Ambivalent Horizons: Competing Narratives of Self in Irish Women’s Memories of Pre-Marriage Years in Post-War England.

Over the past-20-years research into the experiences of Irish female migrants in twentieth century Britain has been steadily accumulating. Based largely on the use of oral history, this work has been important in shedding light on various aspects of women’s experiences, including how young women negotiated unfamiliar urban spaces and asserted an ‘ethnic’ identity in England. The dynamics shaping the re/construction of such experiences, and what they can tell us about the fashioning of gendered migrant selves, has, by contrast, received relatively little attention. Based on an in-depth analysis of the personal migration narratives of three women who migrated from southern Ireland to England between 1945–69, this article aims to provide insight into how migrants’ early experiences of settlement in post-war England were conditioned by the consumption and internalization of a number of competing constructions of femininity circulating within British and Irish culture during the post-1945 period. While these constructions made available a number of different frameworks on which women could draw to order their experiences and fashion an identity, tensions within and between them could also create problems for the process of self-construction. As well as the particular circumstances of each individual’s encounter with their new environment, the distinctive character of women’s negotiation of these tensions alludes to the different ways women sought to construct a preferred version of their past in post-war England, raising questions about the ways past and present, public and private, interact in the production of migrant histories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]