Across nineteenth-century Europe young people inspired both revolutionary optimism and establishment anxieties. The French Revolution, historian Sergio Luzzatto has argued, "inaugurated a political rhetoric around young people that had lasting repercussions: that youth in its liberality and exuberance is a permanent danger to the political and social order." 1 From the radical democrats of Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy to the students of populist Russia, the "fathers and sons" paradigm of generational conflict reinforced assumptions about the involvement of young people, particularly males, in radicalism and collective action. 2 Eric Hobsbawm's seminal study Bandits highlighted the predominance of unmarried men under the age of twenty-five in rural unrest in Italy, Hungary, Manchuria, and Columbia, and argued that youth was "a phase of independence and potential rebellion. Young men, often united in formal or informal age bands, can move from job to job, fight and rove." 3 When preparing for rebellion in the 1860s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood proclaimed, "Youth of Ireland! All depends on you! Upon your courage and devotion hangs the fate of your country. You are our vanguard." At the same time the Irish Times dismissed the movement as nothing more than a lot of "hot-headed Irish youths" with no reasonable objectives. 4Acknowledgments: The research for this article was supported by the Irish Research Council. I am grateful to the anonymous CSSH reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. My thanks also go to Enrico Dal Lago, Enda Delaney, and Louise Jackson, and to the participants in Edinburgh's Modern Irish History seminar, for their advice on earlier versions. 934Depending on one's position, then, youth was something to be celebrated or denigrated.In the nineteenth century, young people were excluded from the electoral process, held little or no security over their labor, and were tied to rural household economies where jealousies relating to inheritance drew them into family conflicts. The alternative of migration to urban centers for employment disrupted relationships and created difficult adjustments. Young people's circumstances, it would appear, gave them reason to engage in radicalism and protest. Yet whether they did so is far from clear. Assumptions about their involvement regularly rest on, first, broad views associated with evolutionary psychology that see younger men as more likely to be caught up in violence, and second, the records of the authorities who believed lower-class youths were intrinsically prone to lawlessness and who exaggerated their role in unrest. This article examines concepts of youth, maturity, and generations in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy and the perceived connections between young people and political and social unrest. I will show that, rather than being consistent, the involvement of younger generations in collective action was uneven, and varied significantly according to specific historical contexts.

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First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large majority. This article analyses how a transnational movement translated into a local setting and how emigrants’ activism was shaped by factors of class, gender and religion. The circulation of mobile agitators and newspapers connected local branches in Dundee with the wider world of the Irish land reform movement, and this article seeks to uncover a more textured picture of the people who collected funds, attended rallies, and who are too often considered in the plural, as anonymous supporters grouped together under ethnic or political banners. The picture that emerges challenges existing views of the Ladies’ Land League as a predominantly middle-class affair. In Dundee the members were overwhelmingly working-class and their harsh experiences in the city’s jute industry shaped their activism. Local Catholic networks and ideas of religious humanitarianism contributed significantly to the branches, yet clergymen did not direct their activities, rather they responded to women’s mobilization.

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