Some 700,000 women emigrated from Ireland between 1885 and 1920.

Many were treated like peasants, and paupers— unskilled and untested and deeply uneducated.

Historians have actually noted that Irish women were, in fact, more literate than either their counterparts at home, or the men and women in most other immigrant groups. 

Nevertheless, Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to servants as half-civilized beings. 

Writing in The Freewoman (a progressive publication on womens’ suffrage) a young Rebecca West, said that she believed housework was only suitable for those with the intelligence of rabbits. 

Even Harriet Prescott Spofford, a prolific writer and social critic in her day, wrote about young Irish immigrants with a kind of derision, and pity: 

The young Irish girl comes to us as plastic as any clay in all the world ... so totally ignorant of any other civilized ways than ours that she is completely ready to be molded to our wish. 

Nobody received an education in pliability—but responding to the whims of one’s employer likely demanded an extraordinary amount of flexibility (and resilience, in the face of all that derision).