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Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban
Читать онлайн.Название Brokering Servitude
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780814764749
Автор произведения Andrew Urban
Серия Culture, Labor, History
Издательство Ingram
Harlon made it back to New York, her health intact. October 1865 found her writing from Litchfield, Connecticut, where her wealthy New York employers, the Whites, kept a second home. Upon returning to the city, Harlon had stayed with the Corcoran family, whom she described as her first employers in the United States. The Corcorans, their name suggests, were probably Irish Catholic. Whereas the McFarlands treated Harlon as a servant to be grouped with the rest of the hired help, the elderly Mrs. Corcoran viewed her as a member of the extended family deserving of free lodging while she looked for work in the city. Harlon’s economic success as an independent wage earner led her to be disinterested in marriage. She turned down the engagement proposal of a suitor, telling Foster in her October letter—in a flirtatious tone—that a man of his class and intellect was the only type she wanted to wed.18 This was the last letter from Harlon that Foster archived.
* * *
From the colonial era onward local policies had required shipmasters transporting immigrants to indemnify municipalities and states against having to provide public relief toward the care of foreign paupers. The insistence of cities like New York and Boston on the need to restrict the entry of economically dependent migrants was instrumental in prompting Congress to act on its plenary power to regulate immigration, and offered the template for the first federal policies enacted in the early 1880s.19 Despite the existence of such regulations, Foster’s interventions are best understood not through the framework of exclusion, but rather as policies that modeled a particular form of integration for Irish women. He engaged in a mid-nineteenth-century version of “salvage accumulation,” albeit without a personal profit motive, in which his assistance programs doubled as a transatlantic refugee policy. As anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing notes, “salvage accumulation” refers to the processes in which actors “amass capital without controlling the conditions under which the commodities are produced.”20
Foster viewed Irish women as human capital being squandered, since Ireland lacked both the land and employment markets for their labor and reproductive capabilities—as wives and mothers—to have real exchange and use value. The export of Irish women as sentimental commodities and republican mothers in the making was routinely cited by Foster as the attainable social reality that justified his endeavors. An ideological liberal when it came to his approach to political economy and markets, Foster was nonetheless aware that few Irish emigrants had the wherewithal to pay for their own passage. A self-styled entrepreneur, Foster routinely alluded to his charitable investments in the potential of the Irish people. Horace Greeley, one of the initial subscribers to Foster’s Irish Pioneer Emigration Fund, editorialized in his New York Tribune that Foster’s work represented a “systematic” approach to population transfers that was preferable to the “No-System” it supplanted. Foster’s method of assistance, Greeley contended, meant the women could be relocated from Ireland to an interior state like Wisconsin for less than twenty-five dollars, and with an expediency that meant “they were hardly six weeks from work to work.” These technical advantages did not even account for how Foster’s supervision also impeded “the usual temptations to intemperance, lewdness and vagrancy, and the exposure to imposition, fraud and robbery.”21
American public opinion most favored European immigration in the nineteenth century when immigrants were perceived as contributing to the continued settlement and development of regions marked as peripheral to the metropolitan core of the nation.22 Foster’s loans to emigrant women, whether he recuperated these expenses or not, enabled him to assert a type of coercive power—rooted in social debt rather than violence or formal legal guardianship—over the immigrants he sponsored. With varied success, as Harlon’s case demonstrates, Foster tried to dictate where the Irish women he sponsored would settle. In the United States, he worked with third-party intermediaries such as priests to negotiate the contract of Irish women’s labor to local employers in Canandaigua, New York, and Janesville, Wisconsin. Like most of the “friends” of migrants active in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, Foster believed that urban settlement patterns left young Irish women vulnerable to sexual and economic exploitation, and that sprawling Irish slums were dangerous barriers to cultural assimilation. Foster’s bias against eastern cities reflected the republican cast of his liberalism, and the deep-seated suspicions that he and others harbored against both “wage slavery” and, in contradictory terms, women wage workers who were content to forgo secondary migrations and marriage to male landowners in favor of maintaining their independence. Commentators framed immigrants’ settlement choices as matters of personal character. An 1857 Harper’s Weekly article, for instance, complained that since more ambitious German immigrant women were “shipped, on arrival, directly into the insatiable maw of the Great West,” Irish women were able to monopolize domestic service in New York and demand wages incommensurate to their skill level.23
As Harlon’s experiences demonstrate, Irish women had significant leeway in determining whether or not they would abide by Foster’s advice. Although Irish women had to satisfy questions about their character and industry in order to receive his funds while still in Ireland, once they were in the United States, Foster’s control over the migrants he assisted was indirect and based on persuasion rather than explicit coercion. Such were the perils of enabling free migration. Foster’s work offers important insights into how gender and race factored into efforts that were designed to convince migrants to voluntarily surrender their independence. Irish servants were instructed to relinquish their liberty of contract in favor of assuming positions as wives and mothers—ideally in homes far removed from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Empirically, historian Cormac Ó Gráda suggests that midcentury Irish immigrant women, in contrast to their male counterparts, had few reasons to expect that upward mobility would result from secondary, westward migrations. Discounting interpretations that have attributed Irish women’s entrenchment in urban areas solely to their lack of capital, Ó Gráda points out that it may not be “correct to see these Irishwomen as ‘locked in’ to the city and domestic service by poverty.”24 For young women, situations as servants in New York City were virtually guaranteed, even if the quality of available positions varied widely. Unclear as to what relocation and marriage offered them in concrete material terms, many Irish women resisted.
Foster was adamant that the Irish women he sponsored were free to leave the situations he ushered them to—often quite literally as a chaperone accompanying their secondary migrations—and that he would not seek to recover the funds given them.25 But these were largely moot points for women who had already acquiesced to being sent to interior locations, without money or contacts of their own. In bad work situations, young Irish women were vulnerable to immediate exploitation. Their vaunted positions as future wives and mothers offered little in the way of protection against such abuses. As historian Clay Gish has argued, the disjuncture between discourse and material reality was a defining feature of many assisted migration programs created during the midcentury.26 Legally, employers were permitted to dismiss household servants without cause. At best, servants might have a civil claim to their last month’s wages, but only if they worked the majority of that period, had the time and resources to go to court, and found a sympathetic judge. In addition, employers had no legal obligation to provide character references to their servants even though, as the literary historian Bruce Robbins has noted, for nineteenth-century domestics this was akin to a “labor passport.”27 As was the case for all female servants, sexual harassment and rape were consistent dangers as well. Away from eastern cities, Irish immigrant women were far more likely to be isolated from networks of friends and family and commercial establishments such as intelligence offices, which provided resources—namely temporary housing—that allowed servants who left bad work situations to survive without public relief. During the economic crisis of 1857, Foster took a position with the Women’s Protective Emigration Society and turned to unemployed women and widowed and abandoned mothers in New York as new targets for sponsored migrations to domestic labor jobs in the interior. As was so often the case in his work, these women (and their children) were the most economically vulnerable source of potential domestic labor. They were also the most susceptible to being coerced into taking jobs in unknown locations, where risks were highest.
After a fifteen-year hiatus from assisting emigration, Foster returned to this