The Image Of The Hired Girl In Literature The Great Plains, 1860 To World War I

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 ...