Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble - bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale.
Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated 'Bad Bridget' podcast, have unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for 'stubbornness', and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as 'the worst woman on earth'. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny, and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these Bridgets are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.
Leanne McCormick PhD is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) at Ulster University. She was awarded a Distinguished Research Fellowship by Ulster University in 2016 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is also the Co-Chair of the Independent Truth Recovery Panel appointed in 2023 as part of the Truth Recovery Programme seeking truth, acknowledgement and accountability around Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries, Workhouses and associated pathways and practices, in advance of a statutory Public Inquiry.
Elaine Farrell PhD is Professor of History at Queen's University Belfast and is a social historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, with a particular interest in crime history, and women’s and gender history. Before 2012, she was Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin. Her first monograph, ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850-1900 (Manchester University Press, 2013), won the National University of Ireland Publication Prize in Irish History, 2015. Her second monograph was published in 2020, Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison (Cambridge University Press), and won the National University of Ireland Irish Historical Research Prize Special Commendation (2021).