s far as the ideal American family wanted. They were mostly Catholic and readily identified with industrialization. Because of their working class background many of the immigrating Irish fell on hard times because of low wages and lack of work. It became impossible for them to meet the ideal family’s demands. Christine Stansell writes about the way that poor urban families were viewed in the mid-nineteenth century. She explains that some of the reformers of the day assumed that there was something inherently wrong, some “cursed vice” that must be affecting the poor immigrants. Often a simple rejection of Protestant values was seen as an indication of inferiority. “Female self-support,” says Stansell, “was seen as indigence.” The Irish were eventually accommodated by society. Protestants tried through schooling to convert the Irish who instead opened their own parochial schools to teach Catholicism. The Irish also continued to flout Protestant ideals by not observing their Sabatarian laws and continuing their use of alcohol. Free blacks moving towards the north ultimately took much of the opposition away from the Irish.The Irish were an oppressed group in their homeland and came to America in large part due to a powerful famine. They no doubt were seeking better lives in America. They did not however want to trade their rich culture and lifestyle for another more ideally American one. I feel that their very rejection of the efforts of Protestants to Americanize them shows how they felt about being different. They wholeheartedly embraced their culture the same way many of the New Immigrants of the twentieth century are allowed to do. Although the Irish were oppressed in this country I feel that they were proud to be Irish. Possibly more so in relation to the surrounding social order. The two cultures, Irish and Protestant, held such different ideals that I believe that the Irish...
