| The Irish Scrubwoman By Daisy
Carrington
In the days when “No Irish Need Apply,” my maternal grandmother, Margaret
McCabe Ackerson, was lucky to find work scrubbing office floors to support
her five children. My aunt remembers sitting as a little girl on the curb
in front of their East 29th Street, Manhattan tenement until her widowed
mother came home around midnight. This was not the American dream Margaret’s
father, Patrick McCabe, left Ireland for in the mid-1880s.
Things improved when Margaret remarried, quit scrubbing floors, and began
attending the new Nickelodeon movies.
She was crazy about them… even though ushers went down theater aisles
spraying disinfectant, hygiene not being what it is today.
Margaret’s untimely death in 1923 at age forty-two prevented her from
seeing that her children achieved a share of the American Dream. They did
it via routes open to the Irish at the time: one son became a priest, one
a detective, one a CPA. As for the girls, my mother became a telephone operator
for Ma Bell, working split shifts (8 a.m. to 12 noon and 3 p.m. to 7), before
marrying my father, James McQuillan Stewart, a sailor from Belfast.
I suspect he, like so many immigrants, jumped ship and was here illegally,
but he had kissed the Blarney Stone and talked his way into a job in the
Accounting Department of Consolidated Edison Company of New York, as it
was then called.
The little girl who sat on the sidewalk waiting for her mother married
a teacher.
The family has come a long way since Margaret scrubbed floors. My sister
teaches, her son is a film animator, her daughter runs her own gardening
business, and I was an advertising writer.
As I look at this circa 1920 photo of my grandmother, I am proud of how
hard the Irish worked to make “No Irish Need Apply” a thing of the past.
— Submitted by Victoria Stewart
Please send photographs along with your name, address, phone number,
and a brief description to Daisy at Irish America Magazine, 875 Sixth Avenue,
Suite 2100, New York NY 10001. If photos are irreplaceable, then please
send a good quality reproduction or email the picture at 300 dpi resolution
to Irishamag@aol.com. No photocopies,
please. We will pay $65 for each photo that we select.
|
