Adolescent Girlhood in Eighteenth Century Ireland

This chapter draws on modern ideas about adolescence to explore writings by girls in eighteenth century Ireland. The central source used for this analysis is the journal of Mary Leadbeater, a Quaker from Co. Kildare which she began when she was eleven years of age. The format and tone of Leadbeater’s journal changed as she moved into her late teens and began to engage more with the public world of the Irish Quaker community. The chapter also draws on writings by other Irish women to chart the transition from girlhood through to young adulthood. When did Leadbeater identify herself as a woman rather than a girl? The article will compare Leadbeater’s account of her girlhood and adolescence with those of other Irish women. Dorothea Herbert’s memoirs lament not just her failure to marry but the fact that she continued to live in her parents’ house while her siblings and friends moved into separate marital homes. Did Herbert perceive marriage as the ritual which transformed girls into women and, if so, did she consider herself immured in a permanent state of girlhood? The article also compares the personal accounts by women of their girlhood with the numerous conduct books for girls which began to be printed in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent did the theoretical advice bear any relationship to the reality of Irish girls’ lives?