The Slender Thread

"In The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860, Willeen Keough explores the lives of Irish-Newfoundland women who cofounded fishing communities along the southern Avalon Peninsula in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using gender as a category of analysis, refracted through the lenses of ethnicity and class, Keough concentrates on the female dynamics of immigration and community formation, attempting to discern the meanings that women ascribed to their experiences and the understandings of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood that were constructed within this New World environment." "Keough layers her evidence, interweaving traditional and nontraditional sources to re-create the everyday world of these Irish-Newfoundland women. She embraces a technique of overlay and interplay and invites the reader to move between layers of information that create a vivid impression of the whole."--BOOK JACKET.