Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T14:00:33.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The circulation of children in rural Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2014

JANE GRAY*
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Abstract

This paper analyses the interactions amongst family, household and extended kin through an examination of two ‘circulations’ of children within rural Irish communities during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the daily journey from home to school; (2) going to live with relatives other than parents. Drawing on life-history narratives, the article develops a new perspective on the stem-family system in Ireland by showing how ‘incomplete’ family households formed integral parts of local kinship circles and were deeply engaged in the everyday lives of ‘complete’ family households, including the promotion of extended family survival and social mobility.

La circulation des enfants en irlande rurale au cours de la première moitié du xxe siècle

Les interactions entre famille, ménage et parenté élargie sont analysées grâce à l’étude des enfants qui « circulent » au sein des communautés rurales irlandaises, au cours de la première moitié du XXe siècle. Deux types de circulation sont examinés : d'une part le trajet quotidien des enfants entre la maison et l’école et d'autre part le fait pour certains d'aller vivre chez des membres de la famille autres que leurs père et mère. S'appuyant sur des récits d'histoire de vie, l'auteur propose une nouvelle perspective sur le système de la famille-souche en Irlande, montrant comment des ménages familiaux « incomplets » faisaient cependant partie intégrante de cercles de parenté locaux et étaient profondément liés à la vie quotidienne de ménages à structure familiale «complète », ce qui permettait d’œuvrer à la survie de la famille élargie et à la mobilité sociale.

Die zirkulation von kindern im ländlichen irland in der ersten hälfte des 20. jahrhunderts

Dieser Beitrag analysiert die Interaktionen zwischen Familie, Haushalt und erweiterter Verwandtschaft, indem er zwei Formen der ‚Zirkulation‘ von Kindern innerhalb ländlicher Gemeinden in Irland in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts näher untersucht: (1) der tägliche Weg von Zuhause zur Schule; (2) die Unterbringung bei Verwandten außerhalb des Elternhauses. Er greift auf lebensgeschichtliche Erzählungen zurück und eröffnet dadurch eine neue Perspektive auf das Stammfamiliensystem in Irland. Es zeigt sich nämlich, dass ‚unvollständige‘ Familienhaushalte integrale Bestandteile der örtlichen Verwandtschaftskreise waren und mit dem Alltagsleben ‚vollständiger‘ Familienhaushalte eng verknüpft waren, indem sie unter anderem das Überleben der erweiterten Familie und die soziale Mobilität beförderten.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

ENDNOTES

1 Tadmor, Naomi, ‘Early modern English kinship in the long run: reflections on continuity and change’, Continuity and Change 25, 1 (2010), 1548Google Scholar, here 23.

2 This is not to say that household processes were unimportant, but rather that they did not loom as large in children's everyday experiences as they did in those of adults – and of the social theorists who have tended to focus on adult concerns. Most of the scholarship on extended families in historic Europe has followed Laslett's classic discussion by asking how extended families and communities may, or may not, have supported households. See Laslett, Peter, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the “nuclear-hardship” hypothesis’, Continuity and Change 3, 2 (1988), 153–75Google Scholar. See also Kertzer, David L., Hogan, Dennis P. and Karweit, Nancy, ‘Kinship beyond the household in a nineteenth-century Italian town’, Continuity and Change 7, 1 (1992), 103–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neven, Muriel, ‘The influence of the wider kin group on individual life course transitions: results from the Pays de Herve (Belgium) 1846–1900’, Continuity and Change 17, 3 (2002), 405–35Google Scholar; Plakans, Andrejs and Wetherell, Charles, ‘Households and kinship networks: the costs and benefits of contextualization’, Continuity and Change 18, 1 (2003), 4976Google Scholar; Wall, Richard, ‘Economic collaboration of family members within and beyond households in English society, 1600–2000’, Continuity and Change 25, 1 (2010), 83108Google Scholar.

3 Arensberg, Conrad M. and Kimball, Solon T., Family and community in Ireland, 3rd edn (Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, 2001)Google Scholar. The first edition appeared in 1940. For a comprehensive overview of the significance of the study, see the introduction to the third edition: Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley, ‘Introduction to the Third Edition’, in Arensberg and Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, i–cl. See also Seward, Rudy R., Stivers, Richard A., Igoe, Donal G., Amin, Iftekhar and Cosimo, Deborah, ‘Irish families in the twentieth century: exceptional or converging?’, Journal of Family History 30, 4 (2005), 410–30Google Scholar; and Guinnane, Timothy W., The vanishing Irish: households, migration and the rural economy in Ireland (Princeton, 1997), 2931Google Scholar.

4 Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, 79–132; Gráda, Cormac Ó, A rocky road: the Irish economy since the 1920s (Manchester, 1997), 192Google Scholar.

5 Hannan, Damien. F. and Commins, Patrick, ‘The significance of small-scale landholders in Ireland's socio-economic transformation’, in Goldthorpe, J. H. and Whelan, C. T. eds., The development of industrial society in Ireland (Oxford, 1992), 79104Google Scholar, here 81.

6 In his authoritative study Guinnane identified some differences between the Irish scholarship on rural household systems and the wider European literature. In Ireland, inheritance practices have been inferred from ethnographic and folkloric evidence, and have been understood as outcomes of social and economic conditions, rather than legal systems. In some accounts marriage of the heir did not occur until the death of his father, in which case multiple-family households would not have occurred. Guinnane argues that the evidence shows considerable flexibility and intrafamily bargaining surrounding the timing of succession. See Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, pp. 133–65.

7 Hannan, Damien F., Displacement and development: class, kinship and social change in Irish rural communities (Dublin, 1979), 69Google Scholar. This article follows both Arensberg and Kimball, and Hannan, in its focus on the kinship groups (or kindreds) mobilised in everyday interactions and relationships. Kinship groups were, of course, related to the system of descent that governed people's understandings of who they were related to. For a detailed discussion see Hannan, Displacement and development, pp. 79–85. With respect to communities, as Arensberg and Kimball observed, their boundaries varied according to the kinds of social interaction in question. Everyday relations of solidarity and exchange occurred within townlands. See Arensberg and Kimball, Family and community in Ireland, 273–4. Hannan argued that neighbouring took place within ‘station areas’, sub-units of parishes that usually covered one or a small number of townlands. See Hannan, Displacement and development, 85. The local primary school was clearly the focal point for many of the childhood memories of community examined in this article. The parish was the basic administrative unit for primary schools, but there could be more than one school per parish. See Coolahan, John, Irish education: its history and structure (Dublin, 1981), 8Google Scholar.

8 Hannan, Displacement and development, 86.

9 Hannan, Displacement and development, 139–57. See also Smyth, William J., ‘Nephews, dowries, sons and mothers: the geography of farm and marital transactions in Eastern Ireland, c. 1820–c. 1970’, in Siddle, D. ed. Migration, mobility and modernization (Liverpool, 2000)Google Scholar.

10 Gibbon, Peter, ‘Arensberg and Kimball revisited’, Economy and Society 2, 4 (1973), 479–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For a more detailed discussion, see Gray, Jane. ‘Household formation, inheritance and class-formation in 19th century Ireland: evidence from County Fermanagh’, in Head-König, Anne-Lise ed. Inheritance practices, marriage strategies and household formation in European rural societies (Turnhout, Belgium, 2012), 153–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Attempts to identify stem-family households in early twentieth-century Irish census documents include: Birdwell-Pheasant, Donna, ‘The early twentieth-century Irish stem family: a case study from County Kerry’, in Silverman, Marilyn and Gulliver, P. H. eds., Approaching the past: historical anthropology through Irish case studies (New York, 1992), 205–35Google Scholar; Carney, Francis J., ‘Household size and structure in two areas of Ireland, 1821 and 1911’, in Cullen, L. M. and Furet, F. eds., Ireland and France 17th–20th centuries: towards a comparative study of rural history (Paris, 1980), 149–65Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, David, ‘Irish farming families before the First World War’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, 2 (1983), 339–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibbon, Peter and Curtin, Chris, ‘The stem family in Ireland’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, 3 (1978), 429–53Google Scholar; Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, 133–65; Yoshifumi Shimizu, ‘The structure of Irish households of the early 20th century: comparing results for Co. Clare and Co. Meath’, paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, 17 November 2011. To my knowledge, the only study based on a statistically representative sample for Ireland as a whole is Corrigan, Carmel, ‘Household structure in early twentieth century Ireland’, Irish Journal of Sociology 3 (1993), 5678Google Scholar.

12 Ruggles, Steven, ‘Reconsidering the northwest European family system: living arrangements of the aged in comparative historical perspective’, Population and Development Review 35, 2 (2009), 249–73Google Scholar.

13 Hannan, Displacement and development, 59.

14 See Brody, Hugh, Inishkillane: change and decline in the west of Ireland (London, 1973)Google Scholar and Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, Saints, scholars and schizophrenics (Berkeley, 1979)Google Scholar.

15 Guinnane, Timothy W., ‘Re-thinking the western European marriage pattern: the decision to marry in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century’, Journal of Family History 16, 1 (1991), 4764Google Scholar, here 61.

16 See for example Fauve-Chamoux's observation that ‘stem family systems are all rather flexible in their practices if not in their rules’, and that non-inheriting offspring could form ‘branching-out’ households under certain demo-economic conditions: Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette, ‘Family reproduction and stem-family system: from Pyrenean valleys to Norwegian farms’, History of the Family 11, 3 (2006), 171–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar argument in the Irish case see Birdwell-Pheasant, Donna, ‘“The home place”: centre and periphery in Irish house and family systems’, in Birdwell-Pheasant, D. and Lawrence-Zuniga, D. eds., House life: space, place and family in Europe (Oxford, 1999), 105–29Google Scholar.

17 A welcome special issue on Ireland in the journal The History of the Family 13, 4 (2008) included surprisingly little discussion of the scholarship on historical household systems, with the exception of Cousins, Mel, ‘Poor relief and families in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy’, The History of the Family 13, 4 (2008), 340–9.Google Scholar

18 See www.iqda.ie (accessed 22 October 2013). All transcripts in the archived dataset were anonymised to preserve respondent confidentiality. The personal names used throughout this article are, therefore, pseudonyms.

19 J. Gray and S. Ó Riain, Life Histories and Social Change Project [collection]. Maynooth, Co. Kildare: Irish Qualitative Data Archive [producer], ID10028. Irish Qualitative Data Archive [distributor]. The ‘Living in Ireland’ data are available from the Irish Social Science Data Archive: http://www.ucd.ie/issda/data/livinginirelandlii/

20 This is the ISCO88 (International Standard Classification of Occupations) Code 6, which includes farmers, available at http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/isco88/6.htm (accessed 9 June 2014).

21 Hammel, Eugene A. and Laslett, Peter, ‘Comparing household structure over time and between cultures’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, 1 (1974), 73109Google Scholar.

22 Breen, Richard, Hannan, Damien F., Rottman, David B. and Whelan, Christopher T., Understanding contemporary Ireland: state, class and development in the Republic of Ireland (London, 1990), 55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Turner, Michael E., After the famine: Irish agriculture 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1987), 88–9.Google Scholar

24 Ó Gráda, A rocky road, 25–7.

25 D. A. Coleman, ‘The demographic transition in Ireland in international context’, in Goldthorpe and Whelan, Development of industrial society, 53–78.

26 Hannan and Commins, ‘Significance of small-scale landholders’, 94–5; Hannan, Displacement and development, 56–9.

27 Brannen, Julia, ‘Childhoods across the generations: stories from women in four-generation English families’, Childhood 11, 4 (2004), 409–28Google Scholar, here 410.

28 Neven, ‘The influence of the wider kin group’, 407. For a different view on the value of biographical sources see Humphries, Jane, Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution (Cambridge, 2010), 1248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Maguire, Moira and Cinnéide, Séamas Ó, ‘“A good beating never hurt anyone”: the punishment and abuse of children in twentieth century Ireland’, Journal of Social History 38, 3 (2005), 635–52Google Scholar, here 635.

30 Ferriter, Diarmaid, ‘Suffer little children? The historical validity of memoirs of Irish childhood’, in Dunne, Joseph and Kelly, James eds., Childhood and its discontents: the first Seamus Heaney lectures (Dublin, 2003), 69106Google Scholar.

31 Brannen, ‘Childhoods across the generations’, 426.

32 Humphries, Childhood and child labour, 24.

33 Thirteen respondents provided descriptions of the journey to school in their narratives, while a further six described regular patterns of visiting with relatives in separate, non-family households. Eight respondents described instances of the residential circulation discussed in section 5; a further three referred to shorter-term residential circulation, during summer holidays, for example. The analysis is based on an in-depth reading of all the narratives included in the sample. Just two cases provided limited relevant material. In one case the respondent was exceptionally frail and the interview correspondingly thin. In the second case the respondent was from an exceptionally wealthy, elite family and the life experiences were therefore very different from those of other respondents in the study.

34 Alice Taylor, To school through the fields: an Irish country childhood (Dublin, 1988), available at http://www.obrien.ie/to-school-through-the-fields (accessed 7 October 2013).

35 Ferriter, ‘Suffer little children’, 89–90.

36 Arensberg and Kimball, Family and community in Ireland, 174, 184–6.

37 See Hajnal, John, ‘Household formation patterns in historical perspective’, Population and Development Review 8, 3 (1982), 449–94Google Scholar; Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette and Wall, Richard, ‘Domestic servants in comparative perspective’, History of the Family 10, 4 (2005), 345–54Google Scholar.

38 Curtin, Chris and Varley, Anthony, ‘Children and childhood in rural Ireland: a consideration of the ethnographic literature’, in Curtin, Chris, Kelly, Mary and O'Dowd, Liam eds., Culture and ideology in Ireland (Galway, 1984)Google Scholar.

39 Breen, Richard, ‘Farm servanthood in Ireland, 1900–40’, Economic History Review 36, 1 (1983), 87102Google Scholar.

40 Fahey, Tony, ‘State, family and compulsory schooling in Ireland’, Economic and Social Review 23, 4 (1992), 369–95Google Scholar, 387–8.

41 Breen, ‘Farm servanthood’.

42 This pattern is consistent evidence that, in the Netherlands, altruistic motives seem to have governed the decision to take in kin, at least from the perspective of receiving family households. Kok, Jan and Mandemakers, Kees, ‘A life-course approach to co-residence in the Netherlands, 1850–1940’, Continuity and Change 25, 2 (2010), 285312Google Scholar, 304–7.

43 See Gray, Jane, Geraghty, Ruth and Ralph, David, ‘Young children and their grandparents: a secondary analysis across four birth cohorts’, Families, Relationships and Societies 2, 2 (2013), 289–98Google Scholar.

44 On gender inequality see Shortall, Sally, ‘The dearth of data on Irish farm wives: a critical review of the literature’, Economic and Social Review 22, 4 (1991), 311–32Google Scholar. On sibling order and inheritance, see Ó Gráda, Cormac, ‘Primogeniture and ultimogeniture in rural Ireland’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, 3 (1980), 491–7Google Scholar and Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, 151–4.

45 See the discussion in Gray, Jane, ‘Poverty and the life cycle in twentieth century Ireland: changing experiences of childhood, education and the transition to adulthood’, Combat Poverty Agency Working Paper Series 10, 4 (2010), 159Google Scholar.

46 Gray, Jane and O'Carroll, Aileen, ‘Education and class formation in 20th century Ireland: a retrospective qualitative longitudinal analysis’, Sociology 46, 4 (2012), 696711Google Scholar.