Catherine Healy – författare

New Zealand was the first country in the world to decriminalise all sectors of sex work. This book provides an in-depth look at New Zealand's experience of decriminalisation. It provides first-hand views and experiences of this policy from the point of view of those involved in the sex industry, as well as people involved in developing, implementing, researching and reviewing the policies. Presenting an example of radical legal reform in an area of current policy debate it will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates as well as policy makers and activists.

New Zealand was the first country in the world to decriminalise all sectors of sex work. This book provides an in-depth look at New Zealand''s experience of decriminalisation. It provides first-hand views and experiences of this policy from the point of view of those involved in the sex industry, as well as people involved in developing, implementing, researching and reviewing the policies. Presenting an example of radical legal reform in an area of current policy debate it will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates as well as policy makers and activists.

This book provides the first major transatlantic history of Irish serving women, drawing on four years of archival research in Dublin, Belfast, New York, Boston, London and Liverpool. Domestic service was the largest source of employment for generations of women who left Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine. The perceived difficulty of managing Irish servants became a prominent feature of cultural discourse in the United States and England, where countless cartoons, editorials and literary works caricatured the figure of ‘Bridget’. Irish maids and cooks were a canvas on which to project fears not only about Irish politics and immigration but also changing class and gender roles.  Existing scholarship on the Irish experience of domestic service has typically focused on socio-economic conditions, but such approaches tend not to capture the complex ways in which Irish female immigrants were encountered both in private households and in wider society. Irish servants were framed through discourses that could involve nostalgia and guilt as well as amusement and disgust: more complex scripts, in general, than those used to describe Irish immigrant men. The period covered in the book allows for a diverse range of cultural sources – including romance novels and Hollywood films depicting working Irish women – to be examined, moving beyond the Victorian-era caricatures typically emphasised in earlier work on the Irish in domestic service.