Revising the Rags-to-Riches Model: Female Famine Immigrants In New York and Their Remarkable Saving Habits
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2018-10-18
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en
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The rags-to-riches paradigm has played an important role in describing immigrant experience in nineteenth-century America and focuses on the immigrant’s development from poverty to wealth. Due to a conflation of Irish famine and immigrant historiography, Irish immigrants appeared at the bottom of every list of immigrant development: they were seen as the most impoverished immigrants America has ever welcomed. Women, moreover, have often been overlooked in research. This thesis focuses on Irishwomen who moved to New York during the Great Irish Famine and its immediate aftermath. Records from the EISB show that some of these women were able to save considerable sums of money. By combining the bank records of domestic servants, needle traders and business owners, with analyses of working women in historical novels written by the famine generation and newspaper articles, this interdisciplinary thesis aims to give Irish female immigrants a voice in historical research.
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Faculteit der Letteren