When Irish immigrants arrived into the US, they were desperate to find job, willing to receive little pay, and do hard labor. The Irish were at the bottom of the economic ladder, “and free blacks in mid-century Boston were in general economically better of than the Irish.” The Irish did unskilled jobs such as coal mining, and building railroads and canals. The work that these Irish men endured was very hard and dangerous. Many of them caught deadly diseases due to the bad working conditions.
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Men working in a factory where hours were long, pay
was low, and conditions were unsanitary.
Irish women made up almost 59 percent of the total population of Irish immigrants coming into the US in 1900. Woman were not given the rights to voice their views or complaints, and unlike Irish men who had formed small societies in pubs, women had no means of coming together. Also they had the extra burden of looking after household chores in addition to the long hours they had to commit for work. The only area where everyone could come together was in the Catholic church. They found this new religious freedom in the US which was very different from the oppression they had experienced in Ireland. The Protestant English forbid them to practice catholicism and they were regarded as inferior due to their religious beliefs. Irish faced heavy discrimination once they stepped on American soil.
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Most women worked as maids, doing common household chores. they worked together, each striking to make life less troublesome.
In the workplace, they were given low pay, their hours were long, and the conditions they had to endure were much worse than they could have ever expected. The historian Dennis Clark states, “Whether they were women servants or men who worked in steel mills, these were people who were subject to the most fierce exploitation at a time when American capitalism had no governors or constraints upon it" (Hoobler). Though the Irish were greatly taken advantage of, they were quick to realize that these Americans were”Yankee tricksters”. Groups of Irish came together to protest their low wages, for instance, in 1859, Irish workers blocked railroad tracks that they had just built, demanding higher wages. Because of the low economic bracket that the Irish were in, they hard hard lives, which lead to more poverty and sorrow.
This low image was conveyed to other ethnic groups, and others began viewing Irish as insignificant. Since whiskey came from Ireland, the Irish were viewed as unskilled drunks, and were often unemployed because of this conception about Irish. Businesses began creating signs saying, “No Irish Need Apply”(Hoobler). Another factor that created much grief and discrimination was the fact that Irish were Catholics. Most Americans who came from Anglo roots were Protestant. These Protestants felt the Irish were untrustworthy because they did not hold the same beliefs, and they felt that Catholics went against the Democratic ways of the US
.
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Due to the discrimination that the Irish felt from other native groups, they lived together in tight knit Irish neighborhoods. There, the children played together, and the community worked hard in keeping each other afloat economically, and stabilizing their lives. Though they worked together in making life better, in many neighborhoods the streets were not paved, streets were dirty, and there were no streetlights. Their neighborhoods were in slums, which also contributed to the low image that Irish held among other groups in America. As Patrick Murphy states, “the Irish position is one of shame and poverty"(Hobbler, 82). Mobs of people would mob government buildings, protesting against the horrible state of Irish slums. They feared that their neighborhoods nearby would be affected by the Irish slums, and disease would spread throughout the area.
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