BAD BRIDGET: Crime, Mayhem & The Lives of Irish Immigrant Women

By Elaine Farrell & Leanne McCormick

The centrality of emigration to Irelands’ history has resulted in much excellent research on Irish migration and the diaspora abroad. But criminal and deviant Irish women have not been a major feature of that research. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick grew tired of reading scholarship centred predominately around Irish men emigrating. They spent six years trawling archives and historical records, mainly in New York, Boston and Toronto, and were shocked with what they discovered. They found huge numbers of Irish women who got jobs but were later fired, women who haunted the bars and drinking saloons, mothers who had their children taken away or who gave them up, and girls and women who went to prison rather than to a convent.

These are the women they collectively dub Bad Bridget, and they deserve to have their experiences showcased as part of the Irish emigration story.

Elaine and Leanne, creator of the celebrated ‘Bad Bridget’ podcast, have

unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for ‘stubbornness’ and in which an Irish serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as ‘the worst woman on earth’. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny, and often moving.

From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these Bad Bridget’s are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.

Elaine Farrell is a Reader in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, and co-creator with Leanne McCormick of the Bad Bridget project. She is a historian of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Ireland, with particular interests in crime and punishment, women and gender, and lived experiences for ‘ordinary’ Irish inhabitants. Her monographs on Women, crime and punishment in Ireland have won awards, and she has published papers on convict tattoos, women in WWI, migration, children in prison, and women’s voices. She lives in Belfast.

Leanne McCormick is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and co-creator with Elaine Farrell of the Bad Bridget project. She is Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at Ulster University, where she has taught history since 2009. Her research interests include women's history, history of sexuality and history of medicine inIreland/Northern Ireland and she has published widely in these areas. She lives in Ballymone