The Slender Thread

In The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860, Willeen Keough explores the lives of Irish-Newfoundland women who cofounded fishing communities along the southern Avalon Peninsula in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using gender as a category of analysis, refracted through the lenses of ethnicity and class, Keough concentrates on the female dynamics of immigration and community formation, attempting to discern the meanings that women ascribed to their experiences and the understandings of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood that were constructed within this New World environment.

Irish women immigrated to Newfoundland to pursue opportunities in the island's fishery and provided demographic continuities and stability in populations that rose and ebbed with the movements of transient fishermen. While official discourse cast these women as vagrants and whores, they in fact held considerable status and authority within the plebeian community. Essential in subsistence, exchange, and family production, they inhabited public spaces, played visible roles in informal conflict resolution, and were spiritual guides in both formal Catholicism and an alternative non-Christian belief system. Only the Catholic church attempted to confine these women to moral guardianship of the home, but such a civilizing agenda clashed with the realities of their lives.

The construction of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood in these fishing communities thus contrasted strongly with middle-class feminine ideals of domesticity, fragility, and dependence. Irish-Newfoundland women also resisted the pressures of gender ideology more successfully than their non-emigrating sisters. As the homeland underwent massive demographic and economic transitions, rural Irish women were increasingly channeled away from productive work and into domesticity and economic dependence. Irish women on the southern Avalon, however, remained economically active, and their status and power in their communities remained intact.

Keough layers her evidence, interweaving traditional and nontraditional sources to re-create the everyday world of these Irish-Newfoundland women. She embraces a technique of overlay and interplay and invites the reader to move between layers of information that create a vivid impression of the whole.