Free 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman Page B

as a tangible keepsake.
    Mary Brown worked as a domestic for a family on West 13th Street. Most likely, Bridget Meehan began her life as an American wage-earner in just the same way, as a servant, a maid or pantry girl, working for a New York family that also provided her with room and board. Disparaged by native-born citizens, domestic ser vice was a form of work open to immigrants and people of color, and by the 1850s it was dominated by Irishwomen.
    The Irish found domestic jobs through other immigrants, who acted as unofficial employment agents. Working in America as maids or cooks, they spread the word that an honest, industrious relative back in Ireland was looking for a domestic position, so when she arrived, a job was waiting for her. If she had no connections, a newly arrived immigrant could find work through a commercial employment agency, or “intelligence office,” as they were known, many of them located downtown, near the docks. The typical intelligence office demanded money from the immigrants they were supposed to help, charging a fee—between 50 cents and a dollar—just to register, and additional fees after that. Even shadier, some respectable-seeming offices were fronts for less wholesome activities. Young girls who stumbled into them expecting to find work with a local family were sent instead to one of the many hundreds of brothels that once flourished in New York. To protect work-hungry immigrants, in 1850 the New York State Commissioners of Emigration opened the Labor Exchange, an office that served both women and men looking for work in New York, or anywhere else in the United States. The majority of people who registered with the Exchange were unskilled workers in low-paying jobs. The men were laborers, and the women servants, mostly German and Irish. Bridget Meehan may have been among them.
    The demand for immigrant servants in nineteenth-century America was insatiable. If a household was well-to-do or even middle-class, its every function was in the hands of domestic workers. Beyond cleaning, servants were responsible for laundering and ironing, for lighting lamps, fireplaces, and furnaces. They took care of the children, nursed the sick, received visitors, and cooked and served the family meals. The housewife’s job was to manage her staff, even though she may have had no hands-on experience of the tasks they performed. If a servant suddenly quit or was hurt or sick, the household was thrown into a tumult until a replacement was found. If the family cook came down with the flu, the housewife was unable to step in and fix dinner, because she had never learned how to cook.
    With so much riding on their staff, the job of finding good servants was a much-discussed topic among nineteenth-century housewives. In the second half of the century, running debates on the “servant question” appeared in the women’s advice columns, now and then boiling over onto the editorial page. One question of enduring interest was: “Which nationality makes the best servants?”
    As a rule, housewives looked on their immigrant servants as partly formed and childlike beings. The word they used for it was “raw.” A German or English or Swiss girl, newly landed, was raw in exactly the right way—untainted and malleable. Raw Irish maids, by contrast, were “Dirty, impudent, careless, wasteful, and for incompetence they take the premium, but what can you expect when most of them are just off the ‘bogs’?” 5 The critique comes from a New York homemaker, venting her domestic frustrations in a letter to the editor. Her biting words, one isolated expression of much broader anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings that had taken hold of America, placed the Irish servant in a highly peculiar position. The same women who battered their Irish maids with insults also relied on them to keep their families clean and fed. Scorned and ridiculed, the Irish maid was also indispensable, a fact she came to grasp, using it to her