"The Irish Bridget"

Tuesday, June 21st, 2016

Last month, thanks to the generous support of our friends at theNew York Council for the Humanities and itsPublic Scholars program, the TR Site welcomed Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Ph.D., to its Speaker Nite series.  Lynch-Brennan is the first person to write a full-length scholarly book on female Irish servants (The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930).  Her talk showcased her extensive research and answered questions for an eager audience.

Lynch-Brennan laid the foundation for her remarks by defining ‘domestic service’ as women working as maids, cooks, waitresses, laundresses, or nannies in private homes.  These women not only worked in private homes, but also lived with their employers.  During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, this was a common arrangement, especially in the urban areas of the northeastern United States.

The association between domestic service and Irish immigrants was so strong at this time that the Irish immigrant servant girl became a familiar presence in American popular culture.  Literature and cartoons regularly poked fun at the faults and foibles of Irish domestic servants.  Lynch-Brennan showed the audience two such cartoons -- one (from Harper’s Weekly in 1867) portrayed the Irish-born servant as ignorant of basic cooking techniques; the other (from an 1883 issue of Puck) suggested that she was overly-assertive and unaware of her “proper” role in the household.

When Irish immigrant servant girls appeared in popular literature, they were stereotypically called “Bridget” or “Biddy”.  These names became so closely linked to domestic service in America that some Irish immigrants changed their name in an effort to escape the negative connotations.  For example, when Bridget McGeoghegan came to Boston from County Donegal in 1923, she changed her name to “Bertha” at the insistence of her aunts, who didn’t want her to become the butt of “Bridget” jokes.

As the popular press stereotyped and assailed the reputation of Irish immigrant servant girls, many American mistresses tried to avoid hiring untrained girls from rural Ireland.  Newspaper ads made these preferences clear.  For instance, a “wanted” ad in the Boston Evening Transcript from August 3rd, 1868, sought “A good, reliable woman to take care of a boy two years old . . . Positively no Irish need apply.”  An ad in the New York Daily Sun on May 11th, 1853, read: “Woman Wanted -- To do general housework . . . English, Scotch, Welsh, German, or any country or color except Irish.”  Other ads, such as those found in Buffalo newspapers of the era, specified a desire for only Protestant applicants -- another strategy to weed-out Irish immigrants.  Despite their best efforts, however, the law of supply and demand ensured that many American mistresses ended up hiring Irish girls to round out their domestic staff.

But, who were these Irish girls and women working as domestic servants?  Generally speaking, most of them were quite young and single.  Between 1850 and 1920, the median age of Irish immigrants was about 21 years old, but some were as young as thirteen.  In 1911, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor said that the number of under-16-year-olds working as domestic servants constituted “a large child labor problem.”  This was certainly true in Buffalo, where 1855 estimates suggest that up to 25% of Irish immigrant girls (ages 10-14) who had been living in the city for a year or less were working as live-in domestics.  

Were these Irish Bridgets -- as suggested by the popular stereotypes -- overly assertive and ignorant of housekeeping methods?  In terms of the latter, Lynch-Brennan allowed that immigrants from rural Ireland (and most of Ireland was rural!) might have been unfamiliar with some of the foods and technology available to and popular with middle-class America.  As to the charge of being overly-assertive, Lynch-Brennan told the story of Hannah Collins, who worked in Elmira, NY, and quit a job because she felt that her mistress demanded too much.  Was Hannah being overly-assertive, or simply sticking up for herself and trying to better her situation?

While some would argue that live-in domestic service offered certain advantages -- namely, room and board -- to young, single, immigrant girls, Lynch-Brennan suggested that the so-called advantages were imperfect, at best.  For instance, domestic servants typically lived in the least-desirable spaces within a home (such as an attic) and often shared the space with other staff.  Further, the food they received was sometimes of a lesser quality and quantity than that enjoyed by employers.  Domestic service work was generally physically taxing, and included both long work days (usually 10-12 hours) and long work weeks (6-7 days) with limited time off.  In describing her situation in 1898, Hannah Collins wrote, “I hope someday will come when I won[‘]t have to work so hard.  I do hate to get up every morning I am so tired.”

Hannah Collins’ story was one of several that Lynch-Brennan told to bring the Irish Bridget’s experience to life.  Like Hannah and in a classic example of chain migration, Nora McCarthy was from County Cork and followed her sisters to Haverhill/Bradford, Massachusetts.  She worked as a servant in private homes until she met and married a fellow Irish immigrant.  After her marriage, which exemplified the common practice of Irish endogamy, Nora stopped working outside the home.  However, she continued contributing to the family’s income by taking in boarders.  Nora was one of many Irish Bridgets whose life followed this trajectory.

Overall, according to Margaret Lynch-Brennan, the interactions between the Irish Bridgets and the middle-class Americans who hired them as domestic servants had a significant impact on Irish-American life.  She suggests that the Irish eventually became more acceptable to middle-class America due in no small part to the influence of the Irish Bridget.  The Bridgets were, after all, just about the only Irish people with whom middle-class Americans had direct and ongoing contact.  In the same way that familiarity with the Irish domestics who worked in their homes may have slowly eroded long-held prejudices on the part of middle-class Americans, the Irish Bridgets learned and adopted middle-class values as a consequence of their employment.

In conclusion, Lynch-Brennan also asked the audience to consider how the Irish Bridget’s experiences relate to modern life.  She pointed to the many young, female immigrants (from the Caribbean and other parts of the world) who work in domestic service in the United States today and, in some ways, are even more vulnerable than their Irish predecessors.

-- Lenora M. Henson, Curator / Director of Public Programming

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Speaker Nite is part of the TR Site’s regular Tuesday evening programming, which is made possible with support from M&T Bank.

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