viewed as an agrarian protest movement; its purpose is to examine in particular the roles played by the Irish peasant women during the Land League period.

These contributions have not been adequately recognised in historical literature. Recently the role of the Irish peasant has been duly acknowledged, but in these discussions a male image usually appears. When the Irish women’s role in the land movement is examined, it is done so in the context of the organisation known as the Ladies’ Land League. These studies concentrate on the activities of the upper- and middle-class urban leaders, particularly the Parnell sisters. But to dwell only on the Ladies’ Land League as the focus of women’s participation in the Land League movement is far too narrow, for it obscures the fact that hundreds of peasant women were fighting the Land War on a daily basis long before the formation of the women’s organisation. The papers of some of the local branches of the Land League provide evidence which shows that Irish rural women participated in the Land War from its beginning. Although the archival sources of the Land League period are biased towards men, enough material regarding the peasant women’s activities, admittedly limited and somewhat sparse, does exist to allow a strong argument to be put forward that peasant women performed effectively in the Land War.

In 1927 a classic textbook of human genetics made the following remark:

This view was typical of a large constituency of opinion-formers, policy-makers and scientists in the period from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the social effects of bad heredity led to the formation of eugenics societies in a considerable number of countries. These included the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907, the German Society for Race Hygiene in 1905, the American Eugenics Society in 1912, and, in the same year, the French Eugenics Society. By the 1920s eugenics societies could be found in the Soviet Union (a legacy from Tsarist times), Mexico, Scandinavia, Brazil, Japan, and many other countries.