Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920

In early April of 1888, sixteen-year-old Mary Ann Donovan stood alone on the quays of Queenstown in county Cork waiting to board a ship for Boston in far-off America. She was but one of almost 700,000 young, usually unmarried women, traveling alone, who left their homes in Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a move unprecedented in the annals of European emigration.

Using a wide variety of sources—many of which appear here for the first time—including persona...