Clodagh Finn: Labour of the Bridgets paved way for Irish diaspora success

Kay Daly and her siblings were hailed as the ‘most successful sister acts in US business’.

"Every woman alive loves Chanel No 5.” The advertising slogan might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the Irish diaspora ahead of St Patrick’s Day tomorrow, but it was written by an Irish woman who, at one point, was said to be the highest-paid female executive in the US.

In fact, in 1949, Kathleen ‘Kay’ Daly and her three siblings were hailed as the “most successful sister acts in US business”.

Between them, they earned over $100,000 a year (almost €1m today) and their accomplishments were trumpeted on the pages of the prestigious Life magazine.

Under the headline ‘Career Sisters’, the article read: “The four girls above [there was a stunning photograph showing them at their different kinds of work] are one of the most successful sister acts in current US business life, a position they achieved without appearing on the stage or screen, recording close harmonies or posing for home permanent-wave advertisements.”

(As an aside, how interesting that a woman might have made a fortune advertising the home perm in 1949.)

However, the Daly sisters made their fortune in some stereotype-busting ways. Kay was an ad agency executive, Maureen was an editor and “spiritual grandmother” of the young adult novelist, Sheila John was a columnist with the Chicago Tribune, and Maggie was a model and fashion show organiser.

The three older sisters were born in Castlecaulfield, Co Tyrone, while Sheila John was born in the US after the family emigrated in the 1920s to Wisconsin (“because Wisconsin looked like Ireland”).

Any one of them could be the subject of a book but together the story of the Daly sisters has ample material for a Mad Men-style mini-series. 

I’d open with a dramatisation of the story that Kay reportedly rented space on a billboard to advertise for an apartment when she moved to San Francisco after the Second World War.

She later joined Revlon and was behind the beauty brand’s legendary 1952 Fire and Ice campaign which, for the first time, acknowledged that women wore makeup for themselves, rather than men. The model wore a rhinestone-studded dress and a scarlet cape modelled on one that Kay had seen in Paris.

‘Fire and ice’ was a “lush and passionate” shade for lips and fingertips — “like flaming diamonds dancing on the moon” — and was aimed at those “who love to flirt with fire… who dare to skate on thin ice”.

It was a massive hit, helping Revlon sales to top $25m, according to one estimate. Little wonder that, in 1961, Kay Daly was appointed Revlon’s vice-president and creative director.

When she died in 1975, The New York Times ran an obituary under the heading: “Kay Daly is dead; copywriter, 55.”

By contrast — the starkest contrast — a century earlier, Irish women were also taking up column inches, but for all the wrong reasons.

Take this 1871 report from Harper’s Bazaar titled ‘Bridgets’. It takes a generous view, in a sense, as it encourages the employers of the hundreds of thousands of Irish women working as domestic servants in the US to be patient while “taking on the arduous task of imparting civilised habits and behaviour”.

It says: “For example, instead of lamenting the fact that Bridget did not know how to scrub floors properly, employers needed to realise that this was quite literally a foreign skill, ‘since her floor at home was the hard earth’.”

On it goes in great detail until the final hammer-blow: If the mistress “finds that she has to contend with a shirk, a slattern, a shrew, not to speak of exceptionally worse, then the mistress ‘cannot be altogether blamed for her declaration of war upon all the Bridgets that St Patrick left alive’.”

It concluded the solution was to hire a Chinese servant instead.

There is no shortage of bile about the women who, by 1846, made up almost three-quarters of domestic servants in New York and were sending more money home than male emigrants. Part of the reason for this was that they had more disposable income — food and board were covered — and they often funded the passage to the US for other siblings.

When those women got there, they too were lampooned for allegedly going upstairs on all fours and wreaking havoc in civilised households.

Little Women author Louisa May Alcott was certainly not a fan, writing in her column in the Boston Transcript in 1874 about the many faults of these “foreign incapables”.

Well, down with Louisa May this St Patrick’s Day, I say. I’ll be dedicating our double bank holiday to those courageous women who struck out, often because of starvation and poverty, to forge new lives in an often hostile land.

Kay Daly's 1952 Fire and Ice campaign for Revlon.

Mention the Bridgets today and the stories of grandmothers and grandaunts who worked as servants in 19th-century America come pouring in. Many never returned to Ireland, but some did, such as Mary H, who visited her homeplace in Johnstown, Kilkenny, with new-fangled ideas about hygiene. Her mother said she had insisted on “overturnin” the cabin, and cleaning beds and floors.

We know that because her New York employer, Quaker philanthropist (and vegan) Asenath Nicholson, set it down in writing when she visited Ireland in 1844 or 1845 to “personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor”.

Nicholson also commented that the £40 Mary H sent home “not only kept her mother in tea and bread but had given them all the ‘blessed tobacco’ besides”.

How many other Irish households were kept afloat by our maligned Bridgets?

That’s a story still to be told, although Margaret Lynch-Brennan’s fascinating book, The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service, does much to put her back in her rightful place.

Lynch-Brennan also explains how she paved the way for those who followed: “Through their personal interaction with the Irish Bridget, native-born Americans came to see the Irish less as ‘others’, and more as fellow humans. Credit is due to the Irish Bridget for pioneering the way… for the Irish as a group to move into the American middle class.”

In other words, without those women, the Daly sisters would never have had a chance to shine.

In all of this, there is another stereotype that needs a makeover — the image of the Irish Mammy who dotes on her sons.

In 1915, Joseph Daly, bicycle-shop owner and father of the Daly sisters, married Margaret Mellon Kelly, a distant cousin of millionaire Andrew Mellon.

She was determined her daughters would get an education and she packed them off every week to the library “to get a stack of books to study”. Then, as Life magazine tells us in a huge headline, she encouraged them to have careers: “[Daughters] were pushed up the ladder by their mother.”

She’s a woman who will be in my thoughts when Mother’s Day comes around later this month.