Between 1885 and 1920, females outnumbered males (among the 1.4 million people leaving Ireland) by almost twenty thousand.

As hard as it was to find community after emigrating, the dispersion across the country—and the tedious social restrictiveness of service—made the prospect of marriage significantly harder to imagine.

I don’t like all these marriages with foreigners, noted one woman who had left Ireland in the early years of the Twentieth Century. My sister married a Scotchman and that’s bad enough.

Pride in one’s story (and country) of origin was instrumental to a particular kind of resilience necessary to endure the conditions of service.

The Irish are thrifty, witty, and unusually fair of looks, she continued. So why not marry an Irishman and make a better race?