Rana argues, settlerism was one “face” of American freedom, distinguished by its democratic aspirations and desire to empower certain subjects, yet accessible only to groups and individuals of a certain skin color.43 Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York and the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1868, captured this mind-set when he expressed the opinion that while “the Chinese have useful qualities” such as being “good servants, ready to do the work of men or women,” these were not “traits which will build on this Continent a great and high-toned power.”44 In these contexts, when Irish servants usurped middle-class rituals as their own, by dressing and acting as if they were the rightful mistresses of the homes in which they worked, their actions represented both a power struggle between capital and labor and a conflict over who was eligible to lay claim to gendered citizenship. More generally, producing domesticity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dangerous and backbreaking labor in addition to being degraded in status. To make those who were defined in racial and class terms as favored representatives of the population live (and live splendidly if they could afford to) meant that the providers of menial services—those hewers of wood and drawers of water—could not be barred or exiled as unwanted subjects from the social life of the nation altogether.45
Organization and Methodology
Throughout this book, I use the terms “domestic” and “servant” as interchangeable shorthand to describe hired laborers who performed work in and around private households. I also use these terms to describe employees who catered to the domestic needs of individuals and families in transit. My focus, with some exceptions, is on domestics who can be classified as general servants. Unlike domestic laborers assigned to specialized roles in more affluent households, such as chambermaids, butlers, and governesses, servants without these distinctions in title were expected to complete any and all work that they were assigned. Cooks and, to a lesser degree, live-in nurses do warrant attention here. Preparing meals often fell to general servants in households where only one hired worker was employed. But talented cooks with experience were highly coveted, and for many servants cooking was the primary route to higher wages, opportunities outside of private households, and situations that carried more prestige.46
Where necessary, I make specific reference to unpaid domestic labor to describe work that was conducted by female members of a household in the service of their own families. Because wives and daughters could be called on to perform the entirety of a household’s labor when resources were lacking, this gendered division of labor kept wages for domestic work in check, and made debates about whether or not certain household services were a luxury commonplace. In addition, this book mainly examines servants working in private homes and not in boarding houses, hotels, or other commercial accommodations.47 Where I depart from this focus it is to illustrate how commentators and policymakers perceived the service economy as an area for governance that extended beyond private homes.
This book addresses “live-in” servants who occupied the same dwellings as their employers. This reflects on the period it addresses, since “living out” would not really take hold until 1900 onward. Because live-in servants resided under the same roof as their employers, matters such as rooming arrangements and the right to visitors had to be negotiated contractually or, more likely, informally. Unlike factory jobs, where a shift—no matter how long—ended, servants and their employers constantly struggled to dictate when work began and finished. In November 1906, the social scientist Frances Kellor published in the Ladies’ Home Journal a work schedule that a housewife had sent to her, which she announced was the second-place winner in a contest that she had sponsored to publicize the best management of servants’ schedules. Despite being in a situation that Kellor deemed “favorable,” the runner-up’s servant was on call each day until eight in the evening and spent eighty-eight hours each week in service, with seventy-one and a half hours spent in active labor.48 Wages for servants were paid weekly or monthly, not by the hour. Many employers dictated that their servants wear a uniform. They controlled the cleaning and cooking techniques they were permitted to use, and the affectations and mannerisms they were allowed to display. In some cases, employers’ rules extended into other facets of their servants’ lives, over where they could worship, for instance, or whom they were permitted to socialize with when outside the home. Sexual and physical abuse, although documented infrequently, were far more prevalent in domestic service than in other workplaces.49
In this book, I rely on novels, short stories, and other works of fiction in order to examine how American household employers—who were both the creators and audiences for these texts—interpreted the actions of their servants. Through fiction, authors narrated servants’ choices, decisions, and habits in order to provide “evidence” that backed assessments about how different domestics should be brokered and employed as suppliers of labor. Where possible, I provide alternative explanations as to what servants would have done in practice, based on information gleaned from nonfiction sources. I also explore how representations of servants’ actions did specific forms of damage when they refused to acknowledge workers’ actual agency.
Why focus on black, Chinese, and Irish servants? Unlike German and Swedish immigrants, whose prominence in domestic work was more regional, Irish servants were employed nationally excepting only the rural South.50 Anglo-American employers considered Irish servants, whom they captured in the stereotype of “Biddy,” to be the primary obstacles to domestic peace and comfort. Irish servants were embraced by both the law and popular opinion as white subjects, but this racial construction did not spare them from attacks that were geared at fixing their place in both household and national hierarchies. Anglo-American household employers viewed Irish servants as members of an undifferentiated mass of poor immigrant labor flooding the United States. When Irish servants began to assert greater power over the domestic labor market, employers in cities like New York responded by presenting “Biddy” as the female prototype of the Irish rebel. In the same ways British imperialists argued that Irish subjects were not fit for self-governance and home rule, Anglo-American employers claimed that Irish servants were equally dangerous when it came to advancing their militant claims to sovereignty over American kitchens, parlors, and bedrooms.51 In California, Irish servants were championed by the anti-Chinese movements that mobilized in the 1870s, as human capital that would drive Chinese immigrants out of domestic and laundry work. At the same time household employers of Chinese servants reviled Irish servants and accused them of using mob violence and populist calls for restriction to drive competitors out and further consolidate their monopoly over the occupation.52 The prominence of Irish servants in the national domestic labor market allowed for these myriad interpretations of their racial, social, and political subjectivity.
The historiography on black women’s domestic labor in the post–Civil War South and North is rich in detail and has done much to map out these workers’ agency in the face of near constant structural discrimination and violence.53 In this book, I add to this literature by examining how black women, men, and children were governed as displaced persons. I focus on the ways in which Reconstruction-era brokers understood the value that subjects classified as refugees presented to household employers, and how they viewed long-distance transactions of labor as an alternative to government relief. Depending on the context, the Freedmen’s Bureau viewed the value of free black labor as either tainted or enriched by the experience of slavery. Progressive Era sociologists and the white middle-class public debated whether black migrants from the Jim Crow South were beyond the pale when it came to reforms that would bring them in line with how white women desired to see domestic labor transformed as an occupation, or whether this made them all the more exploitable for this very reason. In both instances, brokers’ interventions and designs to capture migrant black laborers as a new commodity to be marketed to northern homes provided the backdrop for these evaluations.
This book dwells on the political economy of Chinese domestic labor more than it does on the other groups that are also its focus. As historian Mae Ngai asserts: “we know a lot more about what whites thought about Chinese labor than about Chinese labor itself.” The study of Chinese immigration to the United States has consistently been plagued by what she describes as “orientalist historiography.” “Orientalist historiography,” Ngai argues, speaks
