For much of the twentieth century, the working lives of Irish-American immigrants were generally thought of in terms of men and masculinity. Historians dedicated to describing the Irish-American working-class experience were largely content to draw group portraits dominated by canal diggers and beat cops. By the 1980s, however, it was clear that this one-dimensional perspective would no longer suffice. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the numbers of Irish women emigrating to the United States had more or less equaled, and sometimes out-paced, the numbers of men. Of the 4.5 million Irish people who headed for the United States between 1851 and 1921, for example, over one-quarter were girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 24 years. This female cohort came to dominate the American domestic servant sector. Why had their stories not been told?

Hasia Diner’s Erin’s daughters in America: Irish immigrant women in the nineteenth century (1983) was the first book-length attempt to address this imbalance. It was soon followed by another instant classic, Janet Nolan’s Ourselves alone: women’s emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 (1989). Taken together, both books demonstrated that Irish women had proved capable of emigrating and working abroad, forging new lives independent of the traditional, patriarchal structures that had dominated life in rural Ireland. In other words, these studies of female workers were also essays in understanding changing gender dynamics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In more recent years, books by Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Sophie Cooper, and Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick have done much to deepen our understandings of women, labour and gender in Irish migration history.

Catherine Healy’s Irish domestic servants in transatlantic culture, c.1870–1945 is an exciting, new intervention into this important field of study. Healy acknowledges her debt to previous scholars but seeks to extend the conversation by bringing England into the story and looking beyond the socio-economic dimensions of these women’s lives. Her book considers ‘how transatlantic understandings of the Irish immigrant servant developed in line with changing social and political conditions’, while surveying ‘the overlaps and differences between discursive tropes as they evolved in the two major destinations of Irish migration [the United States and England]’ (3). By focusing on the ‘intimate connections’ (4) that developed between servants and employers within middle-class homes, Healy shows how public discussions of ‘the so-called “servant problem” were a medium through which to express broader concerns about the weakening bourgeois claims to authority, and to make sense of new social and economic dynamics’ (8).

Over the course of six carefully-researched, crisp chapters, Healy unpacks how middle-class opinions of Irish domestic servants revealed deeper anxieties about ethnicity and gender. Chapter 2, ‘Ethnic jokes’, shows how cartoons about Irish servants often travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Laughing at domestic servants functioned, Healy argues, ‘as a release valve for the pressures associated with the maintenance of bourgeois status’ (17). Readers familiar with previous examinations of simianised Irish men in the nineteenth-century press will appreciate the nuance and sophistication with which Healy analyses ‘Bridget’ cartoons. In chapter 3, ‘From slapstick to sentimentality’, Healy looks at the ways in which immigrant maids stoked fears of working-class sexuality polluting middle-class family life, showing how Irish women could be variously seen as dangerous, vulnerable or romantic. Chapter 4, ‘Kitchen politics’, analyses prescriptive literature on servant management, demonstrating how bourgeois American and English employers enhanced their own self-images by treating Irish maids ‘as childlike subjects in need of discipline and surveillance’ (111).

Chapter 5, ‘Dollar dictators’, examines the ways in which Irish immigrant women’s financial support for Irish nationalist campaigns were viewed through the prism of gender. Middle-class employers, already uneasy about the prospect of their female employees enjoying financial independence, often employed ‘the caricature of the gullible domestic sacrificing her meagre earnings to Irish nationalists’ (114) as a way to resolve their own anxieties over money, gender and politics. In chapter 6, ‘Part of the family?’, Healy considers the ways in which the intimacy, which often developed between servants and children, could never fully mask the inherent inequality between employee and employer. Finally, chapter 7, ‘An independent Irish hussy’, shows that by gossiping, answering back and refusing to complete tasks, Irish servants could ‘deny bourgeois claims to authority even without resorting to open protest’ (190).

Experts of transnational history may find themselves wishing that Healy had problematised the notion of a ‘shared Anglo-Saxon worldview’ (6), which frames her examination of public discourse in America and England. But taken as a whole, Healy’s book offers an important new contribution to the literature on Irish female migration.