Ourselves alone

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 personal reminiscences, interviews, oral histories, letter, and autobiographies as well as data from Irish and American census and emigration repots, Janet Nolan makes a sustained analysis of this migration of a generation of young women that puts a new light on Irish social and economic history. By the late nineteenth century changes in Irish life combined to make many young women unneeded in their households and communities; rather than accept a marginal existence, they elected to seek a better life in a new world, often with the encouragement and help of a female relative who had already emigrated. Mary Ann Donovan's journey was representative of thousands of journeys made by Irish women who co