‘Carrying it on her shoulder, like an Irish-woman’: early modern English traveller perceptions of women in Ireland, America, and Africa, 1555–1745

This article compares how early modern English travel accounts to Ireland, America, and Africa portrayed native women. It examines gendered tropes that reoccurred in all these writings, such as ease of childbirth, breast size, and breastfeeding over the shoulder. It argues that many of these tropes that helped shape the racialised thinking of indigenous people in America and Africa first appeared in English-written travel accounts to Ireland. In some examples, English travel writers in America and Africa made direct comparisons to Irish women. Accordingly, the article demonstrates that Ireland is significant for the study of early modern English imperialism. Perceptions of gender were central in formulating English racial perceptions of the Other in the New World, but there was nothing unique about these tropes. In other words, there was nothing particularly ‘African’ about English perceptions of African women. English imperialists perceived Native American, African, and Irish women through the same lens. The article shows that early modern notions of racial difference were constructed less on overt characteristics particular to a geographical zone of contact—for example, the skin colour of Africans—and more on certain transferable gendered tropes that framed perceptions of native women across all three continents.