Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant Workers and Southern Black Domestic Workers

Danielle T. Phillips-Cunningham is the first scholar to examine the overlapping migration histories of Irish immigrants and US southern Black domestic workers. The author draws on intersectional feminist theory to uncover how both groups of women were racialized as inferior across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because they toiled as manual laborers. The racial stigma of domestic work was transnational—it worked to justify British colonial rule over Ireland as well as holding Africans in bondage in the United States—as respectable womanhood was assumed to be both white and middle class in both contexts. But in America, domestic service was long understood to be Black women's work, and as Irish women fled the Great Famine for northern US cities, it morphed into a job suitable only for immigrants. When African American migrants arrived later after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, they were depicted as "refugees" and "immigrants," in part because of the "Irishization" of domestic service but also because they were from the South, a region long pathologized by northerners as uncivilized (49). White journalists, employers, and social reformers similarly represented Irish and Black domestic workers as too rural and therefore too backward for households in the modern and industrialized North. Caricatures of the loyal Black "Mammy" relegated African American women to this occupation, while the "rebellious Bridget" deemed Irish women as less suitable, which allowed them to leave domestic service within a generation.Utilizing racial formation theory, the author offers "putting their hands on race" to capture how the work that Irish immigrant and Black migrant women performed was the reason both for their racialization and for their response to it. "Racial projects," Phillips-Cunningham aptly notes, "require work" (3). Both groups of women challenged and redefined racial boundaries by refusing to perform household tasks; by voicing their grievances in writings, speeches, and petitions; and through labor organizing and institution building. Because Irish women did not have the same access to race-based structures of power like unions and the Democratic Party as their male counterparts, they used the trope of "white slavery" to protest their labor exploitation. In doing so, they expanded notions of "ladyhood" to include "white working ladies" and ultimately left domestic service. This discourse excluded African American women who had to fight their racialization as domestics well into the 1930s, presenting themselves as skilled workers who advanced modern capitalism in the United States.This engaging comparative labor study bridges not only the theoretical divide between racial formation and intersectional feminist theory but also the historiographic divide among whiteness studies, US immigration history, and African American studies. Scholars have examined Irish immigrants and African American women separately, and histories of race—whiteness studies, in particular—usually emphasize the more public experience of working-class men. By comparing Irish immigrant and Black domestic workers, Phillips-Cunningham demonstrates how these women were racialized similarly and in tandem, and she also captures race as a process; in other words, she captures how race works. With deep theorization and contextualization, the author follows the distinct historical trajectories for each group, yet the analysis can be somewhat uneven in places. While we learn how British colonialism and Irish nationalism shaped the representation of Irish immigrant women in the United States, this transnational lens is less well developed for African American women. This research recognizes the presence of West Indian domestics as well as African American settlements in Liberia, yet these diasporic connections are left unexplored. Nevertheless, Putting Their Hands on Race centers Irish immigrant and Black migrant domestic workers within larger public debates about race and US citizenship and is a welcome and gendered addition to histories of the social construction of race.