Irish-America is awash with stories of successful Irish migrants; the men and women who built industrial cities, served its people, or educated its children.
Lizzie Halliday, who left Co Antrim as a child, is not an Irish-American success story. She was described by the New York Times at her death in 1918 as the “worst woman on earth”. She was the first woman sentenced to execution in the US by the electric chair.
Halliday had reportedly been married six times by the age of 30. Her involvement in her husbands’ deaths was unquestioned, until the body of her sixth husband was discovered under the floorboards of their house, and two neighbours were found dead in a nearby barn.
Her perceived mental ill-health saved her from electrocution. Instead, she was incarcerated in an asylum, where she would go on to kill an attendant by stabbing her with shears.
Arrests
This serial killer’s crimes were unusual, but the arrest of Irish women in North America was not. Irish women were regularly the largest ethnic group in courts and prisons. Between 1860 and 1881, Irish women in Toronto Jail made up around 60 per cent of the entire female prison population, outnumbering every other nationality - including Canadian-born women - combined.
Irish women also occasionally outnumbered Irish men. In 1861, Irish women were arrested 12,603 times in New York, while 11,672 arrests involved Irish men. Women tend to be fewer in crime statistics generally, both historically and today, so the overrepresentation of Irish women is particularly striking.
The “Bad Bridget” project that we have been working on for three years explores the history of criminal and deviant Irish women in North America from 1838 to 1918.
During this period, more than five and a half million migrants departed Ireland for North America. A desire to demonstrate that those who left poverty in Ireland successfully climbed the social ladder in the “new world” have swept stories of criminal women like Lizzie Halliday under the carpet.