Twentieth-century Ireland was a place where womanhood revolved around motherhood and marriage. In the quotation from Fr Degen, above, women set the standard for the nation, and in the 1930s they were, in his view, doing less than well. In the case of emigration, it was often argued that it was immoral to leave Ireland and abandon this ‘national’ duty. Lamenting the lack of marriages in Ireland, the Standard quoted the late Arthur Griffith: ‘If you can do nothing else for your country … get married’, thus positing marriage as a fulfilment of nationalist principles. The discourses on non-economic motivations for women's emigration specifically referred to women's interests in marriage opportunities, but to what extent was this a motivating force for women to leave?

Kerby Miller has argued that marriage and the status it gave became a goal for most Irish women in the nineteenth century partly because of ‘the enhanced and sanctified roles of wife/mother/houseworker, and because the waged alternatives for women in post-Famine Ireland were so few and bleak’. While Irish women may have been influenced by such ideology, it seems the equation of emigration with a means to marriage misrepresented their motivations. Yet, within public discourses, Irish emigrant women’s ‘betrayal’ was portrayed as a double one – depriving Ireland of families while populating another country. Paradoxically, as Kennedy pointed out, there were far higher proportions of single Irish men in rural areas than there were women, so ‘if young Irish women were migrating simply to find a husband, they were going in the wrong direction’.

To assert that Irish women maintained traditional ways of feminine behaviour and links with their families, which may have been patriarchal in nature, is not to denigrate such women as mindless dolts, blindly following societal expectations. As Akenson has argued, most female emigrants