Brokering Servitude - Andrew Urban Culture, Labor, History

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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 its goal was to preserve the baseline dignity that was considered the entitlement of all whites. In his 1867 account of Irish life in the United States, John Francis Maguire proudly recounted how Kate, an Irish servant working in an unnamed American city, dealt with the frequent harassment she received from a local Protestant minister. Although Kate typically brushed aside his patronizing humor, which included calling her Bridget and taunting her Catholicism, when the minister announced during a dinner party at her employers’ home that he was willing to pay her whatever “Father Pat” was seeking for her absolution, she lost her temper. With evident glee, Maguire described how “she flung the hot steaming liquid,” a tureen of pea soup, at the minister’s “face, neck, [and] breast.”86 No amount of money, Kate’s actions implied, could convince her to renounce her faith, heritage, or racial birthright.

      Charity or Depopulation? Foster and Assisted Emigration in the 1880s

      When crop failures and famine conditions struck the west of Ireland in 1879, Foster resumed work as a broker of assisted emigration.87 He knowingly entered into a highly charged political debate about whether emigration, land reform, or home rule best served the island’s interests.88 While Foster claimed that his work was apolitical, this was unconvincing in light of how he set about announcing the revival of his assisted emigration campaign. In a public letter to Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish Land League, Foster alleged that it was “unstatesmanlike and cruel to the poor to contravene the laws of nature by decrying emigration as some people do.”89 The more than twenty thousand women whom Foster sponsored in the 1880s were issued two-pound vouchers, and selected based on the recommendations of clergy. The vouchers were then redeemable at any of the Irish ports of departure or in Liverpool, with the steamship companies billing Foster. Together, passage and the mandatory outfit of food and clothing that emigrants had to acquire before sailing cost slightly more than four pounds, and assisted emigrants had to make up the difference on their own. In cases where prospective emigrants already had a prepaid ticket, yet lacked the funds to purchase supplies or to pay for the intermediate journey to a port, Foster donated one pound.90

      In the eyes of home rule advocates and the Irish Land League, assisted emigration was at best a minor remedy that dodged the lasting question of Irish sovereignty and land reform. At worst, it was a scheme to depopulate Ireland and neutralize its resistance. The liberty of Irish women to forge their own destiny in Ireland, freed from pressure to leave, became a mantra to nationalists. If free labor in the United States often revolved around a narrow definition of what defined consent within specific employment relations, in the context of Irish emigration it became a more philosophical question about whether or not an individual’s departure was truly voluntary. Public attacks directed at Foster regularly appeared in the nationalist press during the early 1880s. An editorial in the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal in May 1880, for instance, assailed Foster by name for failing to see how emigration led to “the sad life and sadder death of many an Irish girl in the slums of American cities.” During a September 1880 anti-eviction protest meeting in Prouglish, County Leitrim, one tenant farmer familiar with Foster’s work suggested to the laughter of the audience that he finance a boat to take landlords away instead. Foster received threats that promised violent retribution if he continued his work.91 Even though the bulk of emigrants Foster sponsored made the transatlantic trip without ordeal, incidents to the contrary garnered significant negative attention. In August 1883, for instance, the Freeman’s Journal reported on sixteen-year-old Margaret Moran, who had traveled on a voucher that Foster had provided only to be turned away by American immigration officials on the grounds that she was likely to become a public charge.92

      The Irish nationalist media depicted Foster as a dotty, paternalistic figure who was incapable of adapting to changes in either Ireland or the United States. An 1884 editorial in the Irish Nation mocked Foster for clinging to the outdated notion that the American West was a region where any European immigrant, regardless of circumstances, could expect to be instantaneously rewarded. The West, the paper lectured, was no longer “the El Dorado of the European peasant.” Foster’s unconditional embrace of emigration had blinded him to the United States’

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