Recent scholarship reveals that women's employment patterns in the nineteenth century were more complex than the prevailing family wage ideology might suggest. This was especially true for those women living in female-headed households. Although female-headed households represented a sizeable minority of the working class, there has been little systematic analysis of them in Ireland. This article addresses this gap and contributes to a more differentiated perspective by examining several survival strategies utilized by female-headed households to ensure independence in the Ulster parish of Tullylish, in 1900, including employment patterns, household formation, marriage patterns, literacy, and schooling.
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