Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  New York City. “Syrian children playing in street.” The “little mother,” baby in tow, watches a group of smaller boys playing marbles or shooting craps. (Bain Collection, LC)

  In many working-class families, the babies and small children were effectively raised by their older sisters. It was not that the mothers were uninterested or irresponsible. They were, rather, overworked and forced to delegate responsibility to their helpers. Because it was easier to watch the little ones than do the laundry or the cooking or the housecleaning, the girls were given this task. They accepted as a matter of course.

  The little mothers were more than baby sitters. They were fully responsible for their charges, often from the time they got home from school until the moment the babies fell asleep. They fed them when they weren’t nursing, clothed them, bathed them, diapered them, and put them to bed. The little ones became, in point of fact, their babies.

  In Chicago, an unpublished report on preadolescent girls in a Polish neighborhood noted that the girls there had “the ‘little mother’ spirit well developed.” They not only watched over the smaller children but “took considerable pride in the appearance of the one who [was], at the moment, the baby.”11

  New York City. “A little mother.” A Jacob Riis photograph and caption. The children were sitting on the stoop because there was no place inside for them to play, sit, or rest. (Jacob Riis Collection, LC)

  The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Thirteenth Annual Report of Greenwich House claimed that, during the summer, she minded “Danny, my baby brother, all the time.… Sometimes I go to play a little while at night with the other children but I must mind Danny there because he does not like to go to bed until we do. Then he gets so tired he goes right to sleep on my lap and I carry him up. I think my brother is very nice but I get tired minding him sometimes.”12

  The little mothers and “their” babies were as much a part of the life of the city as their “little merchant” brothers. Settlement-house workers referred to the “little mother” problem by name; newspaper reporters described their activities in mocking detail. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Board of Health even organized its own “Little Mothers League” to instruct the girls in the proper care of “their” babies. As Dr. Walter Benzel of the Board explained to the New York Times, “much of the time in the summer the babies of the tenements [are] entrusted to the keeping of their older sisters, and it would be almost useless to teach the real mothers unless the ‘little Mothers’ were also taught.”13

  The girls worked at home and for their mothers. Every increase in their mothers’ workload meant an increase in their own. When their mothers took in homework, the girls joined them at the kitchen table hemming skirts, embroidering pincushions, stemming artificial flowers, or sorting nuts. When the mothers took in boarders, the girls helped with the extra laundry, shopping, cleaning, and cooking.

  Boarding single men (and an occasional woman or family) was the most common income-producing activity engaged in by married women and their daughters. The American city, so blessed with abundance in other areas, did not have sufficient private housing units for all who needed them. Apartment houses were, as yet, available only for the more prosperous. There were no affordable hotels and few respectable rooming houses.14

  Boarding out provided immigrants from the old world and migrants from the countryside with the cheapest and most comfortable way to survive in a strange, new urban world. It simultaneously brought the boarding families additional income to close their household budget gaps and save money for land of their own. According to the Immigration Commission Report (1908–10), up to one third of urban immigrant families received some part of their income from boarding fees. In areas with a high percentage of recently arrived immigrants, like the Stockyards district of Chicago, the proportion was even higher. A 1910 study of “back of the Yards” Lithuanian and Polish families found that more than half took in an average of three boarders each. In New York City, 48 percent of the Russian-Jewish households took in an average of two boarders each.15

  Caring for boarders was a working-class and not an exclusively immigrant means of supplementing the family income.16 Families with children too young to earn regular wages had to choose between mother going out to work or bringing work home. Most decided on the latter course, though not without some thought. Boarders meant less space and less privacy for the entire family. They were also a sign that the man of the house was not able to support his family on his own wages.17

  Caring for boarders was women’s work. It was the mothers’ and daughters’ task to clear out the front room for the newcomers and find mattresses, beds, or other places for them to sleep. Once the boarder or boarders were settled, it was the women’s responsibility to buy, cook to order, and serve their food, make their beds, clean their rooms, and launder their bedclothes, workclothes, and Sunday suits. Though some men did not consider this “work,” probably because it was done by women at home, the evidence suggests otherwise.18

  Taking in boarders was not the only way that mothers and daughters supplemented the family income. Some women brought in money by cooking for single men. Others took in laundry or did sewing. Still more took in industrial homework.

  Next to boarders, doing “homework” for small jobbers, middlemen, and contractors was the most common source of income for women who worked at home. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to estimate the number of households where homework was done—or the number of children working in these households.19 According to the Immigration Commission, six in one hundred households did some sort of homework, though the percentages varied greatly by city and by ethnic group: from 11.2 percent of all households in Chicago to 1.6 percent for Buffalo, from 25 percent of New York City Italians to 5.3 percent of Chicago Italians.20 Like caring for boarders, homework was women’s work. Unemployed husbands might, in a pinch, join in, but more often they were employed outside the home or, if unemployed, too embarrassed to join their wives at the kitchen table. Their sons, following their lead, stayed as far away as possible. The kitchen and whatever went on in it was not for them.

  A photograph taken by Lewis Hine in East Harlem at five in the afternoon on December 19, 1911, shows what was probably a typical scene in a household with plenty of seasonal homework to do. Mary Mauro, the mother, Angelina, a ten-year-old neighbor, Fiorandi, Maggie, and Victoria, ranging in age from eight to eleven, are sitting at the kitchen table sorting feathers by size. Against the back wall of the tiny, cramped kitchen sit two boys, a little one on his big brother’s lap. The boys watch from a distance as mother and girls work intently. A second Hine photo tells the same story. Mother and three children sit at the table sorting nuts. Behind them, taking up the rest of the space in the tiny tenement kitchen, is the father, pipe in hand, sitting in his rocking chair. In a third photo, we see only mother and daughters. Hine tells us that the father had been sorting nuts with the women, but retreated into the bedroom as soon as the visitors arrived, ashamed at being seen or photographed doing “women’s work.”21

  The women and girls worked well together. With all they had to do to keep the household in order, mothers had to make expert and efficient use of their helpers. Girls too young to decorate pillboxes or embroider pillowcases could, at least, keep the babies out of the way. Girls a bit older could pull bastings or sort materials. Ten- and eleven-year-olds were old enough to sit down at the kitchen table and do the work of adults.

  New York City, December 1911. “Mrs. Mary Mauro, 309 East 110th Street, 2nd floor. Family work on feathers, make $2.25 a week. In vacation, two or three times as much. Victoria, 8, Angelina 10 (a neighbor), Fiorandi 10, Maggie 11. All work except two boys against the wall. Father is street cleaner and has steady job.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  Because most working-class mothers were “too busy” to leave the house, the job of picking up raw materials and delivering finished goods often fell to the girls. Marie Ganz began her day with a trip to the facto
ry loft to pick up a bundle of unfinished skirts for her mother. “The bundle was always twice as big as I was. Just the bundle and a pair of legs were all the neighbors could see as I passed their windows. ‘The bundle with legs’ was the way they described it, for the legs seemed to belong to the pack rather than to a human being.”22

  Probably New York City. A young girl probably bringing home “work” for her mother to sew. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  Girls who helped out at home—especially those who assisted their mothers with the homework at the kitchen table—grew up fast, perhaps too fast.

  Catharine Brody remembered that the Italian barber’s daughters who lived on her block and went to her school never played with the other girls in the afternoon. There was an aura of mystery about these girls, with their long black hair flecked with bits of feathers. What did they do every afternoon? And where did they get the feathers to put in their hair? Only by accident did Catharine discover that the girls spent their afternoons sorting and arranging feathers at the kitchen table.23

  The eleven-year-old girl who told her story in the Greenwich House Annual Report minded her brother Danny all day during the summer. Her activities during the school year were more varied.

  “Every morning before school, I sweep out three rooms and help get breakfast. Then I wash the dishes.

  “In the mornings, on the way to school, I leave finished flowers at the shop and stop for more work on my way home.

  “After school I do my homework for an hour, then I make flowers. All of us, my sisters, my cousins, my aunts, my mother work on flowers. We put the yellow centers into forget-me-nots. It takes me over an hour to finish one gross and I make three cents for that. If we all work all our spare time after school, we can make as much as two dollars between us.”24

  New York City, 1912. “Making artificial leaves in tenement attic.… The five year old helps. Her sister, aged 10, works until 9 P.M. some nights, although she is nearsighted.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  Not all city girls worked as hard as this child. Girls fortunate enough to have been born into smaller families or families able to survive without having to take in boarders or industrial homework had less to do. Because Kate Simon’s father made good money as an “expert shoe worker, a maker of samples,” and her mother kept the family small (by having thirteen abortions, as Kate would later discover), Kate’s chores were minimal. She was required to wheel the baby a turn or two around the block and help with the cleaning and dishes.25

  Marietta Interlandi grew up in a working-class Italian family in Chicago with fewer resources at its disposal. Her good fortune came in the shape of an older sister who was enlisted as mother’s chief assistant. While Marietta was “always out,” skating or playing jacks and ball, her sister “stayed at home with my mother. She helped her out a lot. I was younger, you know. Three years makes a difference.”26

  The little mothers who helped out at home were part-time workers and, like their brothers, were suspended between childhood and adult life. At home and in the classroom, they were expected to follow orders. But out at work—hawking their papers, if they were boys, or shopping for the family’s food and minding the baby, if they were girls—they were expected to act like adults. Girls and boys accepted their ambiguous status without much complaint. It was all part of growing up.

  Though most working-class city kids were, by their tenth birthday, doing some sort of work in the afternoons, there were enormous differences between the work assigned to boys and to girls. Like their fathers, the boys earned money outside the homes and were responsible for bringing it home to support their families. Like their fathers as well, they took liberties with their pay checks, holding back a little as a reward for their labor. The girls, on the other hand, like their mothers, earned nothing at their labor. Household chores and baby-tending were entirely unpaid. Caring for boarders brought in income, but it was not considered “work.” Industrial homework was, but in this case the income producer was the family of women, not the individuals who comprised it. The girls who joined their mothers at the kitchen table were not earning anything by themselves. They were “helping out.”

  This situation put the girls at a disadvantage. Aside from the pennies they might earn at junking and the nickel or two they might collect on their birthdays, they were for the most part marooned at home without funds of their own. Every time they wanted to go to the movies or buy a piece of lace to decorate their hand-me-down shirtwaists, they had to go begging to their mothers.

  The boys experienced a sort of harmony between their work and the pleasures it bought. The more they worked, the more they could eat, see, and do. The girls’ unpaid labor carried with it no such tangible rewards. While the boys’ capacity for paid fun and entertainment was bounded only by their earning power, the girls had to petition for every penny. Unlike their brothers, they had to learn to postpone their gratifications and be circumspect in their pursuit of pleasure. They had to find satisfaction instead in the “grown-up” feelings they enjoyed in accomplishing adult tasks, in their neighbors’ compliments on their well-behaved babies, and their mothers’ congratulations on their outwitting and outbargaining the butcher. When such rewards were not forthcoming, as was often the case, they had to be satisfied, as their mothers “appeared” to be, with the comfort they received from doing their duty without complaint.

  The young girls learned early what would be expected of them as adults. They also learned that no matter how difficult or tedious the task, it could be lightened if accomplished in the company of others. Housework in the early twentieth century was fortunately not yet the isolated, anonymous task it would become. The young girls chopped their “farfel” alongside their mothers, watched the baby from the front stoop with their friends, and joined the other girls and women at the kitchen table to hem the new batch of shirtwaists. While, in comparison to their brothers, they remained isolated from the life of the city, they were able to construct their own community of family, friends, and neighbors and draw from it the companionship and comfort they required and deserved.

  All That Money Could Buy

  The children who worked downtown crossed the invisible bridge that separated and linked the two parts of the city. Like their customers, the eleven- and twelve-year-old refugees from the slums, the ghettoes, the “Jewtowns” and “Poletowns” and “Little Sicilies” were commuters working in the heart of the city, where money was most plentiful. With eyes and ears wide open, the newsies, peddlers, and shineboys observed first-hand how life was lived by the other half. They watched and listened as the new middle class and the older elites shopped, were entertained, and spent their money. They studied the habits, dress, and style of secretaries and bookkeepers, real estate promoters and railroad magnates, gentlemen and fashionable ladies. They peered through plate-glass windows into lobster palaces and hotel lobbies, window-shopped with department store customers; perused the billboards, marquees, and gaudy, colored posters outside the movie palaces; and read in the newspapers about the life of the city: the fads, fashions, amusements, and personalities. The more they saw, the more difficult it was to return to their home blocks and take up again their childish games. Ring-around-the-rosy, prisoner’s base, and building forts in vacant lots quickly lost their attraction.

  The children were swept up in the whirlwind of urban life. They, too, wanted to join in the fun and the games and, as they rapidly learned, this was not impossible. The children could not and did not expect to eat oysters in the lobster palaces, shop in the department stores, or see the latest show at the first-class theaters, but they could—for pennies—buy themselves a very good time. There were amusements, entertainments, and fashions to fit every pocketbook, different variations of the same basic model for different classes of urban customers. While fashionable ladies got their shoes and hats custom-made or at the department stores, the girls could—for a fraction of the price—purchase imitations from pushcart peddlers and bargain stores. While society
people ate their dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria and Delmonico’s and the newly enriched middle classes patronized the lobster palaces, the children could—for a nickel—sit at the counter of a “dairy lunch” and enjoy a big slice of apple pie with ice cream on top. While the upper crust attended the opera and the middle classes the vaudeville palaces and music halls, the children could—for a nickel—see the flickers at the nickelodeon, and—for a dime—watch a cheap vaudeville show from the gallery.

  Denver, 1910–20. Denver newsies smiling for the camera. Every day, these boys left their neighborhoods to travel downtown to sell their papers to the city’s businessmen and shoppers. (Mrs. Ben Lindsey Collection, LC)

  The children had been sent downtown to earn money for their families—and this they intended to do. But the more time they spent away from the block, the more uses they found for the money they earned.

  Money bought pleasure and a place in the city. The children required both. As the settlement-house workers were the first to understand, reforms in child labor and compulsory schooling laws had, ironically, created a new problem for the children (and for the reformers who looked after their welfare). Boys and girls between the ages of eleven and fifteen were now able to attend school for a few more years. But school, unlike work, let out at three o’clock, leaving the new working-class students with free time in the afternoon—time, the reformers were convinced, that they did not know how to fill constructively.1