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In genteel households, only men worked for wages.
But in Irish Poor, and working class households, everybody had to work
to make ends meet. Wives did sewing and took in boarders. Children worked
as errand runners, newsboys and "scavengers," finding old
clothes and other discarded items to sell to junk dealers. Reformers
saw such unsupervised street activity as proof of the immorality of
the poor.
Rapid population growth made housing scarce in New
York City. Since they could not afford good housing, Irish working people
lived in the city's worst tenements. Families of six or eight crowded
into tiny two room apartments. Thousands had to live in damp, dark cellars.
Competition for housing and jobs helped hostility between the Irish
and the city's small free black population.
Genteel homes had running water by the 1850s, but
tenements did not. Immigrant women had to carry all cooking, cleaning
and drinking water up from the street in pails. Children helped with
this task, and with gathering fuel for cooking and heating fares. Poor
and working class women faced lives of endless scrimping, scraping and
borrowing.
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"Dumping ground at the foot of Beach
Street." An 1866 engraving shows people scavenging on garbage
barges, searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items
that might be used or sold to junk dealers. The picture, according
to a Harper's Weekly editor, showed how some people in
New York "live upon the refuse of respectable folk."
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