Overview

Trends in Marriage Among Irish Immigrants in New York, 1880

“We are certain of three things about marriage and family in Ireland in the years 1850–1922. The first is that Irish people in general married at a lower rate than the European norm; the second is that they married comparatively late: the average age of brides in 1911 was 29, that of bridegrooms 33. The third is that, once married, Irish people had what were, by European standards, large families.”

– Caitriona Clear1

Did these trends continue once Irish immigrants settled in New York, continuing to marry late, at a lower rate, and bearing more children once married? Once in New York, who do these immigrants choose to marry, and where do they live? In order to gain a picture of marriage practices in 19th century New York, we turn to data from the 1880 Census.

1. Evidence suggests that Irish-born New Yorkers do marry fairly late – the average age hovering around 25 and 29 for women and men, respectively.

Why? Many young Irish-born women went into domestic service at the time, often an all-consuming, live-in occupation which best fit single women without the responsibilities of caring for her own home and children. On the men’s side, “given the explosion in work opportunities for unskilled men on railroad or canal building projects, Irish male newcomers in particular who disembarked in New York may have left immediately.”2 It would make sense for these young adults to delay marriage and children until they had established savings and were able to settle down in their own community.

However, these average ages are noticeably younger than those provided by Clear in the quote above concerning average ages of marriage in Ireland. Whereas impartible inheritance and limited resources in Ireland made it difficult for new couples in the famine era to start a life on their own, a rapidly expanding New York provided many more opportunities for young people to support themselves. So while the average age at which these immigrants married might be on the older side for the time, it decreased from the average in Ireland thanks to the greater availability of housing and jobs in New York.

2. Irish-born residents do not cluster geographically according to marital status.

This is not the New York in which you grow up partying single in the Village and then move to Park Slope to raise a family. According to our mapped 10 percent sample,3 single, married, and widowed people were geographically intermixed across all Irish neighborhoods. Given what we know about the cramped livings conditions of many Irish Catholic immigrants, it’s unlikely that moving to a bigger apartment or ‘nicer’ neighborhood to accommodate children was a financial possibility for many. Community and familial bonds were also of the utmost importance to these immigrant groups, and the Irish were unlikely to leave a long-standing network of neighbors, friends, and family members just because their relationship status changed.

3. While the overwhelming majority (99.9%) of Irish-born New Yorkers chose to marry white spouses with very close ethnic backgrounds, there were important cases of interracial relationships in working-class Irish neighborhoods in particular.

In the 1880 census, 225 Irish-born residents reported having a spouse who identified as Black/Negro. While this represents a fraction of one percent of the population, the number is nonetheless significant at a time when racial tensions were running high. In the 19th century, many Americans considered the Irish an entirely different (and inferior) race despite their white complexion. Irishmen and women were often depicted with simian features in politically-charged cartoons, placing them on the level of animals.

In a world this sensitive to race, it’s a wonder that any formal marriages between African Americans and the Irish took place at all. Ferris argues that it was the shared suffering the two groups encountered as two of the poorest groups in New York that formed the basis for these relationships. “While the close proximity of Irish and black residents could breed conflict, it was in these working class, racially integrated communities that greater tolerance and harmony could also be found, and indeed where interracial marriages often took place.”4 “Often” might be a factual stretch, but there is no denying that the forced closeness of dense neighborhoods like Five Points encouraged interracial cooperation. Another potential reason for interracial marriage, particularly between black men and white Irish women, could be the fact that the number of women emigrating from Ireland was significantly higher than the number of men from Ireland (unique to that country). According to McCaa, “the intermarriage transition in New York City suggests that, in the first stages of immigration, unbalanced ethnic sex-ratios were powerful forces precipitating intermarriage.”5 This is not to say that Irishwomen turned to black men only because there were no Irishmen left of course, but the comparative lack of a wide and attractive pool of Irish-born suitors surely helped some decide to look beyond their ethnic boundaries. Still, inmarriage was the overwhelming norm among the Irish-born in New York, and their group size as nearly a quarter of the city’s population made the fact that some chose to out-marry even more surprising.

1. Caitríona Clear. Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland 1850-1922. 2007. Digital file. 75.

2. Hasia R. Diner, “‘The Most Irish City in the Union’: The Era of the Great Migration, 1844-1877,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): 91.

3. Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010).

4. Virginia Ferris, “Inside of the Family Circle: Irish and African American Interracial Marriage in New York City’s Eighth Ward, 1870,” American Journal of Irish Studies 9 (2012): 154.

5. Robert McCaa, “Ethnic Intermarriage and Gender in New York City,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 no. 2 (1993): 209.