Place and Power in Irish Farms at the End of the Nineteenth Century¹

Using an anthropological approach that views space as a cultural process created through the interaction between environment, the cultural meanings attached to those environments, and gendered bodies (with their own attached cultural meanings), this article explores how understandings of space in Ireland, and on the farm in particular, shaped women's role in farming households and more broadly in late nineteenth-century rural Ireland. It then raises questions about the implications of this for gendered interactions on the farm and for power relationships in the family.