When Joyce wrote Dubliners, women faced highly restrictive gender roles and a lack of individual autonomy. These ideas, however, were being challenged in many countries. Early feminist ideas were posited in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the first wave of feminism in the United States began in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, which launched the women’s suffrage movement. In Ireland, many lower-class women worked on farms and in factories through the 19th century, but more women were performing domestic labor exclusively. Eveline has a job, indicating her status as a working-class woman, but she is also required to maintain her household, and her father steals her wages. Faced with this double exploitation, Eveline attempts to secure a brighter future through Frank’s offer of marriage. Eveline’s choice represents the struggle for increasing autonomy and self-determination for women. Many Irish women, married and unmarried, left Ireland before, during, and after the Great Famine and sought new lives in America, Europe, and South America.

In Ireland, women began to take on larger roles in the Irish nationalist movement; for example, Countess Markievicz, who was imprisoned for her role in the 1916 Easter Rising, implored Irish women to take up arms and fight for Irish independence.