Women and the Great Hunger. Edited by Christine Kinealy, Jason King, and Ciarán Reilly. (Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press and Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute, 2016. Pp. i, 236. $25.00.)

Introduction to the Handbook of Food Security and Society

“…This is a feature of many chapters in this collection, some offering critiques of charity, others showing how it can be integrated with government schemes. Despite the lack of government support and intervention, historians of the both the Great Irish Famine and the 1770 Bengal famine were not overly critical of the government response; it fell to later historians and economists such as Woodham-Smith and others, more recently Christine Kinealy (who has a chapter in this collection) and Amartya Sen, to reinterpret the narrative and to consider the voices of women and those who suffered (Woodham-Smith, 1962;Kinealy, Moran, 2020;Kinealy, King, Reilly, 2016). The voices of women were, and continue to be, under-represented in the official narratives of food and food policy except as the subjects of research (Kinealy, King, Reilly, 2016).…”