Women's Irish emigrant letters in the archival record

Women’s Irish emigrant letters survive in smaller numbers than men’s, but historians who have gone looking for them have found more than the archive first suggests. In David Fitzpatrick’s landmark collection of Irish-Australian correspondence, women wrote roughly 33 per cent of the letters he selected for publication, most of them domestic servants writing home about wages, health and the news of their townland. Their letters sit alongside men’s in the same family bundles, the same shoeboxes, and the same archives, once someone thought to keep them.

That share is worth interrogating rather than simply reporting. Men emigrated in slightly greater numbers for most of the nineteenth century, and men’s papers were more likely to pass through institutions, such as banks, employers and shipping agents, that later donated records to archives. Family collections behave differently. A woman’s letters were as likely to be folded into a shoebox with everyone else’s, read at the fire, and then lost to damp, fire or a house clearance as any man’s were. What changed after 1871, when female emigration from Ireland to the United States began to equal and then outstrip male emigration, is not that women suddenly started writing home. It is that there were, for the first time, more of them abroad to write at all.

How women’s Irish emigrant letters were actually written

Not every emigrant woman held a pen with confidence, and the surviving record is honest about that. Margaret Nagle, a domestic servant in New York in the 1860s who wrote regularly to her father John in County Cork, was semi-literate and dictated her letters to a professional letter-writer working out of the city. Her drafts stayed in America; the finished, formal copies went to Ireland. Her surviving correspondence, held at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, still carries her voice through that filter: “I have not been out of place but a few days,” she told her father, reporting on her employment with the same clipped confidence she used to warn him that some relatives were “not to be relied upon and sometimes do more harm than good.”

Dictation of this kind was common practice rather than an exception. An amanuensis, often the sender’s better-educated son or daughter, would write down what was said, smoothing grammar while keeping the sense of it. Letters composed this way were rarely private in the way a modern letter might be. They were collaborative from the moment of writing, and collaborative again on arrival, when a literate neighbour or relative read them aloud to a room of family, since Ireland’s own literacy rate did not approach universal until the century’s final decades, climbing from roughly 30 per cent in the 1830s to 75 per cent by mid-century and 97 per cent by 1900. David Fitzpatrick, who spent decades studying this correspondence, noted that even the opening lines followed an inherited formula, visible across hundreds of the letters he examined: “I take up my Pen to write these few lines to you hoping to find you and all your family in good health as this leaves us all at present thank god.”

What the letters actually said

Once past the formal opening, women’s letters tended to settle into a narrow, recognisable set of subjects. Fitzpatrick grouped his 14 family sequences under headings that still describe the material well: communication ceremonies, kinship politics, migration processes, images of home and the new country, and questions of cultural identity. In practice that meant a woman wrote about her employer and her health, about who in the parish had married or died since her last letter, about whether a photograph might be sent, and about which cousin or sister should be nominated next for the crossing.

These were letters written to be read aloud, so they often addressed more than one recipient at once, sending greetings down a named list of neighbours and relations in a single paragraph. That habit is one reason the letters that survive are so useful to genealogists today: a single page can confirm a marriage, a death or an address that no other record kept.

Domestic service and the women behind the letters

Most of the women whose letters survive from this period were in service, which shaped both what they had to write about and when they had the time to do it. By 1860, more than 75 per cent of working Irish women in the United States held positions as domestic servants. In New York alone in 1855, Irish-born women accounted for 23,386 of the city’s 29,470 domestic workers, close to 80 per cent of the total. By the century’s end, roughly 703,346 women of Irish heritage worked as domestics across the country, about 50 per cent of all domestic workers nationally.

Wages were modest. A domestic servant typically earned less than $4 a week, though employers usually provided food, lodging and uniforms on top of that, which is part of why so many women could send money home at all: a wage that looked small in cash terms still left something to spare once room and board were covered. That arrangement, more than any other single fact, explains why so much of women’s Irish emigrant letters concern employers, wages and the small print of a situation, rather than romance or adventure. It is also why remittances feature so heavily in what they wrote.

Money, and who was sending it

Female emigrant correspondence carried money as often as it carried news, and not as an afterthought. By the 1830s, Irish New Yorkers were sending roughly 300,000 letters a year back across the Atlantic through Liverpool, a volume 11 times greater than what arrived in the other direction. By 1854 more than 2 million letters a year were crossing from America to the United Kingdom, and by the 1870s the figure had passed 6 million. A great many of those envelopes carried a draft or a note alongside the news, and women were disproportionately responsible for it. Historians estimate that women sent roughly 80 per cent of Irish emigrant remittances in 1861, at a moment when Robert Murray of the Provincial Bank of Ireland was already reporting some $725,000 arriving from America in 1847 alone, a sum equivalent to tens of millions of dollars today.

Much of that money was directed at bringing someone else across. More than 40 per cent of Irish emigrant remittances arrived not as cash but as prepaid tickets, and American money is estimated to have funded roughly 75 per cent of all Irish emigration in this period. Margaret Nagle’s own letters show the caution that went with that responsibility: writing to her father about her brother’s prospects, she warned, “I don’t think it good policy for children or old people to come over unless they have money or a plan.” A woman writing home was frequently also a woman deciding, letter by letter, who would follow her and when.

Postage itself was not a trivial cost to someone earning a domestic servant’s wage. A ship letter in the 1830s could run to over half a crown, several days’ pay for many women in service. That price fell steadily as the century went on, down to a few pence by 1891 and to a single penny by the early twentieth century, which changed how often, and how casually, a woman could afford to write at all.

Where these letters are kept now

The single most useful published source for this material remains David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation, assembled from 14 Irish-Australian families and reproducing more than 100 letters written between 1843 and 1906 in full, alongside his own biographical notes on each correspondent. Isabella Wyly, Biddy Burke and Eliza Dalton are among the women whose letters appear there, their exchanges tracing everything from homesickness to the practical mechanics of nominating a relative for assisted passage to the Australian colonies.

Newer digital collections are widening what is publicly searchable. The University of Galway’s Imirce archive, launched in 2024 from a donation by Kerby A. Miller, now holds roughly 7,000 letters running to more than 150,000 individual documents, spanning the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, with correspondence from Irish women in America forming a substantial part of the collection. A Carnegie Corporation of New York grant of $300,000, awarded in 2025, is funding further cataloguing of material that had never been transcribed before it reached the university’s Hardiman Library.

What historians cannot know

The gaps in this record are as instructive as what survives. Most letters that Irish emigrants sent and received across the nineteenth century were never kept at all; what reached an archive did so because a family, or an institution, decided at some later point that it mattered, which was rarely a neutral decision. Letters chosen for preservation tend to be the more formal, more legible, or more genealogically interesting ones, which skews the surviving record toward women who were already relatively confident correspondents, or whose families happened to be careful with paper.

Dictation raises a further, harder problem. When a scribe or amanuensis put a woman’s words on the page, some of what survives is inevitably the scribe’s own phrasing rather than hers alone, and there is no reliable way to separate the two after the fact. Historians can describe the pattern of dictation with confidence and point to specific cases where it happened. They cannot always say, letter by letter, where a woman’s own voice ends and a professional letter-writer’s formula begins, and for the many letters that were never kept, there is no voice left to recover at all.

Where this history sits behind this project

This is the world this project draws its setting from, not its plot: a household in Ballycastle, north Mayo, in 1847, where a young woman named Mary Cafferky would have been among those left to answer post arriving from America.

Sources and further reading

The following sources were consulted directly in researching this piece.

• David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia, Cornell University Press, 1994.
• David Fitzpatrick, “Emigrant letters: ‘I take up my pen to write these few lines’,” History Ireland (historyireland.com).
• Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University: correspondence of Margaret Nagle.
• University of Galway, Imirce digital archive of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs, Hardiman Library, launched 2024.
• History Workshop, “Radical Objects: Irish Women Emigrants’ Letters,” historyworkshop.org.uk.
• The Irish Story, “The Irish girl and the American letter: Irish immigrants in 19th century America,” 2018.

For more on how this correspondence travelled and survived, see how dictated letters and literacy worked in practice, how remittances flowed from America back to Ireland, and the working lives of the Irish domestic servants known as Bridgets.