Abstract
As the authors explain in their introduction, the ‘dominant narrative of Irish emigration to North America focuses on those who came from humble beginnings in Ireland and made a better life for themselves’ in their adopted homeland (p. 5). As the newcomers became more upwardly mobile ‘there was no appetite on either side of the Atlantic to face up to the reality that many Irish female emigrants did not succeed – and that many ended up on the wrong side of the law’ (p. 5). Hundreds of thousands of Irish women broke the law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in New York, Boston and Toronto and ended up in these cities’ police stations, courthouses and prisons, constituting the ‘underbelly of Irish emigration to North America’ (p. 7). It is these ‘criminal and deviant Irish women’ that are the subject of Farrell and McCormick's excellent study (p. 5).
While it would clearly have been impossible for the authors to have documented the lawbreaking activities of every ‘Bad Bridget’ in the three cities that are the principal focus of their investigation, they nevertheless skilfully succeed in presenting both a general and detailed picture of many of the crimes committed by Irish emigrant women who resided in them. Their material is organised into ten chapters, each of which deals with a particular type of crime. Prostitution and linked criminal activity committed by prostitutes, infanticide and child abandonment by unmarried mothers, child neglect, drunkenness, kidnapping, theft, spousal violence and murder: Irish women's involvement in these crimes is discussed in colourful and sometimes poignant detail in eight of the chapters. The authors introduce each chapter's topic by presenting a case-study of an individual Irish woman who was guilty of one of these crimes. After skilfully setting the scene in this manner, they then proceed to broaden their scope with more wide-ranging discussions of emigrant women's involvement in the particular type of crime that constitutes the main subject matter of the chapter. For example, chapter eight, ‘Crimes of matrimony and the case of Letitia Armstrong’, opens with an account of how in April 1873 Letitia Armstrong of Toronto caught her husband in flagrante delicto with their servant, Julia Pinkham, whom the enraged Letitia shot in the face with a pistol, causing her to lose her left eye. The detailed discussion of Letitia Armstrong's case paves the way for a general (and sometimes graphic) discussion of crimes of violence committed in Toronto, New York and Boston by vengeful Irish ‘scorned women’.
In addition to the eight chapters mentioned above, another chapter, ‘Rebel girls and the case of Ellen Nagle’, details how Irish juveniles and young women were often prosecuted and imprisoned at the behest of their parents or relatives for the vaguely defined crimes of being a ‘stubborn child’ (in the case of juvenile girls in Boston) or being ‘wayward’, ‘incorrigible’ or ‘out of control’ (in the case of juvenile girls and young women in New York and Toronto) (p. 84, 86). Ellen Nagle, the eponymous ‘heroine’ of this particular chapter, was prosecuted by her father and jailed for a year in 1903 after she refused to stop keeping company with ‘bad girls’ on the streets of their Boston neighbourhood (p. 84). The ninth of the book's ten chapters – ‘Race, reformation and the case of the Anderson sisters’ – documents the fascinating case of Stella Vannall and her sister, Ida King. In January 1880 Vannall and King engaged in a heated argument outside the Boston lodging-house and brothel where Vannall had previously resided, in the course of which Vannall pulled a knife out of her pocket and mortally wounded her sister. The issue of contention between the warring siblings was Vannall's preference for sexual relationships with black men rather than white men (her surname changed from Anderson to Vannall when she married Howard Vannall, a black man). When Farrell and McCormick delve into the case of the warring sisters they show that they had had a long history of violence, prostitution, drunkenness and imprisonment before their fatal quarrel in 1880, with Vannall and King proving to be notably unruly and disobedient prisoners in the various penal institutions in which they were incarcerated. They were, as the authors demonstrate, far from being unique amongst Irish women prisoners in this regard. The remarkable extent to which female Irish emigrants were over-represented in the statistics of crime and in the penal institutions of Toronto, Boston and New York is a recurring feature of Bad Bridget.
This book will appeal to both a scholarly and a general readership. It is based on an impressive research foundation, especially archival material such as court, prison, reformatory and charity records as well as numerous contemporary newspaper reports. Good use is made of Professional Criminals of America (1886), the innovative publication of detective Thomas Byrnes, the Irish-born pioneer of ‘mugshot’ or ‘rogues’ gallery’ photographs in the investigation of crime, to discuss the Irish women who earned a living as professional shoplifters and pickpockets. The fruits of the authors’ research are presented in a lively, accessible style, which, unfortunately, is not something that one can say about all academic historians. Farrell and McCormick have succeeded admirably in throwing light on the ‘underbelly of Irish emigration to North America’ (p. 7). Would it be greedy of this reviewer to express the wish that they should now look at the ‘Bad Bridgets’ in other parts of the diaspora and in Ireland?