this conclusion. Marx grouped together everyone from “whore to pope” as service providers who did not contribute to the production of capital.30 Both classical and Marxist economic theories have been insufficient in grasping the significance of unpaid domestic and reproductive labor as well. Since the late 1960s, feminist historians and scholars have combated the view that unpaid labor performed for families and households could be dismissed, along with the work of paid servants, as unproductive in capitalist terms.31 The performance of reproductive labor generated the very conditions under which men of all classes—and women burdened with second shifts as paid workers—were physically able to work for wages or other compensation.
Historians have failed to account for how capital gets generated through transactions that establish the social relations of production, and link supply to demand. As commercial intermediaries that profited from job placement, intelligence offices generated significant anxiety. Private intelligence offices or employment agencies as they were later called profited as middlemen (and often middlewomen) through fees and commissions. Through transatlantic, transpacific, and transregional networks, they not only managed migrants’ placement in household service, but also provided loans and other forms of financing that enabled migrants’ passage. As arbiters of borders, they instructed immigrants on how to maintain their eligibility to enter the United States and on how to avoid immigration officials who might declare their actions, and the assistance they had received, illegal. Intelligence offices were demonized by middle-class commentators and accused of making a mockery out of the principle of freedom of contract by seducing workers with the promises of riches and by convincing them that they had no responsibility to potential employers beyond the satisfaction of their own self-interest.32 As an author complained in an 1868 Godey’s Lady’s Book article, lamenting the powers of contract that Irish servants had, the intelligence office “represents, in Biddy-dom, all the power of the State, and is moreover the Temple of Liberty.” “The custom of other places is here reversed,” she added, “and the servant is the mistress. She sits enthroned, waiting to receive the homage of dependent and tributary housekeepers.”33 Other middle-class commentators homed in on intelligence offices’ predatory actions, which included trafficking women in sex work, holding their possessions as ransom, and eliciting exorbitant fees from the job applicants whom they were placing. While these practices no doubt occurred, employers seized upon their existence to try to eliminate commercial intermediaries altogether. This allowed them to evade a more nuanced analysis of how these brokers were imperative to labor migrations in the absence of other financing mechanisms.
Domesticity was also commercial, despite its long-standing associations with privacy and opposition to the values of the marketplace, in that it required employers—and middle-class women more specifically—to engage in the procurement, purchase, and training and management of labor.34 Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans were only tentatively connected to an economy where wages predominated as the means by which to acquire goods and services. As historian Jeanne Boydston documents, in the antebellum period men and women participated in domestic production as relative equals, even if gendered divisions of labor existed in respect to the creation of goods for use and exchange. The divisions of household labor that accompanied what historians describe as the midcentury “market revolution” would segregate spiritual, mental, and reproductive work from domestic labor that wages rendered menial. The pursuit of comfort, contentment, and time to devote to intellectual, charitable, and religious matters became the surplus value that men and especially women might enjoy if their homes were well run.35
When commentators insisted that the typical Irish servant was “a more disquieting and unendurable ruler” than even the most “tyrannical” of workingmen’s unions, as an article in Putnam’s did in 1869, they also grappled with the extent to which domesticity might be perfected through the implementation of more conscientious and selective approaches to how supply chains could be assembled.36 Too much was at stake for middle-class women to idly sit by and let supply and demand take its uncertain course. This explicitly commercial role aligned with middle-class Protestant women’s self-appointed cultural responsibility to promulgate American domesticity to the indigenous people, immigrants, and colonial subjects who came under their jurisdiction.37 A letter writer explained to the editor of the New York Observer, for instance, that her husband had encouraged her to act as the “Secretary of the Interior” over her domestic servants—a title that in 1865, when the letter was written, gestured toward the administration of “foreign” Indian populations within the domestic space of the nation—and that she was to convene the “cabinet” only when “great emergencies arose.”38
Competing Discourses of Empire
Consumer demand for services drove migration. The demand for domestic labor and other household services determined both regions’ and the nation’s demographic composition.39 Servants, despite the needs they fulfilled, were considered by many to be impossible subjects for republican freedom. In the antebellum period in which this book begins, southern slavery provided the antithesis to white independence in racial terms, and contributed to the stigmatization of any work that entailed an individual to surrender sovereignty over hours, pace of production, and free movement. The cultural and social construction of what it meant to be a white American made rejecting the deference that personal and household service was supposed to require a gesture of almost mythical importance, and an act that was commonly cited in exceptionalist narratives about what set the United States apart—at least to white immigrants.40
As a matter of demography, the need for servants was framed in the context of how the human capital being imported to satisfy household labor needs might be redeployed—or not—in the social and cultural work of nation building. As E. L. Godkin, the founder and editor of the Nation argued in an 1869 editorial, Americans could not “go back to the early, happy time, when the mill girls wrote poetry and read French and the farmer’s hired man could deliver a Fourth of July oration on a pinch.”41 Having abandoned republicanism for market liberalism, Godkin suggested, Americans could no longer limit what types of experimentations with the hire of wage labor might take place. This was especially true since white immigrant women and the Irish in particular resisted submitting to a social hierarchy within the household workplace. For this reason Godkin supported continued Chinese immigration. As free laborers classified as sojourners, whose unassimilable status allegedly limited them to menial labors, Chinese immigrants exemplified both new advantages to be gained from access to Asian labor markets, and the risks that purportedly came with remaking the United States as a nation that incorporated laborers whose inclusion was never intended to result in their possessing the full rights of liberal self-rule.
White servants’ desire to control who got to participate in labor markets for domestic service and their attempts to exclude black and Chinese workers from job competition were emblematic of how they viewed white settlerism. In this book I use white settlerism, a complicated and multifaceted idea, as a concept that elucidates how white immigrant workers and their allies insisted that they had value as racial subjects that transcended how their worth was defined by labor markets. The goal here, as theorist Patrick Wolfe urges, is to grasp how white settler colonialism represented a “structure not an event.”42 Irish women’s imagined transition, for instance, from wage-earning domestics to unpaid mothers and wives informed the larger philosophy that brokers of their labor professed to, genuinely or otherwise, when it came to intervening in how they moved along the various supply chains that fed household labor. It is possible to see racially inclusive settlerism reflected in the frontier embrace of Irish Catholic immigrant women sent in the 1850s to places like Illinois and Wisconsin, where emigration boosters advertised that wage-earning migrants would be treated as if they were daughters. At the same time, this did not preclude Irish servants from being embraced by white republicans and laboring classes as producers in their own right, whose breadwinner status, defined by the remittances they sent to families back in Ireland, made them independent contributors.
White settlerism also manifested in seemingly less obvious places, like Ellis Island. There immigration officials treated unaccompanied women arriving from Europe as future members of the nation’s reproductive population who deserved protections and required control, but
