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History Of Irish Exploited In America After The Famine
The Biddy and the Paddy, and keeping Irish BIPOC
Roaring Rivers
Torrents, currents, and ripples by Christyl Rivers, PhD.
None of your Biddy-ness
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Let’s celebrate including the Irish among humanity.
The potato crops failed. Many in Ireland died. Millions more fled.
From around 1850, ships from Ireland began ferrying servants to Protestant American homes. They were considered an inferior race, scarcely worthy of servitude. Then, “the domestic service question,” as it was called, was more generally called “the servant girl problem.” What was the problem?
It was that, being Catholic, coming from poverty, and being “uncivilized,” an Irish maid was crude, undisciplined, used unintelligible language, and had an Irish temper. She was known as a Bridget, or a Biddy.
She had to learn how to scrub a floor, having been an animal in the old country who only knew dirt floors and hovel life.
Her male relatives, also often employed as servants, were considered just as bad. They fought, drank, swore, and knew nothing of “civility.”