Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

Abstract

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.

Securing Domestics. Andrew Urban. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018. xi + 355 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8584-3.

“…Urban published a widely-cited article in 2009 on Irish domestic servants in the United States, but my interest in his work, as a historian of colonial domestic service, had been sparked by a fascinating paper on Chinese domestic labor in white settler societies that he delivered at an International Conference of Labour and Social History in Austria in 2013, which was subsequently published as a book chapter. 1 With virtually no histories to speak of on Chinese domestic workers in the United States-barely a mention, even, in the general histories of North American domestic service-Urban's promised book-length study was well overdue. 2 Brokering Servitude does indeed offer the first sustained history of Chinese domestic servants and employers in the United States, and in that regard is groundbreaking in itself.…”