r has described marriages among poor Irish Americans as "stormy and short lived. Irish families sometimes suffered from violence and desertion on the part of husbands and fathers (Purcell 50)." In her book, Erin's Daughters in America, published in 1983, Diner writes: "An Irish immigrant woman who chose in the 1860s or 1870s to marry a construction worker in Boston or Providence or a factory hand living in New York or Worcester Massachusetts, ran a very high risk of having someday to be the sole support for a house full of children, existing on starvation's edge." For these reasons, Irish women often stayed single for years, and once they married, they often headed single-parent households. In 1870, in Philadelphia, 16.9 percent of Irish women were the heads of their families compared to only 5.9 percent of German females. Only blacks had a higher rate of female-headed families (Purcell 48-52). The Irish during the famine years (and the decades following) lived the same as their pre-famine predecessors: they stayed in the cities of the North and Northeast, looking for employment as construction workers or, as in the case of many Irish immigrant women, as domestic servants. Over all, the Irish had no interest whatsoever in moving back to Ireland. Even though land in America was rich and plentiful compared to the land in Ireland, very few Irish immigrants had the money to buy farms. During the years after the end of the famine immigration, most Irish immigrants changed gradually from mainly men to mainly women, although the average age of Irish immigrants was very young. The Irish immigrant women tended to do domestic service jobs or millwork, but the men gradually made more and held more important jobs during the late nineteenth century. As the second generation Irish discovered the power of voting in America, and as American cities grew and needed people to operate the governments and public services, the Irish pretty much took over the...
