This work "documents the challenges faced by Irish women and their complex reactions. This interdisciplinary volume is the first sustained analysis of both reform and resistance in modern Irish women's history. By investigating philanthropies, prisons, hospitals, and inebriate reformatories; interrogating court records, begging letters, and memoirs; and exploring the "imaginative resistance" of folk narratives and formulaic cursing, the authors illuminate previously obscured experiences of Irish women. Several contributores explore the ways in which middle-class and elite women, through philanthropy and reform, found their voices by attempting to regulate the lives of the poor. Rather than passively accepting their lot, these women were often insubordinate, opportunistic in their use of charity, and defiant toward the ideologies of dominating elites." - see back cover.

Includes bibliographical references and index.