The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930

By Margaret Lynch-Brennan

"Bridget" was the Irish immigrant servant girl who worked in American homes from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth. She is widely known as a pop culture cliché: the young girl who wreaked havoc in middle-class American homes. Now, in the first book-length treatment of the topic, Margaret Lynch-Brennan tells the real story of such Irish domestic servants, providing a richly detailed portrait of their lives and experiences. Drawing on personal correspondence and other primary sources, Lynch-Brennan gives voice to these young Irish women and celebrates their untold contribution to the ethnic history of the United States. In addition, recognizing the interest of scholars in contemporary domestic service, she devotes one chapter to comparing "Bridget’s" experience to that of other ethnic women over time in domestic service in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jun 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780815652670

Book preview

Annie Walsh, an Irish immigrant, worked as a domestic in Providence until her marriage in 1883. Courtesy of Daureen Aulenbach, Annie’s great-granddaughter.

Copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

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First Paperback Edition 2014

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ISBN (paper) 978-0-8156-3354-9 (cloth) 978-0-8156-3201-6 (e-book) 978-0-8156-5267-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hard-cover edition as follows:

Lynch-Brennan, Margaret.

The Irish Bridget : Irish immigrant women in domestic service in America, 1840–1930 / Margaret Lynch-Brennan.—1st ed.

p. cm.—(Irish studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3201-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Domestics—United States—History—19th century. 2. Domestics—United States—History—20th century. 3. Immigrants—United States—History—19th century. 4. Immigrants—United States—History—20th century. 5. Irish American women—United States—History—19th century. 6. Irish American women—United States—History—20th century.

I. Title.

HD6072.2.U5L96 2009

640’.46089162073—dc22

2008051731

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my loving husband, John David Brennan

MARGARET LYNCH-BRENNAN began her career as a classroom teacher. Over time she taught at the middle school, high school, and graduate levels. For many years she served as an administrator with the New York State Education Department working on issues related to civil rights, high school reform, and professional development for teachers. Since completing her Ph.D. in American history at the State University of New York at Albany, she has published numerous essays and presented at conferences in the United States, Germany, Australia, and Ireland. She retired from the New York State Education Department in January 2008 and now works as an independent scholar; she is a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars.

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword, MAUREEN O’ROURKE MURPHY

Preface

Introduction

1.Home Life in Ireland

2.From Ireland

3.To America

4.The World of the American Mistress

5.The Work World of the Irish Bridget

6.The Social World of the Irish Bridget

7.Was Bridget’s Experience Unique?

Epilogue

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Annie Walsh

1.Ellen O’Loughlin

2.Nora McCarthy and Mary Hayes

3.Hannah Collins

4.Catherine (Katie) Murray Manley

5.Catherine (Kathleen) Mannion

6.Mary Malone McHenry

7.Mary Anne (Mollie) Ryan’s passport

8.No Irish Need Apply advertisements

9.Bridget cartoon, 1867

10.Letter on Lizzie Bracken’s character

11.Bridget cartoon, 1904

12.Sarah Byrne

13.Catherine Larkin Vaughn

Foreword

MAUREEN O’ROURKE MURPHY

The immigration of single women distinguishes nineteenth-century Irish immigration to North America from the pattern of other western European migration. More women than men emigrated, and they did so as single women who stayed in North America and sponsored other family members, not parents but siblings, to join them. Historians of Irish immigration from Arnold Schrier to Lawrence J. McCaffrey and Kerby Miller have commented on this phenomenon, and pioneering scholars of Irish women’s immigration Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan have examined the history of those immigrant women in America. All have commented on the number of Irish immigrant women who worked as domestic servants, and some have included discussions of domestic servants’ experiences, the way that their work in service supported their families in Ireland and affected the lives of their own families when they left their positions to marry. We have waited until now for a book devoted completely to their story. Margaret Lynch-Brennan’s The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840–1930 examines the lives of the Irish women who worked in private homes in the urban Northeast. Nearly all of them were single Roman Catholics from rural Ireland. Since parents believed that education was the best investment they could make for emigrating girls, most young women had a national school education. Native speakers of Irish were literate in English.

A strength of this book is Lynch-Brennan’s description of the worlds of the Irish Bridgets: their lives in Ireland and their lives as servants in American households. She begins by situating her Irish women in the culture of rural Ireland—rural cottages and their interiors, diet, dress, housework, education, social life, and religious beliefs—and she pays particular attention to the postfamine culture of emigration in rural Irish communities, a culture that encouraged and supported young women’s decisions to leave their lives in Ireland for new opportunities in America. Lynch-Brennan enumerates the push-and-pull factors and the chain-migration phenomenon, the custom of immigrant women sending money or prepaid tickets to a younger sibling or niece or nephew who would in turn bring another family member, which accounted for periods of sustained migration from the Irish countryside.

Lynch-Brennan turns from rural Ireland to the American households where Irish domestic servants lived and worked. She analyzes American women’s roles in their own homes, the difference in power between the Irish mothers the Bridgets knew and the American housewives who were their employers. She offers an anthropological survey of the American household: interiors, diet, housework including table service, and employers’ interest in working for causes outside the house. A particular strength of this study is the attention to the relationship between the Irish domestic servant, her American employer, and the household where she worked and lived. She concludes that those relationships depended primarily on the amount of work required of the domestic servant, on her level of household skills, and on the personalities of servants and employers. An aspect of the personalities of Irish domestic servants was their well-known reputation for verbal assertiveness. Anecdotes of Bridget’s repartee have become part of the folklore of households and of Irish domestic servant lore. Bridget’s verbal assertiveness is part of a larger discussion of attitudes toward Irish domestic servants. Lynch-Brennan convincingly refutes Richard Jensen’s arguments regarding No Irish Need Apply, observing that the Biddy jokes and prejudices were part of the wider anti-Catholic bigotry associated with American nativism and the Know-Nothing Party.

Lynch-Brennan revisits Faye Dudden’s Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983) and other studies of American households to trace the history of Irish domestics, from finding work to experiencing the routine of the often ten-hour workday. She examines the amount and kind of housework required, the hazards of housework, and the improvement of servants’ lives that came in the early decades of the twentieth century with the introduction of running water, screens, kerosene and gas lights, the carpet sweeper, wood and coal ranges, and electricity. Other aspects of servant life that she discusses include the fact that the path of upward mobility led from a one-maid household to one with a staff, and that living at the work site involved difficulties: lack of privacy, around-the-clock availability, and the possibility of abuse from members of the employer’s family.

As much as possible, Lynch-Brennan uses interviews and letters to let the young women tell their own stories of the social world of the Irish Bridget. Their voices bring an authenticity and intimacy to this section. They reveal intense female friendships and yearnings for connections with home: letters, photographs, and local newspapers. They also maintained their connection with home by sending money, clothes, and prepaid tickets to others who wanted to emigrate. Like Bridget Moore, Derek Mahon’s Irish servant-girl author of the letter in To Mrs. Moore at Inishannon, who hears her mother’s voice calling me across the ocean, they dreamed of home.

Lynch-Brennan’s sources provide some insight into the life of Irish domestic servants beyond their households. Mass and devotions were social as well as spiritual, as they were at home, and Irish immigrants tended to identify themselves by parish. They visited family and friends in other households, participated in parish activities, and attended Irish dances, particularly the county society dances that offered opportunities to meet people from home, including the single men whom many later married. They learned to ride bicycles. They went to weddings and baptisms, to amusement parks and picnics, to fairs and on boat rides. Domestic servants in big houses could look forward to an annual servants’ ball, and they often summered with their families in summer homes at the shore or in the mountains. Their social life gave Irish domestics the excuse to indulge in their love of fashion. Out of her uniform, Bridget could pass for a middle-class American woman, so Bridget cartoons often portrayed the Irish domestic as a ridiculous figure with an over-the-top ensemble, sporting boas, boots, and bangles. Lynch-Brennan comments briefly about personal hygiene, including the accounts of bewildered young women who were unprepared for the onset of menses. Even a researcher as indefatigable as Lynch-Brennan found little information about sex.

In her thoughtful examination of the matters of service and status, Lynch-Brennan concludes that Irish domestics found their wages empowering, but when salaries lost ground in the early twentieth century, servant status dropped accordingly; however, Irish domestic servants generally did not accept that their work carried such a stigma. (Irish Americans did.) Their ability to adopt the mores of their middle-class employers and the promise of the opportunity to move their own families into the middle class mitigated their concerns about class and status. With robust opportunities for employment, many Irish domestics were able to negotiate their wages and working conditions through their own agency or with the help of family and friends.

In chapter 7, Was Bridget’s Experience Unique? Lynch-Brennan investigates the question of the exceptionality of the Irish Bridget by comparing the Irish experience with the experiences of African American and Mexican American domestics. In light of such work as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995), Lynch-Brennan considers the relationship between Irish domestics and African Americans for possible racism. Although Lynch-Brennan’s title limits her study to the years 1840–1930, she updates the story of the Irish domestic servant with an examination of the Irish domestics who arrived in the 1980s. Like their earlier counterparts, these women live in their households, work long hours, and are on call, but there is a crucial difference. Many of the late-twentieth-century immigrants are undocumented, that is, they arrived on visitors’ visas that have lapsed and are not eligible for employment. Domestic servants and child- and elder-care givers thus work off the books, and some domestics complain that they are threatened by their employers with exposure to the authorities and deportation. No domestic who arrived between 1840 and 1930 lived under such a sword of Damocles.

Lynch-Brennan’s groundbreaking Irish Bridget—her survey of the scholarship of Irish women’s emigration and women in service and valuable list of sources, including letters, interviews, contemporary documents, articles, and books—will inspire a new generation of scholars of the Irish diaspora to study the Irish domestic servant: her life and the influence of her experience in service on her people in Ireland, on her own people, and on the Irish in America.

Preface

A passing reference in a now long-forgotten work led me to write this book. It indicated that most Irish immigrant women in nineteenth-century America worked in some form of domestic service, that is, they worked as cooks, maids, waitresses, laundresses, and child nurses (nannies), and so on. This fact surprised me. I wondered why I, an American of Irish ancestry, was unaware of the association of Irish women with domestic service. Chuckling at the irony of the fact that I had done this kind of work myself, in 1994 I embarked on a quest to find out just who these women were.¹ I ended up becoming so driven to find out everything I could about Irish immigrant domestics that, at times, my research seemed to take over my life and has finally ended up as this book.²

The gestation of this book was so long that acknowledgments are due to the many diverse parties involved in its production. My late father, Daniel Joseph Lynch Jr. (1914–84), instilled in me his love of history, American and Irish (in that order), and thus started me on the path that led to this book. Although much revised and updated since, this book began life as my doctoral dissertation at the State University of New York at Albany. I will always be grateful to Professors G. J. Barker-Benfield, Ivan Steen, and Ann Withington who nurtured me and my work at that time. And without the assistance of the interlibrary loan staff at both the university and the New York State Library, I would not have had access to material that I needed to complete this work; thank you.

Professor Faye Dudden of Colgate University (then of Union College) was generous with help and advice when I first undertook the research that led to this book. Professor Emeritus Arnold Schrier of the University of Cincinnati kindly let me read the Irish emigrants’ letters he had collected, and then referred me to Professor Kerby Miller of the University of Missouri–Columbia. Professor Miller generously let me read his collection of Irish emigrant letters and has been a kind and supportive adviser to me ever since. Dr. Patricia Trainor O’Malley shocked and delighted me when she shared with me her collection of unpublished letters written by Irish domestics. Dr. Patricia West, then of the State University of New York at Albany and now of the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site within the National Park Service, encouraged my initial research on Irish domestics and shared with me her knowledge of the Irish domestics Martin Van Buren employed at Lindenwald. And Professor Myra B. Young Armstead of Bard College alerted me to research one of her students had conducted on Irish domestics in the late twentieth century.

When they learned of my research interests, my extended family pitched in with pertinent material. My late cousin, Anne Shalvoy Graham, shared with me the letters of her Irish immigrant grandmother, Mary Malone McHenry, and my cousin Susan Lynch Gutman shared with me a photograph of her mother’s very own Irish domestic. My cousin Karen Shalvoy Elias also shared with me her grandfather’s correspondence and recollections of his Irish immigrant grandparents, Owen Shalvoy and Margaret Scollin Shalvoy. The one person most deserving of acknowledgment, however, is my husband, John David Brennan, who accompanied me on all my research trips, and put up with my absence during all the years I was sequestered in my study working on this book. Without him, I would not have finished this book.

1. In the summer of 1972, immediately upon earning my undergraduate degree, I cleaned houses on Cape Cod before beginning my first teaching job.

2. Some of my material appeared in an earlier book; see Lynch-Brennan 2007.

Introduction

During the nineteenth century, having a live-in domestic servant, that is, a woman who worked as a cook, maid, waitress, child nurse (nanny), or laundress in a private home, was common among middle-class American families in urban areas.¹ Historian Faye Dudden claims that in 1850, up to as many as one-third of urban American households may have employed the live-in servants whose presence in a home served as a marker of a family’s social status (1983, 1, 115). Domestic service was an important waged occupation for women, in general, in the United States throughout the period 1840 through 1930, and in the 1850s, in the urban East, Irish-born women constituted the largest single group among servants (McKinley 1969, 152). Overall, 54 percent of the women employed in America in 1900 who were Irish natives were domestic servants, and an additional 6.5 percent worked as laundresses (Katzman 1978, 67).

Irish dominance of this occupation continued into the twentieth century. An investigation into the social conditions of domestic service published in 1900 in the Massachusetts Labor Bulletin showed that the majority of the foreign-born servants involved in this study were born in Ireland, and 155 of the 231 study participants were Roman Catholics (Social Conditions 1900, 5, 6). And in 1920, Irish-born women constituted 43 percent of white, female, foreign-born domestic servants in America (Carpenter 1969, 288–90). The true number of Irish immigrant women who worked in domestic service between 1840 and 1930, however, will never be known precisely because it was not until 1870 that federal census takers tried to accurately record all female employment. Statistics collected subsequently on domestic service, however, are still specious. It is likely that census enumerators missed those females who worked in service on a sporadic basis, thus ensuring that some domestic workers were never factored into census counts.

Saint Brigid is second only to Saint Patrick in the litany of important saints in Ireland, and so Bridget (as the name usually was spelled between 1840 and 1930) has long been a popular girl’s name there. In America, the name became directly connected with Irish immigrant girls working in domestic service. Authors of popular literature and the American public used the generic name Bridget or its diminutive Biddy to refer to female Irish servants; to a much lesser extent Kate, Katy, Maggie, and Peggy also served as nicknames for Irish domestics from 1840 through 1930. So strong was the association between the name Bridget and Irish servants that when Bridget McGeoghegan came to the Boston area from Donegal in 1923, her aunts insisted on calling her Bertha instead of Bridget because of the American Biddy jokes about Irish servant girls. Bertha/Bridget regretted the name change, saying, I wish I never did have it changed, because I like Bridget (1985, 33–34).² Yet despite the fact that nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century popular American literature is replete with references to the Irish Bridget, when I began my research I discovered that no scholar had yet written a full-length work on female Irish servants; hence this book.

This book concerns Irish immigrant females who worked in domestic service in private homes in urban northeastern America between 1840 and 1930. The topic of Irish immigrant women in domestic service in the United States is so broad that it called for establishing parameters for the research, and so this study is restricted to Irish immigrant women who worked as servants in private homes and, for the most part, lived within the homes in which they worked. Those women who worked in service in hotels, boardinghouses, and so on, and those second-generation Irish American women who worked as domestic servants, as well as male Irish domestics, are excluded from this study.

This study begins in 1840 because, although Irish women worked in domestic service in the United States before 1840, truly large-scale Irish immigration to America began about that time (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975, 106). Female Irish immigration began to increase in the 1830s, and by 1840 the number of Irish women in domestic service was a remarked-upon factor of life in the urban American Northeast; by 1845 women constituted nearly 50 percent of all Irish immigrants to the United States (Adams 1980, 223, 224). The end point of this study is 1930 because, after that time, the United States was no longer the first-choice destination for Irish emigrant girls, as by then Irish girls made Britain their goal when emigrating (Rudd 1988, 307). Yet although they shifted their preferred destination, they continued in the line of employment in which they had historically been engaged both in America and in Britain, and by the 1930s Irish servants were viewed as indispensable to the English economy (Walter 2004, 479).³

Irish immigrants settled throughout the United States, yet their importance in changing the face of the urban Northeast is unquestionable. Large numbers of them concentrated there, and though some Irish men later moved beyond its confines, Irish women tended to remain in the Northeast (Foley and Guinnane 1999, 19, 26; Winsberg 1985, 8, 10, 12). Most of the correspondence and the oral interviews reviewed or conducted for this study related to Irish immigrants living in the urban Northeast. Therefore, with a few exceptions, this study is confined to Irish immigrant women domestic servants living in the urban Northeast. Irish domestics in Chicago, San Francisco, the rural Northeast, and other geographic locations in the United States are excluded from this study.

The employer’s point of view predominates in the historical literature on domestic service in America.⁴ Primary source information from servants themselves is scanty, yet scholars recognize that hearing the voices of our historical subjects is crucial to properly understanding their experiences.⁵ So, as much as possible, this study concentrates on the Irish immigrant woman’s point of view on domestic service. And to ensure the authenticity of the voices of the Irish women quoted in this book, their letters will be reproduced as they wrote them, without [sic] being used to indicate errors in spelling or grammar.

In researching this book, focus was placed on determining who the real human beings were behind the Bridget stereotype. Where in Ireland and from what kind of families had these Irish girls come? How old were they when they came to the United States? What were their lives like as domestic servants? Did most of them marry or stay in service all their lives? These and other questions guided the research and shaped this book. And though no one person’s experience can serve as an archetype for all Irish domestics, certain patterns of experience emerged in the research. Ellen O’Loughlin, Nora McCarthy, Hannah Collins, Catherine (Katie) Murray Manley, Catherine (Kathleen) Mannion, Mary Anne (Mollie) Ryan, Sarah Byrne, and Catherine Larkin Vaughn, all shown in the illustrations, and all the other Irish women discussed in this book represent the real women behind the Bridget stereotype.

The story of the Irish Bridget is a transatlantic and transcultural one, beginning in Ireland and ending in the United States. To properly understand these Irish immigrant women, some understanding of the Irish world that formed them is required. Therefore, this book includes information on Ireland that is deemed relevant to the story of Irish domestics in America. In the chapters dealing with Ireland, the material culture from which the immigrant girls came is stressed, and in the chapters dealing with the United States, the material culture of the American world in which they lived and worked is stressed. Theirs was a material world, and so material culture is crucial to understanding the experience of the Irish Bridget in America.

Ireland was one country throughout most of this period. Until 1930 U.S. Census information did not distinguish between Irish immigrants from Northern Ireland and the South of Ireland. The reasons Irish girls emigrated remained fairly constant throughout the period 1840 to 1930, even after Irish independence. Therefore, this book includes information on Irish domestics from present-day Northern Ireland, as well as information on Irish domestics from what is now the Irish Republic.

Considering the lengthy time frame of 1840 through 1930 employed in this study, it was my initial expectation that research would show that technological improvements in the home radically changed the nature of domestic service over this period. To my surprise, my research convinced me instead that the experience of Irish domestics in 1930 was similar in many respects to the lives of Irish domestics in 1840. Although technological improvement occurred, it is the similarities in domestics’ experiences in service over time that are striking.

Domestic service is an occupation that has frequently been in the news from the 1990s into the present. I wondered whether and how the experience of Irish immigrant women in domestic service from 1840 to 1930 was similar to or distinguished from the experience of other women who have worked in domestic service in the United States over time, and so the scholarly literature was reviewed, the results of which can be found in chapter 7. In many respects it appears that contemporary domestic service is remarkably similar to domestic service in the period 1840 to 1930; servants’ reactions to domestic service in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are very similar to servants’ reactions in the 1840s and 1850s. According to those individuals who work in this occupation, domestic service remains physically taxing work and involves disadvantages that have remained fairly constant over time.

Irish emigration was unusual in the high number of women who participated in it. Although in recent years scholars have produced new work on Irish women, still much of the scholarly literature on the Irish in America continues to focus on Irish immigrant men. The underlying sentiment still seems to be that the experience of Irish men somehow serves as a proxy for the experience of Irish women. But it does not. Their gender and their domestic service, the form of labor in which they engaged, distinguished the experience of female Irish immigrant domestics from the experience of male Irish immigrants. Whereas there may have been Irish men who lived in some form of community with their fellow Irish, because most of the Irish Bridgets lived with their employers, female Irish domestics did not. Most native-born middle- and upper-class Americans likely had little interaction on a personal level with Irish men. If they had any direct experience with the Irish, it was probably through proximity to the Irish Bridget who lived and worked in the intimate sphere of the private American home. Through their personal interaction with the Irish Bridget, native-born Americans came to see the Irish less as others, and more as fellow humans. Credit is due to the Irish Bridget for pioneering the way for the Irish to become accepted by native-born Americans and for helping the Irish, as a group, move into the American middle class.

1. Throughout this book, the terms servant, domestic, domestic servant, domestic worker, and household worker will be used interchangeably.

2. In the United States, the family surname was also changed, to McGaffighan. Throughout this book, the Irish domestics known only by their maiden names while they worked in service will be referred to by their maiden names. The entries in the Works Cited note their married names in brackets.

3. Female Irish emigration to work in domestic service in Britain, of course, long predates the 1930s. As noted in chapter 4, many Irish girls worked in service in Britain in the nineteenth century. Discrimination against Irish Catholic servants in Britain can be deduced from the fact that employers, when seeking servants, sometimes specified that No Irish Need Apply or Must be of the Church of England (Horn 1975, 39).

4. Contemporary historical scholarship, as opposed to contemporary sociological scholarship, still tends to stress the employer point of view. For example, even though one chapter gives some voice to servants, Barbara Ryan, in her review of the literature of servitude, Love, Wages, Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States (2006), still privileges the employer’s perspective.

5. I recognize the possible problems inherent in the letters and oral interviews I use as primary sources for this book. Still, letters, in particular, constitute the largest body of the writings of ordinary people of the past that historians . . . possess. Despite whatever problems they present, letters (and in my view oral interviews) provide access to the immigrant’s attitudes, values, aspirations, and fears (Elliott, Gerber, and Sinke 2006, 3, 4).

1

Home Life in Ireland

Who was the Irish Bridget? She was one of the girls who emigrated from Ireland to work as domestic servants in private homes in urban northeastern America between 1840 and 1930. For the most part, they were quite young girls—for example, Ellen O’Loughlin was only fourteen when she left Broadford, County Clare, Ireland, in 1893 for Hoosick Falls, New York, to work as a domestic servant (Unger 2006) (see ill. 1).¹ Overall, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1921 the median age of emigrant Irish females was about twenty-one (K. Miller 1985, 352). These girls were generally unmarried Roman Catholics² who hailed from rural Ireland,³ and as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, increasingly they came from the rural west of Ireland, where traditional Gaelic Irish culture persisted longer than it did elsewhere in Ireland. They were the daughters of people of limited means, rather than the children of either wealthy or extremely poor parents. They were raised in an Irish material and cultural world, yet later lived and worked in an American material and cultural world. How did their Irish world compare with their American one? In what kind of houses might they have been raised? What did they eat? What type of domestic work did Irish women typically perform in the home? What type of clothing did they wear? Did they drink alcohol? Was religion of importance to them? Did their Irish world prepare them for their American world?