Their mothers were servants of the rich; they were servants of the poor. Their mothers were maids. They were Irish-American teachers at the turn of the twentieth century. They are the subject of Servants of the Poor.

Janet Nolan intends to use the perspectives of students and teachers to demonstrate that the role of Irish American teachers in Irish American upward mobility has been understated and to establish that rapid growth of Irish American women's share of the teaching force is evidence that the Americanization of the Irish occurred faster than previously shown. She proposes to do so without significant statistical analysis. And she intends her comparative study of Ireland and the United States to help fill the shortage of comparative studies in education history. In keeping with the contemporary fashion, she has chosen a regional study of three cities rather than an overview of the entire migration to the United States.

Her cities—Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco—are exceptional, not representative. They all had large Irish populations, were regional centers, and had the highest percentage of Irish American female teachers. Thus, they are the cream, not the norm. Nolan chose them because she was born in San Francisco, grew up close to Boston, and teaches in Chicago. She is a former teacher, as are her parents.

This work argues that upward mobility for Irish Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came about because Irish women, influenced by their immigrant mothers' respect for the education they'd received in Ireland, became school teachers. Two chapters discuss Irish education, mostly in the nineteenth century, from both the students' and teachers' perspectives. These chapters are strong in showing how the educational system prepared Irish girls for a life of housewifery and how the domestic skills gained in Irish schools allowed young Irish women to find work as domestics in the United States after they emigrated from an Irish economy that was unable to absorb them.

The chapters on the United States, the bulk of the work, are somewhat weaker. The chapter on Boston deals mostly with the growth of the public school system prior to the period under examination. The years between 1880 and 1920, when the Irish teachers were coming to dominate teaching in the elementary schools, receive only a few pages and a few examples. This chapter could use some hard numbers showing an increase in Irish American teacher incomes or other measures of rising standards of living and economic class. Some correlation between teachers' status and Irish immigrant status overall should be in order in a chapter that intends to show Irish women teachers leading Irish Americans upward in status.

The other two chapters are stronger, but, rather than showing Irish American teachers pulling their community up economically, the focus is more on the plight of Irish American Catholic teachers in a Protestant environment and the inability of teachers to rise into the ranks of school administration. Nolan repeatedly shows conflict between her normal school–educated elementary teachers and the mostly male, mostly college-educated professional administrators, but she does not indicate that administrators prevented further increases in status on the part of her teachers. Nolan downplays the possibility that the lack of advanced education played a roll in keeping Irish-American teachers in the elementary classroom instead of in the administrative offices of what were quite large school systems.

Nolan writes narrative history, relying heavily on anecdotal evidence including interviews and letters and unpublished memoirs. She also uses public records of the school boards and such of the three cities she uses to bolster her argument. And she uses secondary sources. In this regard, the research and documentation are good. That said, Nolan weakens her argument by selecting an unrepresentative sample, and her decision not to quantify leaves her argument for upward mobility resting on only a handful of personal experiences. It would have been helpful to provide at least a couple of tables showing improved status over time for both teachers and the general Irish-American population.

Without hard numbers, it is difficult to illustrate the economic and social rise of Irish men that the Irish teachers supposedly brought about. Is it possible that factors other than the teachers allowed Irish men to dominate the Catholic Church hierarchy, become bosses in her three cities and many others, or make fortunes in contracting and other businesses? Most of the men in Nolan's story are either Protestant elitist administrators or the descendents of her teachers.

On the positive side, she does use numbers to show the increases in school populations through the nineteenth century, even if she does not use many numbers to show how teachers' incomes compare to those of maids or other workers.

Nolan has produced an interesting book, but she attempts to do too much for the limited number of pages and perhaps the limited base of evidence. By eschewing a quantitative component, she made the task of proving her thesis much more difficult than it might have been. She has, however, shown the need for more work on the significant role played by Irish-educated Irish-American maids and their elementary school teacher daughters.