Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America

Abstract

Armed with Irish national school educations that provided skills in needlework, cooking, fine laundry, good spelling, and nice penmanship, young single women emigrated to America when post-famine Ireland had little to offer them. Prepared to seize the best opportunities their school-learned skills afforded, they found servant positions in upper-class homes. Once married—usually to a countryman—they encouraged their daughters to make the most of their own opportunities by becoming teachers. Sons could go early into the work force; daughters stayed in high school and went to normal school. This generation of Irish American women became a substantial proportion of urban public school teachers, and the girls' accomplishments became family advances. The mothers had been servants of the rich. The daughters became “servants of the poor.” Janet Nolan chronicles women who followed a path from the national schools of Ireland to the public schools of Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago in the half century surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The cities had differences, but each had a large Irish population, and in all three Irish American women were the largest single ethnic group among public school teachers. In Boston, they were one-quarter of the teachers by 1908; in San Francisco, almost half by 1910; in Chicago, they were perhaps 70 percent in 1920.