Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women

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Bad Bridget represents the beginning of a new experience here for our visitors with our collaboration focusing on new sensory elements. Elaine Farrell, Women, crime and punishment in Ireland: life in the nineteenth-century convict prison (Cambridge, 2020).

Hear from Dr Elaine Farrell (Queen's University) and Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) who came up with the concept for the exhibition.They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through a succession of stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes very funny, and often deeply moving. Some stories and circumstances were difficult to read by their nature, but the authors handled this well. From alcoholism, sex work, vagrancy, theft, kidnapping, infanticide, and murder, the picture of Irish women is not a good one. Our exhibition shines a light on their living conditions in the tenement and the treatment they received from the authorities. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem through stories that are strange, sometimes funny and often moving.

Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, talk about their bestselling book and tell the strange, funny, and often moving stories of these Bad Bridgets, young women who left their impoverished homeland and ended up as sex workers, thieves, kidnappers and killers.Leanne: We had been filming at the Ulster Folk Museum in August 2019 with Moya Neeson from Morrow Communications who introduced us to Colin Catney and told him about the project. Emigration as a way to avoid the potential stigma and shame associated with a pregnancy outside marriage points to harsh societal attitudes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland.

Farrell and McCormick delivers a fantastic narrative of the circumstances and events which led Irish women to immigrate to America and show how their lives in the promising New World was anything but. Andrew McDowell came on board, we successfully applied for funding from the AHRC and after many meetings later here we are today!The answer is the complexities of Irish identity, our relationship with Catholicism and scandals surrounding the 19th century Mormon practice of polygamy. The exhibition features almost 150 original objects from the collections of National Museums NI, alongside four bespoke scents, curated by AVM Curiosities. Bad Bridget' provides an insight into life at sea and the dangers and difficulties these women faced. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

This 'back and forth' composing became a lot of fun, where the two women were eagerly waiting for each other’s musical ideas to which they could then respond in their own time and in their own homes (Franziska indeed recorded in her small but nicely resonant bathroom in Belfast! Like it was so incomprehensible to some of the well-meaning aid societies why an immigrant woman in an abusive relationship living in squalor with more kids than she could handle would want to have a drink from time to time to forget reality! A lively, entertaining, if also at times incredibly sobering read, Bad Bridget provides a richly evocative account of the experiences of Irish female emigrants who found themselves on the wrong side of the law in nineteenth-century North America.

Listen to the stories of girls and women who left Ireland pregnant or became pregnant in North America outside marriage. Please note that a lot of music was produced in that way, inspired by the stories of the Bad Bridget, but evidently not everything could go into the final podcast. With that said, I fully appreciate the limitations of these stories where so little information is often available and the limitations of the written word as a medium for conveying this information that probably best lends itself to a more conversational format, so now that I’m properly initiated into the topic, I’m really looking forward to listening to Farrell and McCormick’s podcast of the same name!