Irish women’s incorporation, he could not escape these contexts. Irish servants—captured in the stereotype of “Biddy”—were caricatured as colonial threats to the sovereign domestic rule of their Anglo-American mistresses. These depictions of conflict circulated in sharp contrast to the revered republican mutuality that Foster and others claimed characterized American households. Yet they also gave Irish domestics an independent political identity that reaffirmed their status as free (and white) laborers.
During the 1850s, fierce condemnations of “wage slavery” provided proslavery commentators with a basis to compare the treatment of Irish servants to that of black slaves, and to argue that low pay made young Irish women more disposable than laborers owned as property. Racial slavery, they argued, was a more “natural” way of organizing the social relations of production that reflected innate and permanent differences in status. These same critics in turn highlighted the “unnatural” role that for-profit brokers played when they abetted commerce in white women’s wage labor. While living in New York, William Bobo, a white South Carolinian, expressed shock at what he considered to be the degraded manner in which Irish women were forced to sell their labor power. Encountering “fifty or sixty” Irish girls waiting in the tenement basement of an intelligence office on Nassau Street, Bobo commented that the room’s sanitary conditions and crowdedness were far worse than what could be found in Richmond’s slave markets. Because “Yankees are generally very rigid in requiring their papers,” Bobo added, it was not uncommon for employers to strategically withhold character references in order to keep favored Irish servants captive. Intelligence offices had such a bad reputation that even northerners opposed to slavery compared them to slave markets. In doing so, they ignored very real differences in how the labor of poor but free Irish immigrant women was marketed relative to involuntary transactions where enslaved persons were sold as chattel. In 1856, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted described the facilities of the slave dealers he observed in Washington, D.C., as “much like Intelligence Offices, being large rooms partly occupied by ranges of forms.”76 Bobo concluded that the Irish would not achieve real citizenship until they went “where the country is in its maiden purity, among the forests of the far West.” There Irish women could “rear a home and a family, build up a character and a reputation that their children will be proud of, and not skulk about the palaces of the wealthy.”77 Bobo unwittingly called attention to how the social construction of whiteness in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had both occupational and geographic dimensions.
The racialization of servitude was by no means an issue exclusive to the United States. The term “servantgalism,” which American newspapers and magazines embraced, was first coined as the title of a cartoon series that John Leech drew for the English humor magazine Punch in 1853, during the height of the “wage slavery” debates. The ideology of “servant gals,” “servantgalism” referenced a fictitious movement of domestic laborers who conspired to win greater sovereignty over their jobs, and to elevate their social position. In one cartoon, the joke hinges on the quip of an English nursemaid to a cook that they should refuse to work “like Negroes”—an exchange that takes place as the two read and crochet before a fire.
Figure 1.4. “Servantgalism—No. II,” Punch, 1853. Courtesy of Rutgers University Libraries.
Although Leech’s cartoon appealed to employers who felt that white workers overstated their exploitation in comparison to workers who were actually enslaved, it also illustrates how servants disagreed with the notion that wages alone could make work dignified. In both London and New York, employers accused white servants of using race to justify laziness and bad work habits.78
Irish immigrant servants featured prominently in celebrations of white workers’ labor republicanism and radicalism, and were venerated for their blunt resistance to the forces of capitalist alienation. Their steady earning ability often made Irish servants the most important breadwinners in transnational families, and upended conventional gender roles. Irish Catholic elites applauded Irish laborers’ vigor and rejected the more fragile ideal of femininity that the Anglo-American middle class often fetishized. In an account published by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, for instance, the physical strength and rural simplicity of Irish women were depicted as virtues that kept Irish women moored to the mutually reinforcing causes of family, religion, and community. Hanna Flynn, who received domestic training at the Sisters’ House of Mercy on Houston Street in Manhattan, exemplified the type of migrant woman the publication found worthy of admiration. After securing a job, Flynn’s thriftiness enabled her to send the bulk of her earnings to her brother and sister back in Ireland. The Sisters proudly described Flynn as “a woman of masculine strength and endurance” whose “utmost limit of travel was her crowded parish chapel.” Flynn was illiterate and the “alphabet was to her as the hieroglyphics of Egypt,” but this did not stop her from being “a heroine” who honored her parents and her faith, and who “was honest, upright, truthful, laborious and capable of self-sacrifice.”79
Because the appearance of more aggressive forms of Irish servants’ workplace resistance and their growing power over the labor market coincided with the rise of Irish nationalism, domestic employers had an immediate colonial framework through which to assess the social relations of production taking shape.80 Addressing an 1872 speaking tour by English historian James Anthony Froude, who warned Americans not to be seduced to the Irish cause of independence by a naïve love of all republicanism, E. L. Godkin, the founder and editor of the Nation, added that “the memory of burned steaks, of hard-boiled potatoes, of smoked milk, would have done for [Froude] what no state papers, or records, or correspondence of the illustrious dead can ever do; it had prepared the American mind to believe the worst he could say of Irish turbulence and disorder.” Indeed, Irish servants were political, and on occasion transformed their workplaces into sites of protest. When Froude lectured in Boston, the Irish servants employed by his hosts, the Peabodys, initiated a work stoppage rather than serve him. Dispatches from the Times of London’s foreign correspondents in the United States routinely updated English readers on visiting Irish politicians’ appeals to the “servant girls” of New York and Boston for financial support.81 In its account of a meeting of Irish nationalists that was convened in Philadelphia in 1883, the humor magazine Puck commented that “the Irish declaration of independence has been read in our kitchens, many and many a time, to frightened housewives, and the fruits of that declaration are to be seen in thousands of ill-cooked meals on ill-served tables, in unswept rooms and unmade beds, in dirt, confusion, insubordination and general disorder, taking the sweetness out of life.”82 An accompanying cartoon, which portrayed a muscular, ape-like Irish servant bullying her cowering Anglo-American employer, hammered home this point. (The cartoon appears as Figure 3 in the insert to this book.)
Violence was a common trope in Anglo-American employers’ racialized portrayals of Irish immigrants as a people whose primitiveness meant that they had not yet evolved civilized gender distinctions. The Irish servant’s masculinized aggression signified her distance from the refined qualities of the mistress and the restraint of “true women,” whose more effeminate bearing made them the easy victims of Irish servants’ bullying.83 Irish servants were routinely accused of resorting to violence in order to get their way in disputes over the terms of their labor. Biddy’s savagery, employers alleged, prevented her from accepting reprimand. She reacted with fury to even the slightest of criticisms, and “her mistress would as soon stir up a female tiger as arouse her anger.” The Irish domestic’s “strong arm and voluble tongue keep the most tyrannical housekeeper in such awe as to save her from all invasions of her prescriptive rights.”84
Irish servants understood the social implications of doing domestic work even as they relied on the wages it provided. They realized that the racial groups believed to supply the “best” servants occupied a position at the bottom of the nation’s social and racial hierarchy for this very reason. Hanna Flynn, despite all the praise she earned, was still described as “ ‘slaving out’ her life … among strange people, in strange places, for those she loved so well.”85 Among Irish nationalists, even violence could be justified when
