Content area
Full text
The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home. Prod. by Thomas Lennon. Lennon Documentary Group in association with Wait Disney Studios and WGBH-Boston, 1998. 360 mins. (PBs Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698)
May the Road Rise to Meet You: The Irish-American Experience. Prod. by Bryan Skene. Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1998. 57 mins. (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543-2053)
A million and a half people fled Ireland during the famine of the late 1840s, and another 4.2 million left the country between 1851 and 1920. Roughly half of all those leaving Ireland in those years were women, usually unmarried, seeking paid work in American cities. Once across the Atlantic Ocean, Irish women provided the passage money for hundreds of thousands of their siblings still at home. By the turn of the century, the daughters of the immigrant generation had entered the educated lower middle class of teaching and nursing. Despite the importance of women in the history of Irish America, the focus of two recent television documentaries, The Irish in America and May the Road Rise to Meet You, is almost exclusively on men.
The longer of the two films, the four-part The Irish in America, begins with the famine of the late 1840s, making that atypical disaster the trope for the entire Irish experience in America. Using a hodgepodge of unattributed snippets from recent research on the subject of the famine and Irish migration, the series shows how Irish men, forced out of...