While an estimated two million people died from the effects of the famine, many were left impoverished, forced to live in the streets and beg for food. The unsanitary conditions on the streets combined with outbreaks of diseases only raised the death toll. Men, women, and children were initially unwilling and unprepared to face the severity of hunger and homelessness, for .
"[h]unger in its incipient stages, never sleeps, never neglects its watch, but continues sharpening the inventive faculties, till, like the drunkard's thirst, intrigue and dissimulation give startling proof of the varied materials which compose the entire man." (Nicholson, 232).
Nicholson recounts a story of the hungry woman who killed their starving dog in hopes that her children could survive a little longer. Incidents such as this helped bring to light the harshness of the famine to the well-to-do upper class who "had never realized that four millions of people were subsisting entirely on the potatoe" (Nicholson, 223).
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and the impoverished and dispossessed learned the skills of fruit trading and begging in order to survive for themselves and their families. Irish women and children staked their claim on the fruit trading business because they were "unable to do anything else to eke out the means of their husbands" (Mayhew, 105). Although prior to the famine these street women relied on the economic stability of their husbands and families, the inconsistency of the poor street life forced the women to depend on themselves for what little financial support they could gain. In fact, "women tended to he more resilient than men to the effects of the Famine" (Kinnealy 8). Often these women had children to feed so the incentive to continue the strife was much greater than husbands who had abandoned their wives, were single, or widowed. .
Although the Irish men were comparably destitute, their struggle differed in many ways.
