DID IRISH MARRIAGE PATTERNS SURVIVE THE EMIGRANT VOYAGE? IRISH-AMERICAN NUPTIALITY, 1880-1920

Marriage in Ireland became relatively uncommon in the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s. By 1911 over one-quarter of each cohort in Ireland had never married. Explanations of Ireland's demographic patterns often turn on some supposed distinctive feature of Irish culture. Several authors have supported this line of reasoning by noting that in the United States, the Irish-born and their children were less likely to marry than were native whites of native parentage, and indeed less likely to marry than nearly any other immigrant group. This comparison is misleading, however: the Irish in the United States had other characteristics that were associated with low marriage chances among natives. This paper uses the Public Use Sample of the United States census of 1880, 1900, 1910 and 1920 to achieve a fine-grained comparison of the Irish (immigrants and their children) to native whites. Once we control for the Irish immigrants' relatively low socio-economic status the differences in marriage patterns are smaller than simple tabulations imply. Moreover, a significant change in Irish-American nuptiality between 1880 and 1910, along with differences in the experiences of men and women, cast doubt on any story that would focus on deep-seated attitudes and apply to all Irish people. We discuss the implications of these findings for studies of demographic patterns in Ireland and of Irish and other immigrant groups in the United States.