"Send No More Women:" Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia
Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia EARLY IN THE SPRING of 1773, Captain William McCulloch guided the ship Friendship from Belfast to Philadelphia. On May 5, two notices appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette. The first announced that along with a general assortment of spring goods were a few barrels of Irish beef and Scotch herring. The second reported that the ship's cargo included 250 servants. * Dry goods could be purchased at James Stuart's store on Second Street; the human cargo could be surveyed on board the ship. There potential buyers could select the servants they wanted, negotiate terms of indenture, and pay the captain. Rachel Walker was a passenger on board the Friendship; her indenture was purchased by Walter Shea, a Philadelphia merchant. Margaret McKiven, in return for cash paid to the captain, was assigned to serve Patrick Bevin of Southwark. Walker and McKivan were now the property of their masters and they began their lives as Pennsylvania indentured servants. Although we can only imagine how these two young women must have felt as they began their new lives in America, we might reasonably suppose that they left their homes and families in Ireland in hopes of escaping a desperate poverty, of seeking some alternative to the increasingly difficult lives of their mothers and sisters before them. Perhaps, like many of their contemporaries, they had already moved from the countryside to seek work in the cities, to labor as domestic servants in the homes of wealthy families. Most likely, they cherished dreams of a better life than they had known, a modest prosperity,