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Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban
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isbn 9780814764749
Автор произведения Andrew Urban
Серия Culture, Labor, History
Издательство Ingram
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 who were not to be treated as disposable labor or undesirable subjects. As the political scientist Aziz 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.