Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Summer 1984

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 166-77.

Comments

Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

On farms and in small towns across the Great Plains during the nineteenth century, hired girls were necessary domestic helpers. Spring planting and fall harvest compounded the normally heavy work load of farm women, and even in towns, housekeeping was labor intensive. Help with the daily chores was always welcome. As a result, hired girls were in keen demand and short supply. Despite their crucial role in housekeeping, hired girls have received little systematic attention from scholars. Social historians have recently displayed renewed interest in servants, but their works have focused on domestics in the urban East and have given scant consideration to hired girls in rural and small-town America. Little is known about these women: who they were and why they hired out.

Novels and memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest answers to these questions. If they do not reveal precisely who these women were, they do at least tell us who people at the time thought they were. The purpose of this article is to examine, from a historical perspective, the image of the hired girl held by novelists and writers of memoirs, and to compare this image with what presentday historians have written about servants. Annette Atkins, Julie Roy Jeffrey, Sandra Myres, and Glenda Riley, among others, have exposed the dangers of treating novels about frontier women as historical fact.

who then, in the eyes of contemporary writers, were the hired girls? Were they young or old, single or married? Had they been born in America or overseas? Were they black or white? How well educated were they? Why did they hire out? Did people perceive hired girls as fundamentally different from other females?

DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF HIRED GIRLS

Age is one of the most important demographic characteristics to consider. Those females identified specifically as "hired girls" in both novels and memoirs about the agrarian plains were invariably young, in their mid teens to early twenties. Girls who hired out in their midteens include Faye Lewis, who later wrote about her South Dakota childhood in Nothing to Make a Shadow, and suffragist Jessie Haver Butler. Susette, in Mari Sandoz's biography of her father, Old Jules, was in service at nineteen.

The most detailed treatment of hired girls in the works under consideration is found in Willa Cather's My Àntonia. In this classic, Cather lovingly fictionalized the lives of those immigrant pioneers who settled the plains. One of these, the novelist's heroine, was the Bohemian Antonia Shimerda. Antonia worked as a field hand for three years before becoming a hired girl at seventeen. During her five years as a domestic, a number of her farm friends also moved to town seeking employment. Although Cather did not specify the ages of these secondary characters, it is clear from both the narrative and the context that they were also in their mid- to late teens. Cather suggested this in describing the girls physically and socially. First, the language used to portray them conveys the image of nascent sexuality. Lena Lingard, for example, caused a stir when she appeared in church dressed as a young lady. Until then, apparently no one had noticed the "swelling lines of her figure . . . hidden under the shapeless rags she wore in the field." Similarly, Cather's narrator Jim Burden described the three Bohemian Marys as "a menace to the social order" for the same reason. Secondly, the hired girls clearly shared interests transcending their status as immigrants and working women. Cather, who used "hired girl" to refer to all wage-earning women except teachers, described the preoccupation of the hired girls with their social lives, clothes, and dancing in terms that approximate historian Leslie Tentler's depiction of the female urban workplace as an "adolescent counterculture" in which social relations assumed paramount importance.

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