A 1904 study of employment agencies provides further insight into the conditions of domestic employment in the period. Frances A. Kellor, supported by the Woman’s Municipal League of New York and aided by eight fellow investigators, visited 834 licensed agencies in four cities, including 522 in New York.18 Three-fifths of the agencies supplied household workers, and three-fifths of all household workers found their employment through such agencies. Mary Mallon, we know, found most of her jobs through two employment agencies. Kellor described the miserable conditions in run-down rooms where unemployed women met the “ladies” who looked them over like animals. She wrote, “In some of these [agencies] girls are actually herded and treated like cattle. . . . The means of maintaining order in some of the crowded offices is not only insulting, but brutal.”19
Kellor’s study found that not only were conditions appalling within the agencies helping people find work, but working conditions were worse. Women domestics frequently changed jobs seeking better conditions. Kellor revealed that workers “receive such poor food, and not enough of that,” or labored under “defective sanitation and heat,” or found “the over-crowding is in many instances serious, and certainly girls can have no privacy.” Kellor heard complaints of unwanted sexual advances, poor bathing facilities, dirty bed clothing, and very long work days with little time off. She noted, “One employer complained to us that her last girl was not neat and clean . . . and then showed us [her] room, which was partitioned off from the coal-bin and could not have been kept clean under any conditions!”20
By the turn of the twentieth century, domestic service, in contrast to alternative positions in factories and retail stores, “lack[ed] both protection and dignity in the eyes of girls seeking occupations.” The “loss of personal independence” was a particular grievance that Kellor heard as she conducted interviews for her study.21 Young women may have felt they had no choice but to labor in the homes of others, but most understood the confines of their work.22
Mary Mallon’s could not have been an exception to the common experiences of her peers. New York domestic labor at the end of the nineteenth century, almost by definition, entailed alienating class, ethnic, religious, and gendered divisions as women from one cultural milieu came to work and live in the homes of families from another. Even when relationships between employer and employee were relatively good, servants’ positions were precarious. We can safely assume that Mary Mallon’s experiences between 1883 and her 1907 encounter with health officials led her to understand the social, economic, religious, and cultural differences between herself and her native-born employers. She must surely have become aware of the pervasive hierarchy of urban America and been sensitized to her place within it.
Domestic work that included living in others’ homes—not all of it did—severely restricted women’s social mobility. Many women in domestic service complained to Kellor that they had very few opportunities to meet respectable men, which they felt limited their potential for marriage, the road out of servile employment. Furthermore, their dependence on employers for housing meant that they had nowhere to live in between jobs.23 We can infer that some of Mary Mallon’s jobs did not demand living in the homes of her employers (perhaps cooks had more flexibility than those in general domestic service) because we know that she sometimes lived with Briehof (as when Soper found her in 1907) and sometimes with another family. Even so, it appears from reading between the lines of the Mallon story that she often boarded with her employer families and had few people she could call friends and no known relatives once her aunt died. Indeed, a nurse who befriended Mallon at Riverside Hospital said Mallon told her “on numerous occasions” that “she had no living relations” and “no brothers or sisters, nieces, nephews, grand-nieces or grandnephews and that she was the last survivor of her family.”24
One of the more positive legends to be linked to Mary Mallon through her ordeal was that she became particularly attached to the children in the homes in which she worked. As one newspaper wrote at the time of her habeas corpus court hearing, she was a “stout, jovial cook who was loved by the children in every family in which she was employed.”25 Mallon may, in fact, have been a good companion to the children in the homes in which she cooked, though she may have also fantasized such attachments, or reporters could have exaggerated the relationships. We do know that at one of the homes to which Soper traced her, J. Coleman Drayton’s, her employer testified to Mallon’s caring warmly for family members when she nursed them through their illnesses with typhoid fever.26
No matter how positive Mallon’s relations sometimes were with her employers and their families, however, her life was one of struggle and vulnerability. Like the others of her status and occupation, she remained expendable throughout her working career. She could have been replaced without any notice. She experienced periods of unemployment. She understood hardship and deprivation, the vagaries of the domestic marketplace, and probably saw herself—even before any of her dealings with the health department—alone in a sometimes hostile world. She undoubtedly had to learn to pick herself up and get another job when things did not go well, protecting herself against the realities of domestic work. The strong defenses she demonstrated to Soper and the other officials who tried to communicate with her were honed in the harsh world of servitude she had long inhabited.
Soper seemed to think that Mallon’s numerous job changes (he traced eight jobs over a ten-year period) indicated something negative about her. “Mary appeared to be a person who moved about a good deal,” he wrote. “She did not remain long in any situation.”27 Perhaps he thought her employers were dissatisfied with her work, although there was no evidence for that conclusion. He more than implied that she subconsciously understood her role in transmitting typhoid, and left before she could be blamed for it, claiming once, “It must have looked as though [typhoid fever] was pursuing her.”28 Although Soper suggested that Mallon left her employment when typhoid fever developed in the families for whom she worked, this was not substantiated in his own evidence. Soper traced Mallon to Dark Harbor in the years 1901 to 1902, for example, to a family for whom she worked for eleven months. A laundress developed typhoid fever one month after Mallon arrived; she stayed ten months afterwards.29 Other commentators nonetheless have continued to suggest such prescience on Mallon’s part. “[S]he sensed that something was wrong,” wrote Stanley Walker in the New Yorker, “and she would go to another job as soon as she saw typhoid developing around her.”30
In the years during which she carried out her cooking career, Mary Mallon could not possibly have understood that she, a healthy woman, might have caused someone in a family for whom she worked to contract typhoid fever. The best of the world’s scientists were themselves only beginning to understand the existence of healthy carriers by the end of the nineteenth century. Typhoid fever was rampant in New York and around the country at the time and was often connected to summer vacations when people left their familiar habitat and wandered to new places, exposing themselves to disease.31 Even after Soper informed her of the possibility of a healthy person transmitting the disease, Mallon denied her culpability: “She had never had [typhoid] nor produced it. There had been no more typhoid where she was than anywhere else. There was typhoid fever everywhere.”32 Most people believed, as did Mallon, that typhoid was either transmitted by exposure to people sick with the disease or through polluted water and milk supplies. Before cities filtered their water, these were the most common sources of the disease. As Soper himself wrote, “It will be remembered that in those days typhoid fever was far more common than it is today and that the knowledge of its transmission was less complete.”33 At the turn of the century, then, to blame a healthy person with no symptoms for transmitting typhoid fever would have seemed beyond the realm of thoughtful possibility.
It is conceivable that Mallon was fired from some of her jobs, although it is more likely, since there is no record of any dissatisfaction with her cooking and significant record of sat
isfaction, that she left for her own reasons. Sometimes Mallon was hired only for the summer, and thus had some short-term employment. Soper portrayed her as uncommunicative, claiming that “she did not get on well with other servants and wanted to be moving about.”34 His observation is challenged by the story of her capture in March, 1907, when the other servants helped Mallon hide when authorities came to take her away. Her culinary expertise was appreciated in the homes in which she worked, and even the Warrens, whose home Mallon worked in when she was located by Soper, described their favorite dishes that she prepared. Mallon could make good wages: $45 per month at her Oyster Bay job, which was double the average domestic worker’s wage.35
There are a few other possible explanations for Mallon’s varied job history, which seem to fit more with the time and the situation. The first is that Mary Mallon may have left jobs soon after someone in the family came down with typhoid fever in order not to catch the disease herself. This would not have been a foolish response, but one point against this explanation is that when members of the Drayton household contracted typhoid, Mallon stayed to help nurse them in their illness. In this instance, however, Drayton offered her a bonus for her sick-room help, which may have convinced her to stay. The second possibility is that Mary Mallon perceived some danger to her own employment future when a household became disrupted from disease and “epidemic fighters” began their investigations. Maybe she worried that staff reductions would necessarily follow sickness or death; maybe she did not like the idea of being questioned. She may have wanted to leave before being caught up in a situation that might end her job anyway. We know she left some employment because its term was expired; this was true for those times when she contracted to accompany a family to their summer residence.
As she matured in the New York servant world (by 1897 she was twenty-eight years old) Mallon must have become wise to the ups and downs of her profession. She would have been on the lookout for better jobs, and she might have left abruptly when she found one. She would have developed some protective behaviors that allowed her continued success. One of these may have been not allowing herself to get too emotionally close with the other servants; another may have been a few well-timed exits.
With this historical background, we can return to the story of Mary Mallon’s capture and incarceration with a broader understanding of how she may have perceived these events. Through the eyes of a mid-career immigrant woman, thirty-seven years old when Soper first approached her, without family, but with an understanding of how the world divided the haves and the have nots, Mary Mallon saw circumstances very differently than did George Soper or S. Josephine Baker.
George Soper became frustrated when Mary Mallon did not see things as he did: “Reason, at least in the forms in which I was acquainted with it,” he wrote, “proved unavailing. My point of view was not acceptable [to Mary Mallon] and the claims of science and humanity were unavailing.” Soper complained, “I never felt more helpless.”36 We can see through Mary Mallon’s eyes that she, too, felt helpless in this 1907 encounter, and that she, too, found reason in her position.
When George Soper walked up the steps of the Park Avenue brownstone in which Mary Mallon was working in March, 1907, and accused her (albeit, in his terms, diplomatically) of making people sick with her cooking, he initiated a new public health encounter. Investigators previously had looked into other home-and community-based typhoid epidemics. They had come to examine the water supply, the food, and the disease histories of the people in the household.37 But never before, in Mallon’s experience or anyone else’s, had an epidemic investigation led to an accusation that a specific healthy individual was causing typhoid in others. Soper himself admitted that “such a thing had never been heard of.”38
Because of her life experiences in the American urban workplace and her awareness of the low esteem in which Irish women domestics were held, Mallon was probably on her guard when the authorities came to call. Just as the other servants who tried to protect her from S. Josephine Baker’s search, Mallon would have seen the attention she received from Soper and then from the health department and police officers as unwanted attention, even persecution, as she put it to the press. What would government officials want with her except to bring trouble? Soper might have assured her that he thought her “innocent” of causing disease in the sense that she did not do it on purpose or knowingly; Baker might have assured her she “only wanted the specimens and that then she could go back home.”39 But by the time Baker approached her with the full authority of the health department and police behind her, Mallon “was convinced that the law was wantonly persecuting her, when she had done nothing wrong.”40 Mallon did not trust her accusers, especially when they appeared with uniformed police officers. What she understood best was her vulnerability in the face of an attack from powerful officials.41 When at Willard Parker Hospital, the surgeons suggested removing her gallbladder, Baker noted, Mallon “was convinced afresh that this was a pretext for killing her.”42
Soper approached Mallon with at least two assumptions, both of which were unshared: “I expected to find a person who would be as desirous as I was for an explanation of the way in which the typhoid had followed her,” Soper wrote. “Certainly she could not have failed to be impressed by the strange fatality with which the disease had broken out wherever she went.”43 Mallon, however, had not spent the previous months, as had Soper, searching for an explanation of the Oyster Bay outbreak of typhoid fever; she may not have given the occurrence any thought since leaving that job. Moreover, she would not have perceived herself to be at the forefront of a trail of disease. She was a healthy woman doing her job; no more, no less. “She would not allow anybody to accuse her,” Soper realized.44
What was Mary Mallon supposed to make of this man who seemed intent on blaming her for spreading typhoid fever? Soper found her in her Park Avenue kitchen, he followed her home, he interrogated her friend: why was he harassing her? In the face of his seemingly unreasonable accusations, Mallon tried to defend herself. She might not have even listened to his long explanations about the possible role she played in transmitting disease; if she heard his words, she was surely confused by them. What was clear to her was that her future was in jeopardy, and Mary Mallon reacted understandably to that, by fighting back, by trying to run, by resisting.
Mallon’s responses to Soper’s uninvited appearance at her employer’s home on Park Avenue and the apartment she shared with Briehof on Third Avenue near 33rd Street demonstrated her incomprehension and resistance to the words Soper uttered about her being the cause of outbreaks of typhoid fever, but they also revealed the personal anguish the visits caused her. Soper literally invaded her space. Furthermore, he befriended Briehof in the process, an intrusion that revealed a degree of fickleness on the part of Mallon’s “best friend, a man whose name she often went by.”45 Although Soper described Briehof as “a disreputable looking man,” he nonetheless “got to be well acquainted with him.” Briehof “took me to see the room,” Soper divulged, and he “made an arrangement with Mary’s friend to meet her in this room.” But Briehof did not warn Mallon to expect a visitor, and she was “angry at the unexpected sight” of Soper.46 She also must have been upset that Briehof had betrayed her to authorities.
Mary Mallon’s behavior in these initial encounters with health authorities demonstrates her feelings of being attacked, unjustly accused, alone, and helpless in the face of authority. She felt caged, literally and figuratively, by forces larger than life, uncontrollable. Her responses speak of her vulnerability. She lashed out at what she did not understand, at people who threatened to take away her livelihood. They expected her to listen to their explanations, to comprehend that a healthy person could cause disease in others, and to accept that she had killed a person. But the words of the health officials were unfathomable, not because she was dim-witted, but because she came to those initial encounters from such a different starting place. However well intentioned Soper and Baker bel
ieved themselves to be, Mallon could not respond to them in ways they would consider reasonable: they threatened everything she knew. She had to resist.
One response produced another. The more Mary Mallon resisted and refused to communicate with the health officers with whom she came in contact—in her place of employment, her home, and in the hospital—the more they labeled her as uncooperative and saw the impossibility of releasing her. The more they treated her as a pariah, the more she acted like one. This standoff might have been avoided if either side could have stopped long enough to realize what was happening. But this was a new situation. Health officials were feeling their way toward a policy for dealing with the newly identified phenomenon of healthy carriers. In a very different way than Mallon, they too felt vulnerable in the face of a new force they did not yet fully understand but with which they had to contend. In their own excitement and confusion, they were not in a position to negotiate. Neither Mallon nor her captors showed flexibility during those weeks in the spring of 1907.
The initial confrontations between Mary Mallon and health officials defined their respective positions, which became entrenched over time. To the officials, the exciting new medical explanations, especially as they were repeatedly confirmed in the professional literature, remained of primary significance. Mary Mallon’s capture represented the triumph of bacteriology, the promise that science could actually solve the urgent disease problems facing the country. While the practical responses to the newly understood phenomenon of healthy carriers were yet to be developed, public health officers were eager to move forward. The fact that a healthy Mallon carried disease in the inner recesses of her body was vital; and it was exciting at the time to learn the new directions bacteriological thinking might take.
On the other hand, Mallon’s position that as a healthy woman she did not threaten anyone else’s health reflected the predominant understanding of how diseases were transmitted. Even eighteen years after Mallon’s identification as a healthy carrier, one health officer concluded that the concept still “seems incredible to many people. If germs cause disease, they reason, how can one be inhabited by ‘millions of germs’ and yet not become ill with the disease.” Furthermore, this New Jersey health officer realized from his own experience that most people could not fathom how such germs lodged in the gallbladder could find their way into the mouths of other people. “The thought is so repulsive that the act itself seems impossible.” Even “the microscopic size of all bacteria cannot be imagined by most persons.”47 Mallon, too, found a theory that argued for such strange events incredible and unbelievable. Her own beliefs, experiences, and feelings are important determinants in her story, and recognizing them provides a historical perspective that still resonates today. Health officials who encountered Mary Mallon discounted her beliefs, (especially during this “golden age” of bacteriology’s promise) which increased their difficulty in controlling her behavior and the health problems she posed. Such a situation could easily repeat itself today if the beliefs of public health officials about a new disease entity were not commonly shared—were literally not even comprehended—by people required to follow policies based on them.
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