Irish-American Manhood

Manhood in Ireland

Most of the Irish males who came to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century had experienced materially sparse lives in Ireland. The typical male immigrant had farmed a small plot of rented land on which he grew potatoes and perhaps kept a few pigs, chickens, and cattle. Irish manhood prized verbal and physical aggression rather than acquisitiveness. Learning to appreciate the material priorities of American life and the tenets of American entrepreneurial manhood would therefore be difficult for many Irish males and their descendants. The Irish faced harsh treatment by Protestant landlords in Ireland, which accentuated their sense of distinctiveness as Catholics and caused many peasants to dislike rural life. This alienation from the land was intensified by the failure of the potato, the Irish peasant's primary food, during the several famines of the nineteenth century, the most devastating of which occurred during the late 1840s. Excessive drinking among men––often of poteen, a powerful homemade concoction––was extremely common in rural Ireland. In the United States, this distinctively intense affection for alcohol would continue to characterize Irish-American males, though it would often become a source of tension and embarrassment among those who aspired to blend into American society.

Geographical and Economic Mobility during the Nineteenth Century

Although Irish emigration to North America began early in the nineteenth century (and has continued to the present), intertwined factors of famine, eviction from the land, and political turmoil in Ireland made the middle and later years of the nineteenth century the time of heaviest Irish movement into the United States. About 1.5 million Irish entered the United States from 1847 to 1860, and about another 1.5 million followed from 1870 to 1900. Most arrived in poverty. While many nineteenth-century immigrants came from societies around the world in which men and women were often segregated from each other in everyday life, rural Ireland in the nineteenth century seems to have been a place of unusually pervasive separation, and even outright hostility, between the sexes. The journey to the United States often reflected this sexual segregation, with Irish women and men emigrating individually or with members of their own sex rather than in family units.

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