Extracted: Bad Bridget - crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women
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Loading... - Alice Barone
- 31 Jan 2023
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We present and extract from Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women, the new book from Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick.
Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble – bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale...
Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators 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 a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as ‘the worst woman on earth’. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these 'Bridgets' are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities. Bad Bridget is a work of social history and true crime, showing us a fascinating and previously unexplored world
'Sin and whiskey were written in the faces of every one of them', a journalist wrote on observing a group of women in the Toronto police court in May 1865. A ‘harder, more uncivilized and depraved looking set of abandoned women never appeared before the Court’ than this group of eleven women who had been arrested on Garrison Common. Seven of the women were Irish and they were all arrested for being drunk. The women were described as ‘stargazers’, a term used for sex workers who worked outside. They had been drinking and probably soliciting for trade from the soldiers in Fort York beside the Common.
Margaret McCormack was the eldest of the group at eighty years of age. She may not have been an active sex worker, but had been caught drinking and was arrested with the others. She found her situation in court hilarious and ‘with spasmodic fits of laughter enjoyed her elevation in the dock’. Julia Tracy, who was twenty years old, kept elbowing Margaret to get her to stop laughing, but her efforts had little effect and Margaret repeatedly dissolved into giggles. Twenty-year-old Maria Lee was apparently someone to whom ‘temperance, honesty and industry were a thing of the past’, and Elizabeth Stamford, who ‘with a red comforter around her head’ repeatedly shouted to the other women what was on the menu in jail that day, adding to the confusion and chaos. Catherine Glinn was ‘a frail one’, dressed in tattered rags, and 21-year-old Margaret Howard promised the magistrate that she would behave herself in future. This group of women were sent to prison together for sixty days. Read More…
