We don’t know much about Mary Mallon’s life prior to her first arrest and incarceration. She didn’t like to talk about it – and she didn’t publicly or in writings that we know of. But if you examine the history of Ireland and the Irish people in the years prior to and following her birth and her arrival in America, an illuminating context reveals itself. When we hear of Mary vaulting fences, smacking around cops, shacking up in a one-room tenement apartment with an alcoholic gentleman to whom she was not married, it’s helpful to put that seemingly unique assertiveness in its proper perspective. If there were ‘new women’, really, in 1907, then you could hardly find a better example than Mary Mallon, a single, childless, domestic laborer pinned to the floor of a careening Health Department ambulance.
Unless you count the woman sitting on top of her, the other side of the equation.
Josephine Baker was an educated professional, a woman of some advantage who, rather than spending her time playing bridge or swanning about town imitating wealthier doyens of the upper classes, became a pioneer, dedicating her life to the field of preventive health care for children. After a private school education, when Vassar proved out of reach, she attended the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, interned at the New England Hospital for Women and eventually moved from private practice to a distinguished career in public service. She lectured, authored books and was elected president of the Babies Welfare Association. As early as 1908, she was the leader of a team of nurses who taught hygiene and disease prevention in the worst districts of the Lower East Side, her efforts resulting in a significant drop in infant mortality. She was one of many remarkable women from relatively comfortable backgrounds who broke all the rules, fought the good fight, tried actively to make the world a better place – usually in the face of hostility and ignorance.
Between 1845 and 1849, four years of relentless blight on the Irish potato crop, at least a million Irish people passed away, most the victims of starvation and disease. Three million others were left absolutely destitute. Their heartless English overlords did nothing to help. As the 1851 census of Ireland puts it:
. . . the once proverbial gaiety and lightness of the peasant people seemed to have vanished completely, and village merriment or marriage festival was no longer heard or even seen.
Marriage, even in furiously Catholic Ireland, was suddenly a very bad idea. If you were a dirt-poor potato farmer and your potatoes weren’t coming in, taking on a wife, much less a family, didn’t make much financial sense. It meant that you’d more than likely starve sooner, rather than later. Any already remote chances of moving up in the world – even in pre-famine Ireland – were diminished by the prospect of a wife and family to feed. People became reluctant to marry early – it made no sense, and parents became less inclined to subdivide their already near-worthless property holdings among heirs, as was the custom.
Irish men and women lived very separate lives. Schools were segregated. Saloons and pubs were the exclusive preserves of men and whatever limited social activity revolved around them. Disapproving clergy and relatives were everywhere, and much of male social activity revolved around drinking. Marriage, increasingly, became based on economic circumstances – and those circumstances were bad and getting worse.
From the mid-nineteenth century, the marriage rate among rural Irish declined dramatically – as did the number of children born, whether within wedlock or out of it. People were getting married less, and even when they did marry, women worked. They’d been running households for years, of course – seeing to the finances, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and in general, doing all those things which men couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t, do. But the harsh realities of an economy based on the cultivation of the now-unreliable potato crop, required that women also work in the fields, digging turf, tending to chickens, selling crops at market. At the end of the day, the husband could go blow off steam at the pub, buy his mates some drinks, shoot a few darts, get stuttering drunk. The wife was left at home. Married couples rarely even ate together. The wife ate alone or with the children, then prepared a meal when hubby staggered home from the pub. As both parties were usually illiterate – or damn close to it – there wasn’t much to talk about in front of the fire. The thought of taking the wife out for a nice walk, maybe a visit to town, did not occur to too many husbands, who felt such a display would in some way diminish them. In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness. If she wanted something for herself, or wanted to alter her circumstances, she stood up for herself, often physically, not infrequently using a blunt object as a persuader.
With the famine, when millions of Irish peasants began pouring into New York, most of them were women. More to the point, they were women for whom the idea of deferring or avoiding marriage for economic reasons was nothing new. And they were women who were used to the idea that if one wanted to survive, one did for oneself. Men were as likely to be liabilities as assets.
Few Irish women coming to America between 1849 and 1900 came with any ill-formed intentions of ‘finding a man’. They came looking to work hard, save money – and then hold on to that money. That so many of them became domestic servants who lived in the homes they served only reinforced this trend away from continued subserviency to a husband.
They were truly a self-sufficient lot, these new women, oblivious – even contemptuous – of the idea of traditional women’s roles. They were proud, strong and in possession of great mental toughness. They came to America and took the work that was available – as servants and cooks to the middle and upper classes. There was a lot of work available, at least in the beginning, when almost every household, it seemed, had at least one servant. While millions of Irish women were deciding – or being forced by circumstances – to work their way into financial independence, American women, particularly of the Victorian age, struggled with the ‘servant problem’. The American ‘new woman’ was encouraged to keep a good house, but without getting her hands dirty. Her responsibility was to ‘educate’ her servants in the proper skills and comportment required of a ‘decent household’. The servant and the cook became, in this atmosphere, an essential, if frequently joked about, element of middle-class life, and they damn well knew how indispensable they were.
By 1900 most Irish domestic help had had about enough of being looked down on and maltreated, and were having no more of it. Negotiations over working conditions and wages were often contentious. Any misguided attempts to legislate propriety amongst one’s servants in their leisure hours often resulted in frustration. Domestics, after working all day and into the evening, having no families to care for, and limited funds, often spent their off-hours in activities deemed inappropriate by their mistresses. Hanging out in saloons, buying dresses too similar in style to their mistresses’ than their mistresses appreciated. With a few bucks in their pockets and a nice dress or two, the unattached, unsupervised domestic servant girl could hang out in the beer gardens and dance halls, Bowery clubs or bars – maybe even enjoy a little slap and tickle.
Employment agencies for domestics became prime recruiting grounds for whoremasters and brothel owners. Women heads of households were urged to take the training of their servants as a religious calling – the ‘spiritual’ benefits of appropriate behavior being thought as important as their cooking and cleaning skills. It’s hard to believe they persevered against such independent and determined subjects. How do you instruct a woman who’s already survived incredible hardship, who’s worked hard all her life, on how to live ‘properly’, when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice? When many families found it difficult to afford the number of servants they felt they required, attempts were made to form food ‘co-ops’, central associations where family meals could be prepared in a central location and delivered, cost-effectively, to households. This development did not go over well with traditional domestic cooks – and many of them organized against the co-op
s, blacklisting families who had engaged their services, even threatening to go on strike. Families who underpaid or mistreated their help would find themselves infamous in the increasingly vibrant and vocal subculture of domestics, and such organized schemes such as price fixing and standardization of practices and working conditions were enacted, however informally, by networks of working women who exchanged information, resolved disputes, debated what tasks they could and should be responsible for in a given situation.
These women became an important segment of the New York City economy. They saved when everyone else seemed to be doing nothing but spending. Between 1819 and 1847, early years yet for Irish immigration, domestic women servants accounted for almost two-thirds of all savings accounts opened at the New York Bank for Savings.
What you had, by Mary’s time, were large numbers of women who were used to standing up for themselves, who determined, to a greater degree than almost any other group of women, their own destiny, who were resourceful, having to contend with employment situations where they often bounced from one job to another. (Summers were particularly difficult. Many families ran off to Long Island and Maine for vacation. Mary Mallon’s steady employment during these times speaks well of her skills as cook.) These were tough women, unused to taking guff from anyone. Accounts of the day on the subject of stubborn and belligerent servants were legion – the stuff of popular jokes and anecdotes. Lydia Marie Child, quoted in Marie Stansell’s City of Women, describes an Irish domestic confronting a gentleman on the street who has ordered her summarily out of his way:
‘And indade I won’t get out of your way; I’ll get right IN your way!’ . . . She placed her feet apart, set her elbows akimbo, and stood as firmly as a provoked donkey.
Stansell goes on to describe a few saltier phrases, quoting from court depositions of the time – all with Irish female defendants:
She would ‘knock her brains out’ . . . ’tear his guts out’.
Sound familiar?
Mary Mallon was one of these new women. Formed out of poverty and abuse, newly arrived in a strange land, where the Irish were, for some time, considered only slightly elevated from apes. They were ‘white niggers’, without a pot to piss in, and as women even less likely to raise themselves from their circumstances. Without family or husbands, they learned to hustle, to negotiate, to endure. They acquired marketable skills and demanded to be paid for them. It was from the early practices of avoiding marriage, working for themselves, saving money, learning, that Irish women began moving into professions like teaching and nursing. At a time when most professions were considered unsuitable for women, many began to break through.
Their examples did not go unnoticed. The children of the rich, inspired, perhaps by their parents’ Irish help, began misbehaving.
A news story from 1906:
RICH WELLESLEY GIRL WAITRESS IN HOTEL
She is nineteen and the daughter of Alfred E. Bosworth, a wealthy banker . . . (she) acquired democratic ideas of life through associations with another girl who earned her college expenses during the summer by serving as a waitress in a hotel and she decided on the same course herself. While other girls were leaving for the seashore or foreign countries, Miss Bosworth, in a plain white dress . . . had secured a position in the dining room of the Mount Pleasant House in Breton Woods.
Or this one from the same year:
VASSAR GIRL IS REAL CINDERELLA
Preferring to work as a servant girl rather than marry the man she did not love, Katherine Gray, a Vassar graduate, and the daughter of the late Senator Asbury Gray of Virginia . . . has been employed as a house servant.
‘He was old enough to be my father,’ said Miss Gray. ‘And I told Uncle so: but he insisted, and finally told me that if I did not marry the Major, I must leave the house.’ Miss Gray took the latter alternative.
Mary Mallon was not a revolutionary. But she was part of a revolution. She wasn’t that different from hundreds of thousands of other women who’d been cut loose from one oppressive system to make her way in another. She was unluckier than most – in that she was identified as carrying typhoid. But like many of her peers, she was a fighter, a scrounger, a hustler, and a hater. She wanted her piece of the American Dream and was all too willing to work for it. They just wouldn’t let her. She did the best she could.
Chapter Five
The Cook’s Lament
Maybe, if some strange kercheifed man with a big, gold hoop earring had whispered out from a Hester Street storefront, ‘ Mary! There’s a hoodoo following you!’ then she would have believed it. She had to know something wasn’t right. A curse? A hex? Evil spirits?
It was true that the sickness – ‘typhoid’ – seemed to follow her. She couldn’t argue with that. She’d seen it firsthand. She’d even stayed on at the one home – the one in Maine – to nurse those afflicted, so she’d seen it up close. She’d seen the fever and had an idea how it must have felt and knew that she didn’t have that. She was healthy as a horse.
Sickness was everywhere. People of her station were always getting sick, dying. Down at the saloon where Breihof liked to drink, they had a term for it, ‘getting your elevens up’. One of the regulars – some hard-drinking old geezer – would disappear for a few weeks and then reappear, looking dissipated, the cords on the back of his neck deeper and more pronounced, the two muscles jutting straight up from the man’s collar like two 1’s. The others at the bar would wait until he was gone or out of earshot and simply shake their heads slightly, mutter ‘Looks like so and so’s got his elevens up’ – meaning the poor bastard would be dead soon enough.
Death and disease and starvation had been nipping at her heels from the beginning. Back in Ireland, it was the way of life, they died by the thousands, the exact cause – if ever identified – simply a postscript to the inevitable. People died in their beds. They died in the fields. They were lucky if they didn’t die in their cribs.
Mary was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1869. About fifteen years later, like so many of her starving countrymen, she fled to the United States, penniless, in steerage, aboard a sorry, crowded packet. They died on the boat too. She’d been watching people die her whole life, in increments. One day sick. The next? Gone. For her, life had always been an endless vista of suffering and struggle. She knew about epidemics. The world was full of them!
From 1873 through 1875, it was influenza – swept through Europe and America like the four horsemen. In 1878, in New Orleans, the last great wave of yellow fever . . . in 1895 it was Plymouth – typhoid this time (Was that her fault too?) . . . in Jacksonville, Florida, there was yellow fever again, though not as bad as New Orleans . . . and later, much later, there would be more: a worldwide influenza epidemic would wipe out more people than were wounded in the Great War. U.S. Army training camps would become giant sickwards, with an 80 per cent fatality rate.
Some people got sick. Some died. Maybe God decided. Who knew? Mary had felt herself lucky – as if, perhaps, someone was looking after her – as if there were rewards for her hard work and her sacrifices. She’d stayed single, childless. She’d kept herself up. She’d prayed. She’d tried to lead a decent life – unlike so many others of her country and profession. They said – the doctors and the engineers and the health department coppers – that dirt had something to do with it; they were always going on about washing your hands and such. But Mary knew what dirt was. She’d seen real filth and she certainly wasn’t dirty like that. Nowhere near. She kept herself up, her apron clean, her uniform always white and ironed. It was the weak that got sick. Then they got sicker. Then they died. It was always like that, wasn’t it? How could they say she had the fever? She certainly wasn’t weak. No one could say that about her. It was a point of honor how strong she was, how fit.
And here’s this man, this miserable interloper, minding everybody’s business but his own, claiming to be a doctor (she had her suspicions) – a man who doesn’t even know her – who doesn’t know how stron
g she is, saying she’s dirty, sick, a menace to others. What did he – in his nice suit and his carefully trimmed mustache and his prissy manner –know about sickness? Poor people were always sick. That’s what the poor did – they got sick and died, usually in droves. The people down the street when she first came to America, the people down the hall, the crowd at Thirty-third and Third – one day they were there, the next in a box, family and friends crowded around the coffin in a tiny tenement living room. ‘Old John? You didn’t hear? He’s passed. Gone. The wake was last week. Lovely spread they laid out. Terrible thing.’ Back in Ireland? It wouldn’t have even been ‘Old’ John – it would have been, ‘Didja hear about young Johnny? His mother was in here today. Terrible thing. Terrible. Two little ones out of four . . .’
Who noticed them? No one in this city. Certainly not if it were Irish doing the dying. The good citizens of New York were too busy, everyone rushing about in their new automobiles, digging holes in the ground, putting up buildings so tall they were an offense to God almighty, putting on airs, dressing up, always hurrying off someplace. The upper classes? The rich? The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame – a hardworking, decent Irish woman, for instance.
Before, they had said it was the water that did it. It was settled. The typhoid came from the water, they’d said. That time in Tuxedo Park? They said then it was that laundress who brought it into the house, brought it in with the washing. And who could be surprised at that? The woman had looked sick from the first! Anyone could see. Stuck out a mile.