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Relinquishing and Reclaiming Independence: Irish Domestic Servants, American Middle-Class Mistresses, and Assimilation, 1850–1920

BETWEEN the onset of the Great Famine and the restriction of immigration in the 1920s, some five million Irish people emigrated to North America. Roughly half of these emigrants were female, and most were young and single. (1) In America's rapidly developing industrial society Irish women, even more than Irish men, were highly employable. (2) For women of the newly emerging American middle class, employing a servant became a badge of respectability and class legitimacy. No longer directly engaged in the production of wealth, these women were becoming increasingly involved in consuming it instead; and to be active as consumers and members of the public sphere they needed surrogates to run their households. The flood of Irish immigrant women readily met this demand. And because most Irish female immigrants arrived impoverished, unskilled, and single--and were apparently unaffected by the social stigma attached to domestic service--they eagerly accepted the opportunity to work in service. Thus by the turn of the century the Irish "Bridget" had become an integral part of the middle-class American home. (3) Many historians have interpreted the Irish woman's emigration to America and her work in domestic service as a liberating experience. Both Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan, for example, emphasize the newfound autonomy of young Irish women in the US. (4) While Nolan focuses her argument on the idea that through emigrating and working within America, Irish women hoped to "regain the freedom that women had had in pre-Famine Ireland," Diner concentrates on showing that Irish women's emigration to America was an exercise in "cultural persistence," freeing young women to express themselves once they had escaped abroad. (5) Thus, while domestic service certainly carried some disadvantages, the consensus is that it was certainly an improvement over Ireland, and that, from the secure setting of the middle-class household, the young women involved could carve out for themselves and for their children a better life in America. While this interpretation does discuss the nature of domestic work at some length, it does not adequately consider how Irish women's "working" relationships with their American middle-class mistresses shaped their immigrant experience. The Irish servant and the American mistress are treated almost as separate entities who barely interacted and almost never influenced each other's identities. This perspective, of course, serves well the argument for independent Irish womanhood. But it does not adequately address the process of assimilation, a critical aspect of the immigrants' lives. When the mistress and maid are brought together, rather than treated as separate entities, what becomes apparent is that the mistress-maid relationship not only defined the Irish woman's process of assimilation into American society, but also greatly helped American middle-class women to renegotiate their identities in the public sphere that became increasingly open to them during the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay will consider both sides of the mistress-maid relationship as a single social process. Did the relationship between American mistresses and Irish maids force the latter to appropriate the values of their middle-class mistresses, thereby sacrificing much of the independence pointed to by previous historians? And in what ways were the experiences of both maids and mistresses shaped by the social, political, and economic changes in American culture that freed the mistresses to roam the public sphere? By considering firsthand accounts by Irish domestics, along with descriptions by contemporary observers, I will argue that the interdependent relationship between these two classes of women reveals, among other things, middle-class America's prejudice toward the Irish and the manner in which a significant portion of Irish immigrants were taught to replace their so-called uncivilized Irish character with a proper, "civilized" American one. …