Irish Domestic Servants in Transatlantic Culture, c. 1870-1945

This book provides the first major transatlantic history of Irish serving women, drawing on four years of archival research in Dublin, Belfast, New York, Boston, London and Liverpool. Domestic service was the largest source of employment for generations of women who left Ireland in the decades after the Great Famine. The perceived difficulty of managing Irish servants became a prominent feature of cultural discourse in the United States and England, where countless cartoons, editorials and literary works caricatured the figure of ‘Bridget’. Irish maids and cooks were a canvas on which to project fears not only about Irish politics and immigration but also changing class and gender roles.  Existing scholarship on the Irish experience of domestic service has typically focused on socio-economic conditions, but such approaches tend not to capture the complex ways in which Irish female immigrants were encountered both in private households and in wider society. Irish servants were framed through discourses that could involve nostalgia and guilt as well as amusement and disgust: more complex scripts, in general, than those used to describe Irish immigrant men. The period covered in the book allows for a diverse range of cultural sources – including romance novels and Hollywood films depicting working Irish women – to be examined, moving beyond the Victorian-era caricatures typically emphasised in earlier work on the Irish in domestic service.

Catherine Healy is the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, in Ireland, having previously studied at Trinity College Dublin.