The American historian Hasia Diner once described the Irish emigration to America as an exercise in cultural persistence, freeing these hard-working and edventurous souls to express themselves once they had made the escape abroad.
For most, that freedom was decidedly out of reach. Women in particular often felt like prisoners in the large, affluent houses they served. They were treated like children, like animals, like machines.
Many described feeling invisible.
In his 1819 poem Ode to a Nightingale, Keats writes of the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” of the human world. (The nightingale, of course, is spared from all this.)
A century on, one live-in domestic worker described the surprise of feeling enlivened by birdsong. After spending day after day indoors, it was only upon hearing birds singing that she realized winter was actually over.