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SAVOIR FAIRE
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 Canadian Illustrated News
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In honour of Women’s History Month, the October session of SAVOIR FAIRE focussed on a group of women whose lives have been largely unexamined - Irish domestic servants. While Irish immigration was central to the colonization of Ontario in the 19th century, Irish women, many of whom worked as domestic servants, have received little attention from historians. Dr. Marilyn Barber, who teaches in the Department of History at Carleton University, has done extensive research on immigrant domestic servants. 1 In her presentation Documenting the Immigrant Experience: Irish Domestic Servants in 19th-Century Ontario, she explored some of the records that offer insights into the lives of Irish domestics in 19th-century Ontario.
Dr. Barber began her session by relating how she and a colleague, Dr. Lorna McLean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, came to collaborate on their study of Irish domestic servants. Dr. McLean had been doing research on the 19th-century criminal justice system and had discovered that there were numerous servants incarcerated in Ontario jails during this period, and that most of them were Irish. Accordingly, Dr. McLean asked Dr. Barber, known for her expertise on immigrant domestic servants, to collaborate with her. The two worked together on an article that will appear in the forthcoming book Sisters or Strangers. 2 It will be a sequel to Looking into My Sister’s Eyes, which was published in 1986 and was one of the first explorations of Canadian immigrant women’s history. 3
Marilyn Barber explained that during the 19th century there was a great demand for female domestic servants. This meant that immigrant women without training could readily obtain employment in Ontario homes. The majority of domestic servants during the 19th century were Irish women who came to Canada either through family and regional migration from Ireland or with groups sent from Irish workhouses. Dr. Barber noted that despite the important role they played in 19th-century Ontario homes, very little is known about these women, for they have left few letters, diaries or memoirs as a record of their thoughts, feelings, hopes or fears. The best sources for information on 19th-century Irish domestics are the records of governments, courts, asylums and rescue or reform agencies.
Marilyn Barber described the bleak lives that these women often faced. Domestic servants contributed essential labour to the household and were also a symbol of social status for their employer. While conditions varied among employers and from rural to urban society, Irish domestic servants often worked in isolation, and the treatment they received in the households where they lived confirmed their low social status.
Invariably, many Irish domestics had problems adapting to Canadian life and meeting the demands of Canadian employers. While some Irish women had worked as domestics in Ireland, they were unfamiliar with Canadian practices and unprepared for the frequent isolation of their new life. Many Irish women came from a background of rural poverty and were accustomed to a limited diet, to preparing food on a turf fire and to living with sparse furnishings in a small cabin. They did not have the knowledge essential for cooking in Canadian middle-class homes or for housekeeping in rooms filled with elaborate Victorian ornaments and furnishings. Marilyn Barber pointed out how the class difference between poor Irish domestics and their employers was often portrayed in the literature of the time as ethnic traits of character or intelligence. The Canadian Illustrated News of the 1870s and 1880s caricatured Irish domestics as good-hearted and willing, but dim and inept.
 Publications on Ontario domestic servants, from the National Library's collection.
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Dr. Barber explained how Irish domestic servants working in Ontario became subject to state interrogation, surveillance and documentation when problems brought them into the courts, jails or asylums. She noted that, for this reason, more 19th-century records exist for the minority of Irish women who encountered difficulties serious enough to draw state attention than for the majority who were in more fortunate circumstances or developed more successful strategies for coping with the immigrant experience. She noted that state legal and medical records reveal individual instances of illegal or socially unacceptable behaviour, while also providing insight into patterns of deviance and the challenges faced by many immigrant Irish servants.
When studying a sampling of county jail registers from four Ontario communities that encompass both rural and urban counties from the mid- to late-19th century, Marilyn Barber and her colleague Lorna McLean discovered that half the women in jail who listed occupations were servants or housekeepers, and of these, the largest immigrant grouping was from Ireland. They also found patterns in the types of crimes that brought women into contact with the judicial system. The four most frequent reasons that led Irish servants to be incarcerated, in order, were: drunkenness, vagrancy, larceny and insanity. For this presentation, Dr. Barber and Dr. McLean chose to focus on committals for drunkenness and insanity. Jail registers recorded only those women who were found drunk in public places and taken into custody; nonetheless, almost half of the Irish women in jail were committed for drunkenness. Dr. Barber discussed possible reasons for this high incidence and considered the impact of arrest for drunkenness on a servant’s future employment.
Marilyn Barber then moved to a discussion of servants who were incarcerated for insanity. From the mid-19th century, a number of servants were transferred from county jails for longer terms in provincial lunatic asylums. The first permanent Ontario asylum opened in Toronto in 1850 as part of a widespread movement to create specialized institutions where the insane could receive "moral treatment" rather than simply be restrained. Asylum registers and casebooks kept in the 19th century record place of birth as well as occupation, age, religion and marital status and are thus a valuable source for historians interested in immigrants to Ontario. Since the most common occupation of women admitted to the asylums in the 19th century was domestic servant, asylum records are particularly useful for investigating some of the stresses that could accompany a life spent in service. 4
 From left to right: Marilyn Barber, Nina Milner, Coordinator, SAVOIR FAIRE.
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Dr. Barber discussed some of the discoveries that she and Dr. McLean made in their examination of the casebooks of Kingston’s Rockwood Asylum. They found that servants from Ireland formed the largest group of servants in the asylum after those born in Canada, and that most of these Irish servants were single, and were in their 30s or 40s when admitted. Dr. Barber speculates that this is perhaps an indication that women beyond the period of youthful adaptation were either less resilient or less compliant as domestic servants. Women in their 30s had also passed the normal age for marriage and might be regarded in the 19th century as having missed the most socially acceptable goal for a woman’s life.
While the asylum records lacked sufficient data for Dr. Barber to draw general conclusions, individual case records contained intriguing suggestions of the social, emotional and physical stresses that these Irish domestics faced. The casebooks contain hints of the isolation, poverty, overwork and harsh conditions that might lead an Irish immigrant to behave in a deviant manner. Dr. Barber provided poignant examples of individual women suffering from the effects of poor physical health, isolation and the absence of support networks of family or friends, and of women who were overcome by fear of poverty and feelings of longing for their Irish homeland.
Marilyn Barber concluded that although domestic service offered an opportunity for Irish women to save for a better life, it could also lead to downward mobility for those who were unable to adapt. While asylum and jail records do not reveal the whole picture of the experience of Irish immigrant servants in Canada, they do add another dimension to our understanding of the contributions and legacy of these immigrant women to Canadian life. She noted that while the majority of Irish immigrant domestics did marry, it is ironic that among the women that she has studied - women who helped to build colonial households - few may ever have had the opportunity to have a home of their own.
__________1 Marilyn Barber’s publications include a number of articles on immigrant domestic servants, notably Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada, Canadian Historical Association, 1991 and "The Women Ontario Welcomed: Immigrant Domestics for Ontario Homes, 1870-1930", Ontario History, LXXII, no. 3, September 1980, p. 148-172.
2 Sisters or Strangers, edited by Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta and Frances Swyripa, will be published by University of Toronto Press.
3 Jean Burnet, ed. Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’s History. - Toronto : Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986. This book contains an article on immigrant domestic servants by Marilyn Barber, entitled "Sunny Ontario for British Girls, 1900-1930", p. 55-73.
4 Wendy Mitchinson, "Gender and Insanity as Characteristics of the Insane: A Nineteenth-Century Case", CBM/BCHM, vol. 4, 1987, p. 99-117.
