by Gail Collins
Most of the new generation of domestics were Irish. From the days of the Pilgrims, the women who came to America generally came because a man—a father or spouse—thought it was a good idea, or because they wanted to improve their chances of finding a husband. But the typical Irish immigrant was a single woman, who came with the intention of getting a job and supporting herself. “I am getting along splendid and likes my work,” reported a young seamstress in Connecticut to her people back in Ireland. “I will soon have a trade and be more independent…. You know it was always what I wanted so I have reached my highest ambition.”
Even before the great famines, daughters in Irish families had been encouraged to go off to the cities and find work in a store or as a servant, while the sons stayed home to work on the farm. They were expected to take care of themselves—although the cultural ban on premarital sex was strict, there was no thought that young women would require a chaperone or watchful brother to protect them from trouble. They emigrated eagerly, intending to get a job, save money, and bring over other members of the family.
Although almost no one liked domestic service, Irish women seemed to find the jobs more bearable than many others. They were not troubled by problems with the English language, and since so many of them were on their own, they might have found living in someone else’s home more acceptable than girls who had a family in America. They also seem to have adapted to situations in which they were given little chance to meet young men. In Ireland people tended to marry late, and about a quarter of the women never married at all. One sign of the Irish women’s priorities was that when they arrived in America, they headed out for the places that offered the best jobs, not the best opportunity for matrimony.
By midcentury, 74 percent of the domestic servants in New York were Irish, and familiarity did not necessarily bring affection. (Edwin Godkin, the editor of The Nation, claimed the performance of Irish domestics was a major reason American opinion had swung toward the British side on the question of Ireland’s independence.) The young women, who came mainly from farm backgrounds, did not all share their middle-class employers’ standards for housekeeping, and they were notoriously poor cooks. They also had a reputation for sauciness. However, employers’ ideas of what made a rebellious servant were rigid. In the book Plain Talk and Friendly Advice to Domestics, under the heading of “evil counsels” the author described an Irish troublemaker named Elizabeth who told the other servants, “Sure, six days is enough to work and the seventh, that belongs to us.”
When Irish women married, they immediately quit work. But their husbands had a much more difficult time finding jobs than women did. The Irish World examined the work of the Free Labor Bureau in New York in 1870 and found that it had provided jobs to 81 Irish men and 628 Irish women. The men were often forced to take dangerous work no one else would accept. (In the South before the Civil War they were employed on projects on which slave owners did not want to risk their valuable slaves.) Irish women often found themselves widowed by industrial accidents or deserted by husbands who were unable to make a living. Some of the most destitute people in big cities during the late nineteenth century were Irish women who had simply collapsed under the strain of their problems. The population of American almshouses and insane asylums tended to be heavily Irish, and most of them were women.
Those who survived the first generation in America usually engineered a very quick turnaround for their daughters. Second-generation Irish girls had the advantage of education in the parochial schools that sprang up in every large city, and many moved into careers in nursing or teaching—jobs that rewarded women for postponing marriage. None of them went into domestic service.
“I DIDN’T GO NO PLACE”
Italian-American immigrants put a particularly high value on keeping their women at home. “I didn’t go no place,” summarized one woman who arrived as an adult and never learned English. Jane Addams reported that when her Chicago settlement house gave a party for Italian women in the neighborhood, the invitees sent their husbands instead, “and the social extension committee entered the drawing room to find it occupied by rows of Italian workingmen.” Rosa Cavalleri said that among her Italian neighbors in Chicago, the height of entertainment for the women was to pull their chairs onto the street during the summer and sit on the sidewalk, drinking a cold can of beer they’d bought together from the saloon. “That’s all the pleasure we had—the cool from the beer in summer,” she said. Like many of the new arrivals, Italian women had trouble sympathizing with the temperance movement. One member of Addams’s Hull-House staff went to see the mother of a kindergarten student who had come to school intoxicated from breakfasting on bread soaked in wine. The mother listened politely to a lecture about the evils of drink, then offered the visitor a glass of her best wine. When the woman refused, the mother reappeared with a glass of whiskey, proudly saying: “See, I have brought you the true American drink.” The settlement worker concluded that her visit might have convinced the mother that good American children breakfasted on bread soaked in whiskey.
Addams was struck by the isolation of the Italian women and recalled one moment when an Italian neighbor admired the red roses in a vase at the settlement house. The woman was sure they had been imported all the way from Italy because she had never seen such flowers since she left her native village six years before. “During all that time, of course, the woman had lived within ten blocks of a florist’s window; she had not been more than a five-cent car ride away from the public parks, but she had never dreamed of faring forth for herself and no one had taken her,” Addams wrote. “Her conception of America had been the untidy street in which she lived and had made her long struggle to adapt herself to American ways.”
Italian girls were less likely to work than other immigrant teenagers. When they did get jobs, they were often walked to and from the factory by their brothers. “One girl told me that her mother made a note of the exact time at which she returned every day from work, and that she had to account for every minute of deviation,” said a social worker. “Seldom are Italian girls permitted to join clubs or evening classes…. When they are allowed this privilege, they areinvariably escorted to and from the gathering by a parent or older brother, who must be assured that no mingling of the sexes has been allowed.”
The contrast between life in southern Italy, where everything happened outdoors in the sun, and that in a tenement house in a poor urban neighborhood was hard on the newcomers. In Italy, women washed their clothes with their friends at the river. In New York, some tried carrying baskets of clothes to the East River, toting them on their heads as they did at home. But such foreign behavior was impermissible even in a neighborhood full of foreigners. “They were beaten up for doing this, they stoned us,” said one immigrant. In Italy, the women had done the cooking, sewing, and spinning outside. Their old houses, with stone floors, had required cleaning only once a month. Now they had wooden floors that looked dirty even after they had been scrubbed. “You have no idea how simple life is over there,” one said.
“WELL, WHAT DID YOU THINK
OF THAT YOUNG MAN?”
When Rose Cohen was a teenager, she was sent to buy sugar at a different grocery store than the one her family usually patronized. Two days later, her mother asked, “Well, what did you think of that young man?” The befuddled girl was led to understand that the grocery store clerk with whom she had exchanged a few words was a potential suitor. A “date” was arranged for the next Saturday, and it included all her family as well as the suitor’s uncle. The young people were sent for a walk, and the suitor explained in detail his ability to support her. After this brief get-together, the family proposed an alliance and Rose was engaged.
Arranged marriages were common for many immigrant cultures, although how much a girl was bound by her parents’ choice varied with the community and the girl. Rose Cohen’s parents were upset when she decided she did not want to be the store clerk’s wife, but they did not force her to go t
hrough with the marriage. Still, an arranged marriage was a way to ensure that daughters stayed within their own ethnic group. It was also an answer to the question of how a girl was supposed to find a husband if her parents did not allow her to talk to young men.
Despite the theory that girls should be kept innocent—or ignorant—about sex until they were married, young women who lived in tenements must have noticed what went on between their parents in the tiny apartments. At work, they were continually subjected to various forms of sexual harassment. Rose Cohen said the first sentence she learned in English was “Keep your hands off, please.” When she grew up, she said, “the thought of marriage often filled me with fear, even with disgust. So the sweatshop left its mark.”
Hester Vaughn was a cautionary tale of what could happen to a young woman who failed to keep predatory males at bay. She came from England before the Civil War to marry her fiancé, but he deserted her and she became a dairymaid. Her employer raped her and months later, when her pregnancy started to show, he gave her $40 and told her to leave. Hester went to Philadelphia and worked as a seamstress until her money ran out. Then with her last two dollars, in a terrible blizzard, she found and rented an unheated attic room. She had been without food for two days when she went into labor alone. The next day the landlady found her lying on the floor, her dead baby so frozen that a piece of its skin stuck to the floor. Hester was charged with infanticide, tried without a lawyer, convicted, and sentenced to be hung. Her story was so extreme that it attracted national attention, and she became a feminist cause. The governor rejected a plea for clemency by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saying he was acting on “principle.” But after a year of protests she was pardoned, and her supporters raised money to send her back to England.
Jewish wives tended to have fewer children than other immigrant women. One of their secrets may have been the religious rule that forbade couples from having sex while the woman was nursing. This may have been one instance in which the theory that nursing mothers could not get pregnant really worked. Although couples—particularly fathers—were proud of their big families, many women were desperate for ways to keep from having more babies. Emma Goldman, who worked as a midwife to immigrant women around the turn of the century, said that most of the women she knew “lived in continual dread of conception.” When they discovered they were pregnant, Goldman said, they often tried to induce miscarriage. “It was incredible what fantastic methods despair could invent: jumping off tables, rolling on the floor, massaging the stomach, drinking nauseating concoctions and using blunt instruments.” One Jewish woman from Eastern Europe recalled that when her mother, who was too poor to feed the children she had, got pregnant again, “I heard a funny sound and crept out in the middle of the night. My mother was lifting a heavy barrel full of pickles and dropping it again and again.” Her mother’s sister, she said, had eight children and fourteen abortions before she reached the age of forty. Abortions, which were illegal, were common but very dangerous—one study estimated one in five was fatal.
The most truly pathetic members of the immigrant community were single women attempting to support children. It was almost impossible for a mother alone to be both breadwinner and caretaker. She could take in piecework to supplement the family income, but that was not a living wage. In 1853, the Tribune estimated that a needlewoman who actually maintained full employment might make $91 a year. At the time, a family of four required $600 to sustain themselves at a marginal level. Any job that took a mother out of the home left her young children in peril. Jane Addams said the first three crippled children her settlement house workers encountered in Chicago had all been injured while their mothers were at work. “One had fallen out of a third-story window, another had been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him.”
Immigrants nursed their infants on demand and continued breastfeeding for a long time—sometimes eighteen months. But many women were so badly nourished that it was impossible for them to nurse, and they fed their babies milk that they bought out of large buckets and carried home in pails. Because of lack of refrigeration at the stores, and unsanitary conditions in the dairies, the milk was frequently contaminated with bacteria. A third of all babies in immigrant neighborhoods died before their fifth birthday and the milk they drank was one of the reasons. But bad air, bad food, lack of sunlight, and dirty streets made the urban immigrant children vulnerable to almost every conceivable disease. Jane Addams reported bitterly that in one year “six promising pupils out of a class of fifteen developed tuberculosis”—a disease that was, for poor people, a death sentence.
The women were suspicious of doctors, and they believed that hospitals were places where you went to die. The medical community returned the sentiment, treating immigrant parents as if they were too dense to understand their methods. In 1908, doctors swooped down on schools on the Lower East Side bent on removing all the students’ adenoids in the name of preventive medicine. Their mothers rioted and marched on the schools to rescue their offspring. The Tribune reported that they “stoned the school houses, smashed windows and door panes.”
Children were the center of immigrant women’s world, but they died so often that many bereaved mothers showed the same kind of fatalism that their middle-class American neighbors had left behind in the eighteenth century. Addams recalled a devoted mother whose five-year-old boy tumbled from the roof while he was helping her hang laundry. “His neck was broken by the fall, and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called for him to ‘climb up again’ so confident do overworked mothers become that their children cannot get hurt.” At the funeral, the bereaved woman said her one wish was to have a day off work so she could stay at home “and hold the baby,” because she had never had time to hold the one she lost.
“I WANTED A NEW THING—HAPPINESS”
Most immigrants came from rural backgrounds, in which life consisted of work and sleep. But American cities had amusement parks, pleasure steamers, and dance halls, and by the late nineteenth century they were no longer intended just for prostitutes and their escorts. Nice girls could go in a group and meet boys. Once they had paired off, the girls expected their escorts to “treat” them for the rest of the evening. The high point of the summer for New York immigrant girls might be an excursion to Coney Island, where there were eight large dance halls of varying degrees of exclusivity. One of the great pleasures of such outings was the chance to assume a different identity, and factory girls frequently passed themselves off as department store clerks, while the clerks were pretending to be typists or ladies of leisure. “I wanted a new thing—happiness,” said a Jewish girl who begged to learn to dance. For some immigrants, happiness consisted of something as simple as a streetcar ride out of the neighborhood with the family. “Oh my God, what a treat it was to go to Central Park,” remembered an Italian woman.
Young people of every class and ethnicity shocked their elders with the risqué way they moved to the music. “The Negro race is dancing itself to death,” worried the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell in Harlem. “The town is dance mad,” announced Survey magazine. “Down on the Lower East Side, dancing is cheap. Twenty five cents for a couple is all it costs, and ten cents for the girls.” Many parents, particularly the Italians, wouldn’t let their daughters go anywhere near the dance halls, and they weren’t being entirely unreasonable. In many of the halls, dance instructors were actually pimps on the lookout for new talent. “The pimps were hunters,” wrote Mike Gold, a product of the Jewish Lower East Side. “A pretty girl growing up on the East Side was marked by them. They watched her fill out, grow tall, take on the sex bloom. When she was fifteen, they schemed to trap her…. Pimps infected the dance halls. Here they picked up the romantic factory girls who came after the day’s work. They were smooth story
tellers.” The dances sponsored by political or ethnic groups were safer, and many young people discovered untapped interests in causes like Irish independence. Maureen Connelly, who went to work after the eighth grade, said she and all her friends joined the Friends of Irish Freedom, although they knew nothing about politics. The Friday night dance was the draw—“the highlight of our lives.”
One of the main reasons immigrant women were attracted to the labor movement was the hope for shorter workdays. “It was quite wonderful to get home before it was pitch dark at night and a real joy to ride on the cars and look out the windows and see something,” said a young woman who was a member of a union in New York City. Although immigrant girls had a great need for labor unions, few of the unions were interested in them. By the Civil War, the labor movement had become almost exclusively male, focused on the idea that men should be able to earn enough to support their families.
But as the twentieth century approached, unions began to recruit women, and they found many of them eager listeners. Irish women, who had regarded politics as a male issue, sometimes decided that labor unions came more in the line of economics, which was their turf. Italian girls sometimes ignored their parents’ injunctions against making associations outside the family and became union members. But the biggest and most successful labor movement came in the garment industry, with Jewish girls taking the leading role. In 1909, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union held a meeting of 2,000 workers, in which speakers droned on in general terms until a young woman named Clara Lemlich rose and said in Yiddish that she was tired of the delay. “What we are here for is to decide whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now.” The audience rose as one, voted to strike, and took a Jewish pledge: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may the hand wither with the arm I now raise.” Twenty thousand workers went out on strike, 80 percent of them women.