Dramatic language was often used in newspaper reports on women’s employment prospects in Britain, evocative of the rhetorical titillation we observed in Chapter 3 over the menace of the white slave trade. It seems that many could not abjure the theatrics in discussing emigration, and simple, dispassionate observations such as that of D. Tait Christie of the International Labour Office (ILO), quoted above, were few and far between. This chapter juxtaposes public discourses and personal recollections in exploring women's emigration and employment. The predominance of Irish female immigrants in occupations such as domestic service and nursing is mirrored by a dearth of research on the spectrum of Irish women's working experiences. This chapter explores alternative sources of information to sketch a broader picture of female emigrant employment in Britain while recognising the primacy of these occupational groupings by mining new source material on both.

Delaney has cogently argued that emigration was undertaken within the context of knowledge on available options and opportunities, including economic ones, something that was not only rational but also entirely normal:

Within this rhetoric by ‘politicians and civil servants’, among others, assumptions based on gender also emerged, with many recognising the legitimacy of male economic migration but denying such motives for women.