Saving Ireland in Juteopolis: Gender, Class and Diaspora in the Irish Ladies’ Land League

Abstract

First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large majority. This article analyses how a transnational movement translated into a local setting and how emigrants’ activism was shaped by factors of class, gender and religion. The circulation of mobile agitators and newspapers connected local branches in Dundee with the wider world of the Irish land reform movement, and this article seeks to uncover a more textured picture of the people who collected funds, attended rallies, and who are too often considered in the plural, as anonymous supporters grouped together under ethnic or political banners. The picture that emerges challenges existing views of the Ladies’ Land League as a predominantly middle-class affair. In Dundee the members were overwhelmingly working-class and their harsh experiences in the city’s jute industry shaped their activism. Local Catholic networks and ideas of religious humanitarianism contributed significantly to the branches, yet clergymen did not direct their activities, rather they responded to women’s mobilization.