The introduction outlines the major themes of the book and its scope and rationale. It explains briefly the origins of the book and its relationship to the companion volume by the historian David Fitzpatrick, The Americanisation of Ireland: Migration and Settlement 1841–1925 (2020). The chapter sets out the volume’s use of the term Americanisation and the value of applying this framework for examining Irish society in the decades after the Great Famine. It considers the question of race and the multicultural American identity and briefly discusses the scholarship on whiteness and Irish identity. Returned migration is a key aspect of the influence of the United States of America on Irish culture and the chapter provides information on the extent and exceptionalism of Ireland’s returned migration trends. The chapter includes a survey of the international and Irish historiography of the phenomenon and of Ireland’s relationship to America. It concludes by outlining the structure of the book, emphasising the thematic and interdisciplinary approach.

This chapter highlights the impact of the war on women’s private everyday lives and explores how the wartime state increasingly reached into the home. It demonstrates how previously personal issues became political as women were urged to express their patriotism through their careful household management and by maintaining model homes and families for their absent husbands. The chapter also assesses the impact of the war on the standard of living of women in Ireland, interrogating previous interpretations of wartime prosperity and contrasting the urban and rural experiences. It explores the impact of the war on maternal and infant health, and the consequences of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic for women in Ireland. The chapter argues that the war resulted in much greater intervention of the state in women’s everyday and personal lives and brought significant hardship to many women. Far more women became reliant on governmental welfare through separation allowances, pensions and initiatives under the Prince of Wales National Relief Fund. Memoirs, diaries and letters are used to explore the experience of separated couples during the war and how women coped with the emotional hardship of the soldiers’ war service.

This chapter explores social morality on the home front focusing on the commentary about the public behaviour of soldiers’ wives, anxiety about a supposed increase in incidences of female drunkenness, and concern about prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. It tracks the number of wartime arrests of women for drunkenness and child neglect. The chapter argues that the hostility to separation women transcended the nationalist movement, and that while there were many incidences of soldiers’ wives arrested for drunken behaviour, the rhetoric exaggerated the reality with total convictions for drunkenness declining in wartime Ireland after the first year of the war.The chapter further explores concern with sexual immorality in wartime, focusing on venereal disease and illegitimate births. It also examines the women’s patrols established to limit the public interaction between working-class women and the soldiers. The chapter concludes that the public behaviour of working-class women in Ireland altered little as a consequence of the war, but there was nevertheless greater censure of problems evident before 1914. While the separation allowances brought women greater control over their domestic spaces, the surveillance of state and society confined women to narrowly defined codes of behaviour.

The conclusion evaluates the overall impact of the Great War on women’s lives in Ireland, exploring the extent to which Irish women felt their lives had been irrevocably changed by the war, and analysing how the war affected women’s lives at the time and their position in society. The chapter reflects on the diversity of Irish women’s experience of the war, noting the demographic, regional, religious and socio-economic factors affecting that experience. The divergences between north and south are particularly noted with the book arguing that women’s voluntary work for the war effort accentuated the differences between Ulster and southern Ireland and accelerated the process of psychological partition. It further addresses the question of emancipation, arguing that while in many respects the war had a politicising impact upon Irish women, it also served to reinforce the gendered idea of the separate spheres. The chapter briefly discusses the emphasis on motherhood and domesticity in the Irish Free State. It concludes however with a reminder of the importance of considering how women actually experienced the upheaval of war.

The Great War altered the means by which women conducted political activity as they adapted to wartime circumstances, while also bringing new opportunities for women’s mobilisation and politicisation. Competing loyalties of suffrage, nationalism, republicanism and unionism also affected attitudes towards Irish women’s role in the war effort and provided dissenting voices against the mechanisms of wartime mobilisation. This chapter examines the mobilisation of suffragist, nationalist and unionist women for the war effort, the participation of women in acts of dissent and the impact of the war on the achievement of female suffrage in 1918. It contrasts the opportunities for politicisation offered by the nationalist and unionist movements and argues that the differing approaches to the war effort resulted in the further polarisation of unionist Ulster and southern Ireland. The chapter argues that the war created a space for political activism, evident through the mass mobilisation of previously unorganised women in the 1918 anti-conscription campaign and the actions of working-class soldiers’ wives in Ireland in defending their interests against the growing republican movement.

This chapter examines the immediate impact of the ending of the war for Irish women in the public and private spheres before considering the longer-term effects of the war for women in Ireland.While the cessation of hostilities brought enormous relief to women anxiously awaiting the return of their loved ones, in many cases it accentuated the trauma and grief of those bereaved by the war. This chapter argues that Irish women faced particular difficulties arising from the swift demobilisation of war workers which resulted in high levels of unemployment, the more limited relief available from the British government, and the political instability in the years immediately following the war. The impact of ex-servicemen returning home to family and domestic life and women’s role within the home is examined, making use of autobiographical novels. Towards the end of the war, the press returned repeatedly to the vexed issue of women’s role in society, raising the spectre of the ‘superfluous woman’. Despite the wartime loss, the chapter’s examination of the 1926 census reports for the Free State and Northern Ireland concludes that such fears were unfounded and marital prospects were little changed by the war.