Search

This thesis explores the institutional care of Irish women, aged fifty years or more, from 1845 to the introduction of the Old Age Pension in 1908. Moving beyond the experiences of the adolescent and young women, which have been explored by historians in recent years, this study introduces the aged grandmother, elderly widow and old spinster to the historical record. This exploration serves to deepen not only our understanding of the life course in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also what it truly meant to be a woman in the past. Archival sources were used to compile thirty distinct databases, containing 12,925 entries. These represent 7,112 elderly women who resided in Irish workhouses, charitable homes, lunatic asylums, prisons and infirmaries as some point between 1845 and 1908. This ambitious study focuses primarily on gender differences, comparing and contrasting the institutional experiences of older women and men. However, it also addresses issues of class, religion and family. The impact of late life poverty is explored, alongside experiences of those from middle-class families, assessing the standard of care for older women of diverse social status. It considers the role of religion in gaining access to institutions established by religious orders, highlighting the treatment of women who adhered to different faiths. Lastly, by exploring the movement of women through these institutions, this thesis provides an insight into the changing demographic of Ireland, showing how family structure was altered by the Great Famine of 1845-53. In doing so, it reveals the extent to which family members adopted the responsibility of caring for their older relatives. In addressing these key themes, this thesis serves to further our understanding of family dynamics and relationships, societal attitudes and responses towards old age and the importance of poor relief and welfare for aged women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland.

In this thesis we explore the period of renewal that Athens experienced during the second century AD. This century saw Athens at the peak of her cultural prominence in the Roman Empire: the city was the centre of the League of the Panhellenion and hosted a vibrant sophistic scene that attracted orators from across the Greek world, developments which were ideologically fuelled by contemporary conceptions of Classical Athens. While this Athenian 'golden age' is a standard feature of scholarship on Greek culture under Rome, my thesis delves further to explore the renewal of the urban and rural landscapes at this time and the relationship between that process and constructions of Athenian identity. We approach the renewal of second-century Athens through four lenses: past and present in the Ilissos area; the rhetoric of the Panhellenion; elite conflict and competition; and the character of the Attic countryside. My central conclusions are as follows: 1. The renewal of Athens was effected chiefly by Hadrian and the Athenian elite and was modelled on an ideal Athenian past, strategically manipulated to suit present purpose; the attractions of the fifth-century golden age for this programme of renewal meant that politically contentious history of radical democracy and aggressive imperialism had to be safely rewritten. 2. Athens and Attica retained their uniquely integrated character in the second century. Rural Attica was the subject of a powerful sacro-idyllic ideology and played a vital role in concepts of Athenian identity, while simultaneously serving as a functional landscape of production and inhabitation. 3. The true socio-economic importance of the Attic countryside as a settled and productive landscape should be investigated without unduly privileging the limited evidence from survey, and by combining all available sources, both literary and documentary, with attention to their content, cultural context and ideological relevance.