Deirdre Moloney, "A Transatlantic Reform: Boston's Port Protection Program and Irish Women

Immigrants," Journal of American Ethnic History, 19 (1999): 50-67

While from my last article I found out that there is a lot more gender equality in regards to opportunities in
the Irish culture, I found out through this article that women still are not treated close to as fairly as men.
A lot of women immigrated to America during the late 19th century to early 20th. These women were
typically young, single, and in search of working opportunities. Since these women were single, there was scarcity
that many bad things would happened. This is the origin of port programs like CIS (the Charitable Irish Society),
and the Boston port program, whose goal was to help these single women better, and more safely, integrate into the
population. What I learned is that the Irish culture is actually a very high esteemed culture compared to others. The
reason I say this is that during the peak of Irish immigration in 1890, Ireland had the lowest illegitimacy rate among
15 countries) (p. 51). What I learned is that the Boston port program was that it was not actually created to protect
Irish immigrants but rather monitor their behavior. The reform effort was certainly double-edged; the flip side of
protection was a punitive form of social control, often occurring well after the immigration process had ended (p.
62). So in fact women in terms of moral were not even close to treated the same. It was just the opposite in terms of
other cultures where women were supposed to be housewives, Irish women were expected to go to work and
contribute to society. So in order to make sure the women did this, they were often times threatened with
deportation, even if they had done nothing criminally wrong.
Another interesting thing from this article that I found is the story about Charlotte Grace OBrien, a
wealthy daughter of an Irish nationalist. The Boston port program started after OBrien went on a tour addressing
the dangers of immigrating to the US for women. Originally she claims that a program should be based around
helping to find jobs, housing, and providing funds for poor immigrants, but as I learned also overwhelmingly turns
into this behavior censorship. What is interesting is that OBrien believed that her immigration programs could help
other European countries with the immigration process (p. 54). So I am interested to see if there are any similarities
with other countries that my teammates found.
Overall what is developed by the Irish is not only just an immigration plan that aims to protect the
immigrants and help the process be a little easier going. What is actually developed is a way to censor the public
(specifically Irish women in this case) into making sure that they are morally perfect, and also to prevent
unprivileged women from coming to America. I would like to see if there are any other inhumane ways where
immigration to the US becomes an ethical issue. Obviously this an extreme and this is not the way the immigration
process works today but as far as the debate over Hispanic immigration. I do agree that while most of them are
capable of working and being a contributing factor to society, that a big reason many are against it is that they take
away jobs from the privileged.