10th October 2024, 6.30pm, Ulster University Belfast
The annual IAAS Emmerson Lecture, in conjunction with Ulster Talks, will take place next Thursday, October 10th. Professors Elaine Farrell (QUB) and Leanne McCormick (UU), creators of the celebrated ‘Bad Bridget’ podcast, and the bestselling, chart topping book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women, speaking to us about the lives of Irish women in North America.
Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were large numbers of women, many young and many travelling alone. Some prospered making new lives for themselves and sending money back home. Others quickly found themselves in trouble and on an astonishing scale. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated ‘Bad Bridget’ podcast, and the bestselling, chart topping book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women have unearthed a world in which Irish women in America actually outnumbered Irish men in prison. A world in which you could get locked up for ‘stubbornness’, and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as ‘the worst woman on earth’. Join them to hear the stories of Irish women and girls which are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these ‘Bad Bridgets’ are women who went from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.