Bad Bridgets podcast about crime among Irish women in US inspires film | Podcasts
It started as a combing through dusty archives by two history professors for an academic project about Irish women immigrants in Canada and the United States; a valuable but perhaps unsuitable topic for research.
After all, the subjects were masses of people from the Irish diaspora whose presence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.
They were poor girls and women who were on the wrong side of the law and lived and died in poverty; Footnotes of the mass migrations to New York, Boston, and Toronto in the 19th century.
But two academics researching police, court and prison archives for this secret world of women’s crime coined the term Bad Bridgets, which has turned into a popular podcast, a book and now a Hollywood movie.
Margot Robbie’s production company announced this week that it will turn the stories into a feature film starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and directed by Rich Peppiatt, who made Kneecap.
“This is a new world for us,” said Elaine Farrell, who teaches at Queen’s University Belfast. “It’s been lovely the number of messages and emails from people saying this is great, great news.”
Ulster University collaborator Leanne McCormick welcomed the move to the screen. “Delivering your baby is something we’ve been working on for a very long time, but it’s also really exciting to see how people with expertise that we don’t have are taking what we’ve created and turning it into something else and different.”
In the film, Edgar-Jones, who made a name for himself in Normal People, and Emilia Jones, who starred in Coda, play sisters who leave famine-ridden Ireland to escape an abusive father, poverty and hunger. They enter the shadow world of the “Bad Bridgets”, consisting of sex workers, thieves, drunkards and murderers in New York.
Peppiatt and Kneecap producer Trevor Birney have optioned the historians’ book Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women and will collaborate with Robbie’s production company LuckyChap.
Oscar-winning production designer James Price and costume designer Kate Hawley will work on the film, which will begin shooting in Ireland and Northern Ireland next year.
“I’d like to think we’ll have a lot of influence on the movie, but I don’t think we will,” Farrell said. “It’s a little scary because as historians you have certain ideas, we think about things in certain ways. So there’s a little bit of latitude.”
McCormick said they relied on Peppiatt, a former tabloid reporter who garlanded Kneecap, his semi-autobiographical film about the rap trio of the same name. “We’ll leave the movie to Rich. He’s an expert and has great ideas, so we’re really looking forward to seeing how it turns out.”
The original academic project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, dispelled the traditional narrative that female Irish immigrants were domestic servants, cooks, wives and mothers known for industriousness and honesty.
In the 1860s, Irish people made up about a quarter of New York’s population, but Irish men made up half of the male prison population and Irish women made up 86% of the female prison population. A survey of 1,238 foreign-born sex workers in the city found 706 (just over half) were Irish.
Research has uncovered individual stories such as that of Ellen Price, who was described as appearing in a Toronto court in 1865 “as drunk as ever, with a flaming red feather in her hat.” After being taken to prison, he joined the chorus in Rocky Road to Dublin.
Pickpocket Margaret Brown, known as Old Mother Hubbard, tried to escape from a Chicago jail in 1877 by tying sheets together but fell and was seriously injured. Lizzie Halliday, originally from County Antrim, was convicted of multiple murders and became the first woman to be sentenced to death in the electric chair in New York, but the sentence was commuted on the grounds of insanity.
Farrell said fans of the book and podcast, which has just begun its second season, value learning about this aspect of the Irish immigrant experience. “They weren’t all good wives, mothers, nuns, or teachers. There’s a slightly darker side to it. I don’t want to meet these women, but I like that we can see their strengths and defiance.”
Historians hope aspects of their “favorite Bridgets” will make it to the big screen, but in the meantime they will continue to research and teach. “Premiere speeches and all that are really exciting, but we still have to do our day jobs,” McCormick said. They could still dream of showing off, Farrell joked. “That’s our main concern, you know, what are we going to wear on the red carpet?”
