Affluent homeowners assumed that the women they employed had been rescued from lives of crime and poverty.
This was false. That they left rural homes to come to urban areas did not make them paupers or vandals.
Having left Ireland and arrived on US soil with their own lives, families, education, and integrity intact, this sort of treatment was met with silent outrage.
Admonished for her uneven laundry skills, one former chambermaid writes:
Sheets imperfectly ironed went on her bed the next week without, I trust, endangering the life, happiness, or social position of the family.
Referring to the unbridgeable divide, and looking back after her years of service were mercifully
behind her, another concurs:
Honestly—you’d be a socialist, too.