REVISING THE RAGS-TO-RICHES MODEL: FEMALE MASTER FAMINE IMMIGRANTS IN NEW YORK AND THEIR THESIS REMARKABLE SAVING HABITS Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Emigrant Savings Bank Interior with design”, July, 1882 Melanie Strating 4836561 Master Thesis Historical Studies (HLCS) First Supervisor: dr. M.C.M. Corporaal Second Supervisor: Prof. dr. J. Kok 3 October 2018 Word Count: 34.866 1 Summary The rags-to-riches paradigm has played an important role in describing immigrant experience in nineteenth-century America and focuses on the immigrant‟s development from poverty to wealth. Due to a conflation of Irish famine and immigrant historiography, Irish immigrants appeared at the bottom of every list of immigrant development: they were seen as the most impoverished immigrants America has ever welcomed. Women, moreover, have often been overlooked in research. In 1995 bank records, from the Emigrants Industrial Savings Bank became publically available. A large proportion of these bank records were owned by Irish immigrants and a significant percentage of account holders were women. This thesis focuses on Irishwomen who moved to New York during the Great Irish Famine and its immediate aftermath. Records from the EISB show that some of these women were able to save considerable sums of money. By combining the bank records of domestic servants, needle traders and business owners, with analyses of working women in historical novels written by the famine generation and newspaper articles, this interdisciplinary thesis aims to give Irish female immigrants a voice in historical research. This thesis enlarges our knowledge about famine immigration and shows us how Irishwomen can enrich our understanding about female economic activity and women on the nineteenth-century job market. Most importantly, this thesis demonstrates that if we want to revise the rags-to-riches paradigm, it is necessary to include a female perspective. Not only did women work, their occupations also prove that current ways of analyzing economic mobility, with its strictly demarcated definitions of, for example, labor and business, are untenable. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter focuses on the historical context in which these women operated by analyzing newspapers. Through agenda-setting-theory it becomes clear that ideology played an important role in describing immigrant poverty. The second, third and fourth chapter each deal with a specific occupational category: domestic servants, needle traders, and female business owners. In these chapters, data from bank records are combined with representations of female characters in novels. This method allows us to not only understand how women saved in reality, but also explores the culturally constructed context by revealing narrative templates which explain deeply held cultural beliefs about Irish women and their savings. The leading question in this thesis is: to what extent can saving habits and literary representations of the female famine generation (1846-1880) in New York City contribute to the revision of the rags-to-riches paradigm? 2 3 Table of Content Introduction 10 Status Quaestionis 17 Methods and Approaches 22 Structure 27 1. Irishwomen in New York: a Social and Domestic Context 28 1.1 The Suffering, Reckless and Respectable 30 1.2 Irish Domesticity: Domestic Ideal and Domestic Reality 36 2. Domestic Servants 45 2.1 Domestic Servants in Famine Generation Novels 46 2.2 Domestic Servants and their Bank Accounts. 51 3. Needle Traders 58 3.1 Needle Traders and their Bank Records 60 3.2 Needle Traders in Famine Generation Novels 64 4. Female Business Owners 70 4.1 Female Business Owners of the EISB 71 4.2 Female Business Owners in Famine Generation Fiction 77 Conclusion 84 Bibliography 91 Appendices 99 4 5 List of Tables Table 1: Median and average amount on deposit for needle traders when opening 61 their accounts, highest amount they ever saved and balance on the day of closing the account. Table 2: Median and average amount on deposit for business owners when opening 72 their accounts, highest amount they ever saved and balance on the day of closing the account. Table 3: Median opening deposit, highest amount on deposit and end balance for 73 all three occupational categories in this thesis combined. Table 4: Average balance for business owners who moved to America before the 74 famine or during/immediately after the famine. Table 5: Average highest amount and end balance for famine boarding house keepers 76 and traders. 6 7 List of Figures Figure 1: Number of domestic servants with certain peak savings on their bank account. 52 Figure 2: The distribution of domestic servants over the various wards in New York City. 55 Figure 3: Variety of occupations within the needle trades for depositors at the EISB. 63 Figure 4: Female business owners and the different trades they worked in. 72 8 9 Introduction “Good girls! – poor things now far from home, Who crossed the ocean‟s darkling foam; There‟s many a way of sin and shame – and many a way of peace and fame.”1 The above passage from Peter McCorry‟s The Lost Rosary, published in 1870, beautifully illustrates the novel‟s attitude towards the many Irishwomen who immigrated into America during the Great Irish Famine. It also shows the variety of options presented to these women in novels written by the famine generation in America. These options either pointed these Irishwomen in the right direction, the way to peace and fame; or the wrong way, namely that of sin and shame. During the Great Irish Famine, when a dreadful potato blight in Ireland caused mass migration, an estimated 1.5 million immigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed in America.2 Historians generally agree that, in contrast to earlier periods of Irish emigration, the gender breakdown of famine immigrants was relatively equal.3 This, however, has not resulted in a well-balanced debate about female immigrants, and although this slowly started to change in the 1990s, a paucity of research into the lives of famine Irishwomen in America still exists. This thesis aims to fill these lacunae by focusing on those Irishwomen who left Ireland and continued their lives in New York during and immediately after the Great Irish Famine, between 1846 and 1880. By combining historical data from the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York with female representations in Irish American novels and newspapers, this project will shed light on these women‟s remarkable saving habits. The thesis specifically builds on and extends earlier work done by Tyler Anbinder, Córmac Ó Gráda, and Simone Wegge. In their project titled Moving Beyond Rags to Riches these scholars made use of a large database which they created from data of New York‟s Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank (EISB). New York is a city of great relevance to the Irish-American population in general and the famine generation in particular. By 1855, the Irish made up almost a quarter of the city‟s entire population and the number of 175.750 Irish immigrants had nearly doubled since 1845.4 Most bank records from the EISB were owned by those arriving from Ireland who came to America between 1846 and 1854, a period that encompasses the famine. These bank records, which became available to the public in 1995, are unique because of their test books in which depositors were asked a number of questions about their relatives, origins and whereabouts in New York before they were able to open an 1 Peter McCorry, The Lost Rosary; or, Our Irish Girls, Their Trials, Temptations and Triumphs (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1870), 72. 2 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow: Longman Publishing Group, 2000), 90. 3 See Cormac Ó Gráda, Kevin H. O‟Rourke, “Migration as disaster relief: lessons from the Great Irish Famine,” European Review of Economic History (1997), 3-25, 11.; Mary C. Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish- American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 18; Deirdre Mageean, “Irish Women‟s Perspective” in Peasant Maids, City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 57-98, 97. 4 Timothy J. Meagher, The Colombia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 77. 10 account. Through record linkage, the research team was able to trace a relatively large number of these Irish immigrants and follow them for several decades. The team combined bank records with census material and other available sources, such as newspaper articles, ship manifests, death registers and obituary accounts. They concluded that many Irish immigrants were able to save considerable sums of money. This was also true for the female depositors, which made up two-fifth of the total of 18.000 account holders. In his 2012 article “Moving Beyond „Rags to Riches‟: New York‟s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Saving Habits”, Anbinder, therefore, concludes that the project proved that a reconceptualization of how historians research economic achievement of immigrants was absolutely necessary.5 Anbinder specifically proposes to discard the rags-to-riches model which has so often been used by historians to measure the successes of American immigrants. „Rags-to-riches‟ refers to a situation in which an immigrant rises from poverty to wealth or from obscurity to fame. The concept has an interesting history of its own. Although the situational archetype of moving from poverty to wealth was often used in popular literature in the nineteenth century, it became inextricably linked to the novelist Horatio Alger Jr. (1832-1899).6 His work, with novels titled Ragged Dick (1868), Fame and Fortune (1868), Sink or Swim (1870) and Strive and Succeed (1872), largely followed the „rags- to-riches‟ model, but Alger himself never used the concept.