The most common referents many people have when thinking about Irish women's employment in Britain are nursing and domestic service. As with most stereotypes, there is an element of truth, as many Irish women worked as servants and nurses, and in fact specifically sought out these areas of employment. There is also a larger body of evidence on these employment types, and oral history collections always include women in these occupations. This chapter examines the rhetoric and evidence on the experience of Irish women who worked as nurses and servants, but will also broaden out to discuss other occupations that Irish women participated in using new evidence from the travel permit files from the Second World War. Irish women often experienced greater career mobility than men, with many able to obtain white-collar jobs inaccessible to them in Ireland, and which continued to be unavailable to their male immigrant peers. They also engaged in some daring and exciting occupations during the Second World War that have so far remained outside the broad perception of Irish women’s lives in Britain.

Throughout the years 1939 to 1945, the number of Irish women going to Britain to domestic service jobs greatly outnumbered those going to agricultural, nursing and factory work. Table 7.1 details the breakdown by gender and occupational group of emigrants regulated through the travel permit system in the 1940s. For men, the most common occupation was as unskilled workers, with a total of 96,788 men in this group. There were 61,580 female domestic servants who emigrated between 1941 and 1948, representing 56 per cent of the total (109,507) recorded number of women issued travel documentation. Nursing accounted for 17,840 women obtaining travel permits, representing only 16 per cent of the female cohort, although it is likely that many women emigrated to take up this work rather than being trained already: it was noted that many emigrants ‘put down the occupation which it is hoped to follow abroad rather than the occupation actually followed at home’. In oral history collections, it is revealed that many men and women had no experience of working in their chosen occupation before emigrating.