NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

October 15, 1998

Plains Folk: The Hired Girl—an Obscurity of Rural History

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

One of the most compelling passages in all of Great Plains literature is "The Hired Girls," the middle section of "My Antonia," by Willa Cather. In the boy's-eye view of Jim Burden, the immigrant country girls who kept house for the townspeople of Black Hawk (a.k.a. Red Cloud), Neb., are wonderfully alluring. Including the Norwegian girl Lena and the Bohemian girl Antonia, these older daughters of farm families help their families get out of debt and send younger siblings to school by working out for Anglo-American town folk.

"There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk," Cather writes. "All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which made them conspicuous. The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background."

Leaving aside the issue of sex appeal, hired girls from the country were a commonplace of town life up and down the plains. Cather's great novel, too, draws our attention to the girls who worked in town, and away from the far more numerous hired girls who served farm families. These other young working women, however, are the subject of some fine recent research by Barbara Handy-Marchello, with the history department at the University of North Dakota.

"In my research on rural pioneer women," she says, "I have found that nearly every woman hired out for at least a brief period in her life."

Handy-Marchello sees five categories of girls or women who worked out for other farm families. The first category is similar to Cather's hired girls—young women working for a while before marriage—except that they served on farms instead of in towns. This made their work more physically demanding because it included things like milking and gardening. The second category of hired girl worked out for pay on occasion to meet short-term labor needs in house or field. The third category did the same, except without pay, a type of work exchange that Professor Handy-Marchello calls "trading daughters."

So far the work situation sounds reasonably humane, but now we come to the fourth and fifth categories. The fourth is that of girls who were "difficult" or "superfluous" in their own families and thus were sent away to work. These might be orphans, illegitimate daughters, or daughters of widows. One such exploited child-worker named Margaret Kottke died of abuse and neglect while working for a family near Granville, N.D.

The fifth category was composed of older women, for whom domestic work was "the safety net that caught them after they were divorced, abandoned or widowed and found themselves without other means of support." Elinore Pruitt Stewart, author of "Letters of a Woman Homesteader," was a happy example of this type of domestic. But Handy-Marchello says, "Many women in this category ended up alone and on welfare."

Sorting all this out, Handy-Marchello determines that the most important issue was "the family status of the hired girl or woman." Did she have family to fall back on if her work situation ended or became intolerable? Was she working by choice? Was she receiving cash wages? Working out might indeed be "a stepping stone to marriage and possibly status," but it might also be "a dead end for girls and women."

The hired girl, so memorably sketched by Cather in literature, remains obscure in rural history.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136