Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain Page B

blacklisting families who had engaged their services, even threatening to go on strike. Families who underpaid or mistreated their help would find themselves infamous in the increasingly vibrant and vocal subculture of domestics, and such organized schemes such as price fixing and standardization of practices and working conditions were enacted, however informally, by networks of working women who exchanged information, resolved disputes, debated what tasks they could and should be responsible for in a given situation.
         These women became an important segment of the New York City economy. They saved when everyone else seemed to be doing nothing but spending. Between 1819 and 1847, early years yet for Irish immigration, domestic women servants accounted for almost two-thirds of all savings accounts opened at the New York Bank for Savings.
         What you had, by Mary’s time, were large numbers of women who were used to standing up for themselves, who determined, to a greater degree than almost any other group of women, their own destiny, who were resourceful, having to contend with employment situations where they often bounced from one job to another. (Summers were particularly difficult. Many families ran off to Long Island and Maine for vacation. Mary Mallon’s steady employment during these times speaks well of her skills as cook.) These were tough women, unused to taking guff from anyone. Accounts of the day on the subject of stubborn and belligerent servants were legion – the stuff of popular jokes and anecdotes. Lydia Marie Child, quoted in Marie Stansell’s City of Women , describes an Irish domestic confronting a gentleman on the street who has ordered her summarily out of his way:
     
    ‘And indade I won’t get out of your way; I’ll get right IN your way! ’  . . . She placed her feet apart, set her elbows akimbo, and stood as firmly as a provoked donkey.
     
         Stansell goes on to describe a few saltier phrases, quoting from court depositions of the time – all with Irish female defendants:
     
    She would ‘knock her brains out’  . . . ’tear his guts out’.
     
         Sound familiar?
         Mary Mallon was one of these new women. Formed out of poverty and abuse, newly arrived in a strange land, where the Irish were, for some time, considered only slightly elevated from apes. They were ‘white niggers’, without a pot to piss in, and as women even less likely to raise themselves from their circumstances. Without family or husbands, they learned to hustle, to negotiate, to endure. They acquired marketable skills and demanded to be paid for them. It was from the early practices of avoiding marriage, working for themselves, saving money, learning, that Irish women began moving into professions like teaching and nursing. At a time when most professions were considered unsuitable for women, many began to break through.
         Their examples did not go unnoticed. The children of the rich, inspired, perhaps by their parents’ Irish help, began misbehaving.
         A news story from 1906:
     
    RICH WELLESLEY GIRL WAITRESS IN HOTEL
    She is nineteen and the daughter of Alfred E. Bosworth, a wealthy banker  . . . (she) acquired democratic ideas of life through associations with another girl who earned her college expenses during the summer by serving as a waitress in a hotel and she decided on the same course herself. While other girls were leaving for the seashore or foreign countries, Miss Bosworth, in a plain white dress  . . . had secured a position in the dining room of the Mount Pleasant House in Breton Woods.
     
         Or this one from the same year:
     
    VASSAR GIRL IS REAL CINDERELLA
    Preferring to work as a servant girl rather than marry the man she did not love, Katherine Gray, a Vassar graduate, and the daughter of the late Senator Asbury Gray of Virginia  . . . has been employed as a house servant.
        ‘He was old enough to be my father,’ said Miss Gray.