Networking Respectability: Class, Gender and Ethnicity among the Irish in South Wales, 1845–1914

O’Leary, Paul

doi:10.1080/02619280500188310

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…The language and demarcation of respectability, and its converse "roughness", remained both highly charged and nebulous during the period covered by this chapter, and could be invoked within and by marginalised neighbourhoods and individuals as well as being applied to them by outsiders (Brown et. al., 2011;Ross, 1985;Masters, 2010;O'Leary, 2005;Walkowitz, 1992). Definitions of what constitutes "respectability" in any given society are of course marked by regional and temporal specificity, and in some instances the criteria for this category can change dramatically in a short span of time.…”

Section: Respectability Gender and Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

Grey¹

2023

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

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Infanticide stands out as a crime which, in England and Wales, has been marked for at least two hundred years by deep-rooted continuities in its representation and treatment by both the criminal justice system and the media, despite the massive political, economic, social, legislative, and cultural changes that occurred over this period. Particularly remarkable about this longstanding discourse is its routine emphasis that the guilty mother is also a victim of tragic circumstances that led to the crime and deserving of sympathetic treatment. It also invariably sets infanticide apart as a "special case" which does not necessarily fit with either medical or legal definitions of diminished criminal responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this framing of women who commit infanticide stresses not only their "normality" prior to the offence but also their "respectability", a sharp contrast to the sometimes overtly misogynistic representation of other types of women offenders. This chapter argues that it is above all "respectability" that profoundly shaped the cultural script relating to infanticide in England and Wales between 1800 and 2000, and that this continues to exert a powerful legacy on the relatively small number of cases that now come before the courts in the twenty-first century.

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Section: Respectability Gender and Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

Grey¹

2023

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

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Mass commodity culture and identity: the Morning Chronicle and Irish migrants in a nineteenth-century Welsh industrial town

O’Leary

2008

Urban History

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This is an original contribution to the debate on representations of Irish migrants in nineteenth-century British towns. It analyses a new form of investigative journalism to locate Irish migrants as outsiders by detailing their exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture in an industrial town. It also argues that the series mapped industrial Britain in a new way. This is an original approach to investigative journalism in the nineteenth century, showing how commodities could be used as a form of exclusion. It is a reference point for studies of representations of minorities.The ?Labour and the Poor? investigations of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, which charted social conditions in towns outside London in 1849?51, subjected Irish migrants in Britain to a hostile journalistic gaze. In the case of the iron-manufacturing town of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales, the minority Irish ethnic identity was defined by observers in terms of exclusion from an emerging mass commodity culture and in opposition to the native working class. This early investigative journalism deployed some conventions of the contemporary novel that were familiar to its mainly middle-class readership to root social identities in material conditions.Peer reviewe

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Between Isolation and Integration: Religion, Politics, and the Catholic Irish in Preston, C.1829-1868

Hepworth

2020

Immigrants & Minorities

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Since the 1970s, case-studies have highlighted specific local contexts which informed variegated Irish migrant experience across nineteenth-century Britain. This article scrutinises how the Catholic Irish in Preston navigated their host society. Especially in public and organisational expressions of religion and politics, the Preston Irish were unusually closely connected to their host community. Preston's unusual confessional demographics and multifaceted political contestation offered the Catholic Irish opportunities for meaningful interventions in local society. Situating this case-study comparatively, this article posits four key interlinking factors shaping migrants' experiences of a nineteenth-century town: its size, broader immigration patterns, confessional composition, and labour politics.

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Networking Respectability: Class, Gender and Ethnicity among the Irish in South Wales, 1845–1914

Cited by 4 publications

References 8 publications

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

Mass commodity culture and identity: the Morning Chronicle and Irish migrants in a nineteenth-century Welsh industrial town

Between Isolation and Integration: Religion, Politics, and the Catholic Irish in Preston, C.1829-1868

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