The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930. By Margaret Lynch-Brennan. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xxiv, 232 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8156-3201-6.)

Abstract

Historians have frequently observed that nineteenth-century emigration from Ireland was remarkable because of the high number of women who chose to depart. The vast majority of those women settled in the United States, where many who entered the paid work force took service positions in American households. In this book, Margaret Lynch-Brennan offers the first full-length study of the women who carved their niche in America as domestic servants, the ubiquitous Irish Bridget. Lynch-Brennan contends that women's early experiences in Ireland prepared them poorly for their roles as domestic servants in the New World. Ireland's slow adoption of new household technologies, the women's early life experiences, and most newcomers' Roman Catholicism contrasted sharply with the more affluent, modernizing, Protestant homes they entered. The book adopts a conventional structure to explore that disjunction, analyzing successively the “push factors” that reduced Ireland's nineteenth-century population so dramatically and the “pull factors” that encouraged the nation's women to settle abroad. Subsequent chapters reveal the new world that Irish domestics inhabited. Lynch-Brennan opens the curtains on the daily life of middle-class American households, providing insight into the values and expectations of their mistresses and convincingly demonstrating the prejudice against Irish domestic servants. More significantly, she provides fresh glimpses into the working world and the social world that Irish domestic servants constructed and inhabited in the United States. Despite a high level of familiarity with America, Irish domestics at times suffered from intense loneliness, yet their isolation was balanced by the offer of relatively attractive wages and the opportunity to save for themselves (and for their relatives back in Ireland). Despite their time-consuming live-in duties, Irish Bridgets also celebrated their origin and identity through a range of activities, including social visits, dances, courtship, and church functions. The last chapter of the book is particularly valuable, raising interesting questions about the uniqueness of the Bridgets' experiences and making important comparisons with other domestics' experiences throughout U.S. history.