Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women

Product Information

And we tell lots of Bad Bridget stories along the way! The fascinating individual cases reveal the lived realities and experiences for Irish girls and women who left Ireland for the ‘new world’. We hope that visitors to the exhibition, come away with more understanding of how tough it can be to be a migrant, to leave your home, to be away from family, friends and support networks. That this might influence the way migrants today are viewed.”

Bad Bridget presents fascinating case studies of women whose life stories are a matter of court records, prison files, and the admission and discharge books of various mental institutions and reformatories in New York, Boston and Toronto. Individually, the stories are dramatic and vivid, full of the kind of lurid detail that made the related Bad Bridget podcast so popular. But their narrative specificity is also something of a limitation in that, relying on the routine use of phrases such as “many women” or “one of several”, the particularity of the stories can make it difficult to sense just how common they were to immigrant life. (Perhaps the book title should have “Some” inserted before “Irish Emigrant Women”?) But when it pans out to include statistical context and historical oversight, Bad Bridget is at its strongest in suggesting not alone individual lives but patterns of experience.Yet she still ended up in court defending herself, was found guilty and was sent to prison for seven years. It is likely that her status as a young immigrant involved in the sex industry went against her. One of the main ones is a really sad one about a woman called Catherine O'Donnell in Boston, who is unmarried, had a baby. Sher thinks the father of the baby is going to come and join her but he doesn't. A Chicago Post editorial in 1868 urged mass deportation: “The Irish fill our prisons … Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country.” In Bad Bridget all of the featured women in the book come under the title ‘bad’ but, in many cases, they were simply sad, or sometimes mad, Bridgets.

Some were likely of criminal bent and possibly would have been on bad terms with the law, had they stayed in Ireland. For most others, dismissal from a job or failure to find one in America exposed them to immediate and dire need. In an environment without any economic safety net or the support network of extended family, on top of what might have been a traumatic wrench from home, the line between upstanding competent and deviant reprobate may have proved surprisingly porous.

Explore

The authors draw the threads of these forgotten women’s lives together expertly and sensitively. There is nothing of the sensationalism of the true crime genre about this book…It is an important, impeccably researched though eminently readable book that charts new territory. It might be only February, but this could yet be the book of 2023.’ Two Northern Ireland-based academics have excavated their stories from police, court and prison records and coined a name for the transgressors: “Bad Bridgets”. Sin and whiskey were written in the faces of every one of them', a journalist wrote on observing a group of women in the Toronto police court in May 1865. A ‘harder, more uncivilized and depraved looking set of abandoned women never appeared before the Court’ than this group of eleven women who had been arrested on Garrison Common. Seven of the women were Irish and they were all arrested for being drunk. The women were described as ‘stargazers’, a term used for sex workers who worked outside. They had been drinking and probably soliciting for trade from the soldiers in Fort York beside the Common. We have career criminals who are involved in department store theft, or Elizabeth Dillon, who’s robbing people left, right and centre at funerals. These are women who are making a very deliberate decision.” Opened in April last year and inspired by a research project of the same name, Bad Bridget interprets the lives of women who left Ireland between 1838 and 1918 and were drawn to North America by the promise of economic opportunity.