Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America (review)

Janet Nolan, in Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America, examines the role single women played in the education and upward mobility of women in Ireland and the United States. In particular, Nolan focuses on public education and the critical part female teachers played in advancement of the Irish immigrant population in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Nolan's own family history in part inspired this study. Her parents were educators in Massachusetts and elsewhere, and their stress of the importance of education propelled the author to her own career in higher education. It also inspired Nolan to consider similar sentiments among generations of female immigrants from Ireland. Her family was not unique. Her study is also transatlantic. She traces the development of the national education system in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century, including the struggles for equal employment opportunities for female teachers. In the perilous economic and political conditions in Ireland, girls profited from continuing their education. Those who entered the teaching profession provided the means of support for themselves and their extended families.

Opportunity motivated single women to leave Ireland and migrate to the United States. The immigration of single Irish women alone to the United States is not new territory for historians. Scholars have shown how daughters migrated for economic reasons to support families. What makes Nolan's study unique is that she builds on these elements of family support to show that female education benefited the larger Irish immigrant community. The thousands of young women who graduated from the Irish school system and the Normal Schools in the United States became teachers in public schools in cities such as Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. Once in these roles, women instructed future generations of immigrants and Irish Americans. Nolan shows that in these cities, Irish teachers taught in public school where larger numbers of Irish American children attended. The American Catholic church by the second half of the nineteenth century, however, stressed the parish school over public education. While this is true in many cities, Nolan's focus on Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago highlights the manner in which Irish female teachers staffed public schools. Equally important, they occupied crucial seats on school boards as in the case of Julia Harrington Duff in Boston. They fought sexism and anti-Irish sentiments in hiring practices in Chicago and in San Francisco, and worked for all teachers as they championed the cause of teachers' unions. Nolan credits this activism to the same respect for education that motivated female teachers to fight sexism in Ireland. Furthermore, Nolan argues that the upward mobility of Irish immigrants and their Irish American children into the middle class in the United States had as much to do with female teachers in public schools as it had to do with the success of Irish men in business and politics. Although not always successful in their efforts to advance the position of Irish in America as teachers, on school boards, or within the larger American society, education, Nolan argues, invariably proved an asset.

Nolan's last chapter deals with the legacy of teaching, passed from one generation to the next, including mothers to sons. At this point, the author returns to her own family's history. She began her study by informing her readers of her own family's generational dedication to the profession of teaching. Nolan examines, among others, her father's effort throughout the Great Depression to obtain an education, ultimately graduating from Salem Teachers' College in 1935, and support his family as a teacher. One might construe Nolan's personal connection to her subject as a liability. Her frank treatment of her family's place within the larger history, however, allays any concerns the reader might have regarding her biases...