Society & Culture
Bad Bridget is a five-part podcast series which tells the unheard stories of Irish girls and women who emigrated to North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The series is a culmination of over five years worth of research by historians Elaine Farrell of Queen’s University Belfast and Leanne McCormick of Ulster University. Each episode delves into the lives of these women who travelled across the Atlantic and didn’t quite find the American dream. The extensive research into police, court and prison records uncovers the types of criminal activity in which Irish women were involved, including drunkenness, sex work and murder. In the 1860s, Irish women alone made up 86% of the female prison population in New York, while a 19th-century survey of 1,238 foreign-born sex workers found that 706 were Irish, just over half. In today’s episode, Farrell and McCormick speak to Róisín Ingle about the Irish women that history chose to forget.