I’m going to England: Irish women’s stories of migration in the 1930s

This paper is based on interviews with ten women who emigrated from southern Ireland to Britain in the 1930s. I discuss some of the issues involved in interviewing very elderly women about events that happened almost seventy years ago. The interviews were framed by the interpersonal dynamics between me - a woman in her thirties who left Ireland in the 1990s - and these women - approaching ninety who left Ireland in the 1930s. These ten women told me very personal stories of emigration but there are, nonetheless, common themes that point to some of the wider social and economic contexts of Irish emigration. Clothes were used as a metaphor for movement, transition and autonomy but also poverty, dependency and location.