Women, Family, and Class

The Lillian Rubin Reader

Michael S. Kimmel, Amy Elizabeth Traver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317248811
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than 40 years, Lillian Rubin's work has stood as a model for the integration of the psychological and the sociological in studies of class, male-female relationships and friendships, women and aging, the sexual revolution, and the contemporary crisis of the American family. Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family and her other books have been enormously influential. This new book brings together articles and book excerpts that reflect Rubin's revolutionary style and her distinct analytic contributions.

Part I
Asking Like a Therapist, Listening as a Sociologist

Up from the Immigrant Ghetto

I started out to do a paper entitled "Family Values and the Invisible Middle Class," which argues that the national discourse on family life that has so engaged this nation in recent years is a discussion in a vacuum. For as family values advocates frame it, the family itself becomes the context, as if families were atoms afloat in space, unconnected to the social and institutional life in which they're embedded.

Class plays no part in this discourse. Yet it’s obvious to anyone willing to stop and think about it for even a moment that the class status of a family is the single most important element in determining where and how it fits into the social and institutional life of the community. Which means that it determines the experiences of every family member—from the schools children attend, to the kind of work parents do, to the financial and social resources available to them, to the issues that preoccupy and engage them.

But since I've just finished a memoir in which my own background as an immigrant working-class girl figures very largely, I thought I'd rather do a more personal kind of telling here because it's so perfectly reflective of the often invisible ways immigration, class, and gender affect the course of a life. And also how hard it is to put those experiences behind us—even when, in adulthood, our lives are very far removed from them.

Not, mind you, that I knew the words working class when I was growing up. I knew we were poor, of course, and that my mother worked in a factory—and I very early on learned to be ashamed of that. And I knew, too, that my teachers saw me and my immigrant family as some kind of savages that had to be civilized as quickly as possible. But in all the years I went to the NYC schools—from first grade through twelfth—I never heard the word class.

I was born in 1924, just ten months after my parents and brother (then six months old) arrived from Russia and settled in Philadelphia, where my father had family. My father died when I was five years old, leaving my mother, a twenty-seven-year-old illiterate immigrant who spoke only the most rudimentary English, with two small children to support and no way to do it. She looked for work cleaning other people’s houses, but in 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression, there wasn’t much call for her services. As she cast about desperately for alternatives, one of my father’s brothers urged her to come to New York and try her luck there. Within a year after my father’s death, we moved away from the family and community I’d known all my life. By then I was nearly six years old; time to go to school.

Yiddish was the language of the home I grew up in as well as the tongue of most of the Philadelphia community in which we had lived. It was in my first grade classroom, therefore, that I had my first serious brush with English. But none of the programs that so commonly ease the way for immigrant children today were available then. Our teachers—often young women just a generation away from their own immigrant experiences—helped us with a word when we got stuck, but turned a deaf ear when, in frustration, a child broke into a foreign language, whether Yiddish or Italian—the other large language group in the schools I attended. The rules were clear and unrelenting: We were to speak only English while our teachers inducted us into American ways with a fervor that suggested we were embarrassing reminders of a past they wanted to leave behind.

But giving up the language that frames our world from infancy through early childhood isn't easy. I don't just mean that it's hard to learn a second language. That's true, but far easier than the psychological feat necessary to abandon our mother tongue. For a language is more than its words and syntax; it's a way of thinking about the world, of meeting it, of being in it. When we learn a language, we absorb its aura—its rhythms, its color, its emotion, its lightness and darkness, its subtleties of expression and meaning, To give it up means relinquishing a part of ourselves, the part that experienced the world through that language.

A word learned in early childhood carries with it an accumulation of associations that give it its emotional power. The same word translated later into the new language is stripped of its internal resonance. So, for example, even after I could understand the meaning of the word tree, the word had no evocative power. It was a word without pictures, a word sundered from the thing it was meant to represent. It took a long time before I could associate it internally with the vibrant, changing, living boim (the Yiddish word) whose leafy branches shaded me on a hot summer day.

Children in non-English-speaking immigrant families also often have difficulty with English because of the split between their private and public worlds—between the family language, with its familiar, welcoming warmth, and the public language, with its cold, unfeeling words that are so strange on the tongue.

For me, learning English was easier partly because I had so little to hold on to from the past. Whatever safety and comfort existed in my family life were shattered by the death of my father and our move from the familiar neighborhood in Philadelphia to the Bronx in New York. My mother and I had a difficult relationship even before my father's death; afterward she became more embittered and rejecting. In defense against the anger she acted out on both my body and my soul, I did what I could to distance myself from her. If she embodied the old ways, I would reach for the new. If she spoke Yiddish, I would speak only English.

As both the internal and external pressures toward Americanization increased, I became more and more shamed by our foreignness and more alienated from my family. True, my troubled relationship with my mother escalated that, but even in families where parents and children live more harmoniously, some level of alienation is one of the uncounted costs of the prejudice immigrants meet when they come to this land of their dreams. As their children endeavor to become real Americans, to be accepted by the world around them, they adopt the public attitudes as their own and try to protect themselves from the barbs and jeers by distancing themselves from their heritage and shrinking from any public expression of their difference.

By the time my first year at school was over, I was well on my way to fluency in my new language. My mother knew some English by then, but not enough to make her way easily in the world. So my brother and I became her teachers.

This reversal of roles—children as teachers—is one of the more agonizing issues in immigrant family life. Talk about a generation gap! In immigrant families it’s more like a canyon. As children become increasingly comfortable in the public world, they not only distance themselves from the family culture, they become their parents’ guides through the social and institutional maze of the new land.

But a child's help comes at a price. For the child who is also a parent's teacher is less likely to give unreflective assent to parental knowledge and authority—a shift in the dynamics of the family that's rarely spoken about but that's felt, even if not openly acknowledged, by all.

It's easy to see why and how this reversal of roles between parents and their children is so hard for the adults. But it's equally fraught for the children. Until I became her guide in the public world, my mother seemed huge to me, a powerful woman whose word was law, even when I violated it; the woman who controlled my world, even when I fought her so tenaciously and won an occasional battle.

When it became clear that: there were important ways in which she couldn't navigate the larger world as well as I could, that changed. She seemed smaller, diminished—a vision that, given the difficulty of our relationship, was at once relieving and frightening. There was something satisfying in seeing her cut down to size while, at the same time, it was anxiety-provoking, since it shook my belief in her strength and power—a belief a child needs if she's to feel safe in the world.

It was common in those years for poor immigrant families to take in lodgers or boarders, or for one poor family to rent space to another. So for the first year or so after we arrived in the Bronx, we moved into a series of apartments that were already too small for the family that lived there. Sometimes there was a bathroom in the apartment; sometimes it was in the hall outside. My mother, brother, and I lived and slept in one of the rooms and had what were called kitchen privileges. Which meant my mother was allowed some space in the ice box and could cook our meals at specified times.

It wasn't until my mother found her way into New York's garment industry that we were able to move into an apartment of our own. The building we moved into—one of the many dreary, red brick, six-story walkup buildings that lined the neighborhoods we lived in—was no different than the one we left when we lived with others. Our apartment was on the fourth floor—a tiny one-room studio with a bed in one wall, a cramped little kitchenette along another, our very own bathroom, and a window that faced a brick wall so close you could almost reach out and touch it. It was dark and cold in the winter, dark and hot in the summer, but it was ours. My mother and I slept in the bed; my brother was on a cot. I was seven years old.

Later, when I was eleven and my brother nearly thirteen, my mother decided we should no longer be sleeping in the same room, and we moved to a one-bedroom apartment—the only one of the many moves we made throughout my childhood that I ever appreciated. After years in a single room, an apartment with a real kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom felt nearly palatial to me. I still shared a bed with my mother at night, but for the first time it was possible—during waking hours at least—to find a corner where I could retreat behind my book without being in sight and sound of her, without having to listen to her complain, "You think you're smarter than everybody else with your nose always stuck in a book."

At work, my mother took her place among the dozens of women who sat hunched over their sewing machines in a large, noisy, dank, and airless room. Eight hours a day on Monday through Friday and four on Saturday they sat there, their hands and feet flying, an occasional shrill scream punctuating the air when, in their haste, they didn't get a thumb or forefinger out of the way of the machine's needle. They were piece workers, these women, paid a few cents for every garment they sewed. No benefits, no overtime, just the privilege of working long hours in abominable conditions for subsistence wages.

Although my mother worked in several different places over the years, those I saw all looked alike to me—the same dirt, the same noise, the same lint-clogged air, the same foul smell, the same cold in the winter, the same oppressive heat in the summer, and the same row upon row of women doing the same repetitive task, hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

I hated the look, feel, smell, and noise of those places. I hated the women in the office who treated the factory workers with such disdain—women who themselves were no more than a few years away from the factory yet who, when they had to come onto the factory floor, sniffed and picked their way through, holding their skirts tightly to their sides so as not to be sullied by contact with anything or anyone there.

For those of us whose lives revolved around the garment industry, there were five seasons of the year instead of the usual four: winter, spring, summer, fall, and the dreaded slack season—as real a part of our lives as the winter snow and the summer sun. As each regular season waned, so did the work, and the workers were sent home to wait for the next season and worry about how their families would make it until then.

The anxiety of those times still lives in my bones. My mother, one of the world’s most frugal women, usually managed to have some savings to help tide us over the slack season, a feat she accomplished by foregoing most small comforts during the months when she was bringing home a paycheck. We still had no radio; we wouldn’t see a telephone in our house for years; leaving an electric light on beyond what was absolutely necessary was a crime of high order; even a subway ride, then only a nickel, was taken only when it was impossible to walk.

As the weeks of unemployment piled up, we hunkered down into a real subsistence level. But even this stripped-down life usually didn't keep us from running out of money before it was over.

We were saved from disaster by a $2,000 life insurance policy my father bought a few years before his death. It was common then for such insurance policies to be sold door-to-door, especially in poor neighborhoods. There, where people knew firsthand about all kinds of hardships and calamities, including early deaths, it wasn't hard for a salesman to convince a man that his family needed the security a life insurance policy offered. The terms were easy—ten or fifteen cents a week. And they didn't even have to go anywhere to pay their money; the salesman came around regularly to collect.

My mother tapped that insurance money carefully and only when she had no choice—when she ran out of money for food, when we were threatened with eviction. But even that small cushion would soon be lost in the bank failures of 1932.

For my mother—and for the millions of others whose life savings were swept away with a turn of a key in a lock—the unthinkable happened. Hundreds of banks all over the country simply closed their doors. I don't remember how she heard the news, only that she flew out of the house in a panic, with me following closely behind, as we raced the few blocks to the bank.

Hundreds of people were already congregated there by the time we arrived. Some were so shocked they could only stand there silently, not believing what they saw. Others were shouting and pounding on the locked doors while the few bank employees who were still inside peeked out helplessly. Like a wild woman, my mother pushed through the crowd and joined those who were demanding entry. I can still see her, her fists beating furiously on the closed doors, her eyes wild with terror, her lips calling down the wrath of God with every Jewish curse and invective at her command.

I stood at the edge of the crowd—a frightened and bewildered eight-year-old child. I wanted to go home, to run from the terror and rage that filled the air. But I was afraid to move, afraid to leave my mother, afraid I'd never see her again if I did.

Finally, the police came and, threatening the crowd with their night sticks, quickly broke it up. Defeated, my mother turned and walked slowly home, all the while talking as much to herself as to me. How could a bank simply close its doors? This was America; such things didn't happen here. The bank, she had been told, was the one safe place for her money. Now it was gone. What could she ever believe in again? For a woman who already looked so suspiciously at the world, the bank closings confirmed for her that she could trust nothing or no one.

Every autobiography is a construction built on our need to develop a life story that's not only coherent but that reflects who we are—or at least who we want to believe we are—as well as our unique way of filtering and internalizing experience. That's why it's so common to find members of a family who, having lived through the same events, record and narrate them differently.

In my own narrative of the events that stand out as crucial turning points in the life of my family, the year 1932—with its bank failures and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—is high on the list, although I certainly didn't understand it that way when it was happening. FDR's famous National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), which became law in 1933, included a clause that gave renewed life and energy to the trade union movement. For the first time, the United States government guaranteed the right of unions to organize. Which also meant that workers couldn't be fired for joining a union.

When the law went into effect, only a small fraction of New York's garment workers were members of the ILGWU. Now, with the law on their side, the union called a general strike of garment workers in New York City. Seventy thousand workers shut down the entire industry.

The strike was a triumph that solidified the union's power over the industry and changed the working conditions—hence the lives—of garment workers forever. By the time the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, the union's power was firmly entrenched and the garment factories of New York were closed shops, meaning that a worker had to be a union member to get a job.

For me, living through the organization of New York's garment workers, experiencing firsthand how the union movement touched and changed my family's life, was the beginning of my political understanding, providing an education in the power of collective action I would never forget. Many years later, when I became a political activist and organizer, it was the lessons I learned as a child about the importance of collective action in bringing about social change that fueled the energy and conviction I brought to my work.

But even with the gains made by the union, the life of a garment worker didn't become a walk on the sunny side of the street. True, wages and working conditions improved dramatically, extra hours meant overtime pay, grievance procedures were set in place. But the really big difference in our lives came when—partly due to union agitation and partly because of the extensive suffering wrought by the depression—the Roosevelt administration cobbled together the New Deal legislation that provided a safety net for families in need.

It was then that what we now know as the modern welfare state came into being, first with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), later with Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), the first national program designed to assist widows with young children. Until then there had been poor relief, meaning subsidies administered capriciously by local jurisdictions to people they defined as "the deserving poor. Now, for the first time, the federal government joined the cities and states in assuming some share of the responsibility for poor families who couldn't make it on their own.

For my mother these new federal programs provided the first small bit of security she had ever known. Later there would be unemployment insurance to tide her over the worst effects of being out of work. But in the first years of the New Deal there were only these public assistance programs to which my mother could turn when slack season rolled around.

When I listen to the mean-spirited discussions about welfare now, to the endless talk about the value of self-reliance by people who will never know the shame of being in need no matter how reliable y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: From "Worlds of Pain" to a "World of Choice"— Lillian Rubin's Worlds
• PART I ASKING LIKE A THERAPIST, LISTENING AS A SOCIOLOGIST
• PART II DISCOVERING DIFFERENCE, CONSTANTLY CLASS-CONSCIOUS
• PART III STUDYING SEXUALITY, ADDRESSING AGE
• PART IV POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
• Credits
• About the Editors