Immigrant Women

Elizabeth Ewen

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1985
• Print ISBN: 9780853456827
• eBook ISBN: 9781583673706
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

1

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

IN 1895 A YOUNG JEWISH GIRL MIGRATED TO THE UNITED STATES with her mother. Her name was Maria Ganz and she was five years old. She had come from Galicia to join her father in New York City. One day her mother sent her out into her Lower East Side street to play. There she saw a stranger who was “wearing a cap and long coat and was standing behind an empty carriage and a pair of horses: I stopped to stare at him for he did not look as if he belonged to our neighborhood: there was too prosperous and important an air about him.” The stranger invited Maria to come for a ride with him uptown. She had never been out of the Lower East Side; she accepted the ride because of the adventure it promised.

As they drove uptown, Maria Ganz marveled at the city she lived in but had never seen. She noticed that there were “no tenements now with fire escapes hung with bedding and where groups of women and children huddled in the doorways, but stately buildings that almost reached the sky and bore no sign of family life.” Riding up Fifth Avenue, she saw “gorgeous carriages … and inside surely princes and princesses, such women and men and children all dressed most wonderfully, even the children decked with furs. On one side were beautiful trees, a forest of trees decked in autumn colors; on the other, palaces of brownstone and marble, solemn, mysterious, forbidding.” It began to get dark: “All the windows of the palaces are throwing a magic glare over the streets and palaces.” She felt uncomfortable: “Nothing seems real. Am I awake or dreaming? Even the crowds of people are shadows, not living things of flesh and blood. It is too weird and fantastic to last long.”

As her confusion increased, they left the “magician’s paradise” behind: “Again we are on the streets I know, the streets of the tenements and the walks are thronged with people of my own kind. Pushcart torches flare along the curbs; oil, gas and candle lights gleam feebly in tenement windows; mothers crouch gossiping together on tenement steps; to hurdy-gurdy music little girls are dancing. I have come back to my own world.” The contrasts Maria had seen on her adventure—“All the splendors I had seen”—provided food for thought, forcing the realization of how “miserable our home was.” The contrast was a cruel one: “I was beginning to know the meaning of poverty.”¹

On her odyssey, Maria Ganz discovered some of the dynamics of her new American home. The contrasts she saw—between uptown wealth and the poverty of the tenement districts—led her to see things in new ways. In the same city, there were worlds within worlds. On the one hand there was Fifth Avenue, surrounded by giant buildings that bore no sign of family life, and part of a world based on wealth, power, and elegance. On the other there was the Lower East Side—poor, enclosed, but intensely familial, gregarious, and alive.

Into this city of contrasts poured thousands of immigrants challenged by the promise of America, determined to realize their dreams. Beckoned by the lure of money and freedom, they entered a social universe distinctly different from the world from which they had come. Between 1890 and 1924, about 23 million people migrated from eastern Europe and southern Italy. Over 17 million began their journey across America through the port of New York. For a great many of these, the Lower East Side was to become their home, the place where they were initiated into American life: by 1920 there were over 480,000 Jews and 391,000 Italians living in New York City.²

By the turn of the century, the heyday of the wave of immigration, the United States was in the throes of rapid industrial change. Life was now centered in the metropolis—the city rather than the small town or frontier became the center of energy and progress. In New York, new wealth and commerce, located on Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, dominated the economic and cultural life of the city, and to most upper- and middle-class New Yorkers the Lower East Side seemed a dangerous and menacing place. According to social worker Lillian Wald, the very “words ‘East Side’ suggested an alarming picture of something strange and alien, a vast crowded area, a foreign city.” These fears “reflected the popular indifference—almost contempt—for the living conditions of a huge population.”³ Nevertheless, it was this same middle class that benefited in countless ways from the products made by immigrant labor.

The city was the new frontier. Below Fourteenth Street, the sights and sounds of change were everywhere: the tumult of the sweatshop, the many-tongued babble of the marketplace, the cries of anguish and excitement, the poverty, the congestion. Above Fourteenth Street, in the quiet brownstone districts, signs of change were less visible but nonetheless present, as the wonders of modern industry and technology arrived in the home.

Between 1880 and 1930, an explosion of factory-made goods and services transformed the nature and quality of life in the United States. New industries developed a vast array of consumer products that altered the context of everyday life. Steam heat, hot water, indoor plumbing and sewage systems, electricity and refrigeration simplified household labor. Ready-made clothing, factory-constructed furniture, canned goods, store-bought bread, and such mundane necessities as soap, candles, and cardboard boxes could now be purchased rather than made at home.

By 1905 newly built apartment buildings provided middle-class families with such blessings of progress as central heating, electricity for light and telephone, electrically powered elevators, refrigerators, and gas pumped in to heat the stove. By the mid-1920s, most middle-class homes had such appliances as the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine.⁴

For those of means, the city also offered public spaces devoted to commerce and entertainment. Middle-class women, used to shopping in specialized stores or to being visited at home by local merchants, could now find the same goods and services in department stores. Sunday or evening meals could be eaten in elegant new restaurants designed to woo a middle-class population into their environs. Lavish in appointments and services, sumptuous in design, these new commercial enterprises were referred to as “palaces”—an ironic commentary, perhaps, on the new functions of business in a democratic society.⁵

Middle-class families, and particularly women, found the industrialization of everyday life both wonderful and bewildering. As the household moved from being a center of production and consumption to being a center of consumption alone, work demanded of middle-class women changed dramatically. Social workers, sociologists, and home economists saw the changes that mass production was creating. Ellen Richardson, one of the creators of the new field of home economics, wrote about some of them:

Years ago, when our country was a nation of country folks, women did little of the spending, but helped much in the production of wealth. Before the invention of machinery production of most of the needs of life centered around the home. Men raised sheep and cattle; women did the spinning and weaving. Men tilled the soil and harvested … women did their own work which did not end with the preparation of meals but covered the actual manufacture of many useful wares such as candles for lighting the house and soap Then there were spinning wheels, now there are factories. Then the home loom was part of the furnishing of every house, now the mills do the work. The country has moved to the town. Women can now buy all the necessities they once had to manufacture. They are not producing, they have thrown over the yoke of economic production. They only spend.⁶

The new standard of living to which the upper and middle classes was becoming accustomed was, in fact, a double standard. If middle-class families were now able to consume what they had once produced, immigrant working-class families produced—although no longer at home—what they could not consume. The new consumer goods’ industries demanded their labor, but their daily lives were still defined by a nineteenth-century standard for living. The tenement line divided not simply rich from poor, but those who had access to new products and new technology from those who did not. In the tenement neighborhoods there were few inside bathrooms, coal and wood were the main sources of fuel, kerosene provided lighting, blocks of ice a minimum of refrigeration. Two- or three-room apartments contained an overabundance of people—sometimes eight or nine occupied these cramped spaces.

The daily grind was punctuated by the need for money. Money was the secular God of the new metropolis, the calling card that enabled progress to be purchased. Back home, the immigrants had had access to nature to supplement their meager earnings, but in the large cities they needed money: access to nature was replaced by access to the marketplace.

The market in Europe had of course dealt in money, but it had also dealt in barter or kind. In the United States, and particularly in the city, everything was measured in money terms. Labor time was measured in money, work time became money time. Goods and services were computed in the language of money, from rent to food to health to recreation. Italians called America the land of dolci dollari—sweet money—a slang expression that succinctly described the new life.⁷

At the same time, however, city life created new opportunities for all classes. Nineteenth-century Victorian culture had given the same moral weight to home and family as did Eastern European Jewish or Italian peasant culture; for each, the home was the center of social life. But as people poured into the cities, the patterns of social life began to change. For the upper and middle classes, background and social status gave way to an emphasis on money and displays of wealth. The city offered opportunities “to see and be seen”; the home was eclipsed by more alluring and glamorous diversions—restaurants, cabarets, department stores, or promenades down New York’s fashionable streets.⁸

For immigrants, too, street life and the commercialization of leisure held out new options. Billboards, movie posters, chromos of all varieties created beguiling images of social life. The new nickelodeons and dance halls provided new meeting places. “To see and be seen” was important, as important as for the middle class, though costly.

First existing on the margins, and then moving to center stage, an urban mass culture was in the making. Using the energy and desires of youth and ethnic people, this culture allowed a place for the elite to meet the street. The movies, for example, which began in the 1890s in working-class immigrant neighborhoods, had by the 1920s attracted an audience from every class; the nickelodeon became the movie palace. Street music, whether played by blacks, Jews, Italians, or Irish, fueled the cabarets, Tin Pan Alley, and the record industry. Coney Island and Luna Park offered weekend amusement for all.

Two conflicting forces were set in motion: an urban consumer economy created distinct classes, geographically set apart, while an urban mass culture carved out public spaces that made possible a limited degree of cultural integration. The new immigrants were caught up in this process of urban transformation; their story illuminates not merely a change from old to new, but a change in the fabric of American society and culture.

New York City was the printing center of the country, but its leading industry was ready-made clothing, which produced three-quarters of all women’s clothing in the country and most of the men’s clothing as well.⁹ The new immigration coincided with the development of New York City as the capital of the ready-made clothing industry, and the immigrants provided a source of labor. It was in the garment trade that most immigrant women worked. The industry was organized on a contract system: a contractor would buy material from a textile manufacturer, and hire workers to cut and finish the garments. Thousands of experienced tailors arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe and went to work in their tenement apartments, helped by all the members of the family. The contractor either rented machines or had his workers buy them on the installment plan and set them up in their homes, paid little overhead and low wages—and either made a profit or went broke. As the industry expanded, new laws and increased specialization pushed workers out of the home and into shops and lofts. Here a form of mass production was adopted as tasks were subdivided and an almost assembly-line type of production evolved, although finishing work continued to be done at home.

By 1910 women made up over 70 percent of the garment industry workforce. The sexual hierarchy that had developed gave men the more privileged positions and women were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. By 1913 over 56 percent of these workers were Jewish and over 34 percent were Italian—and about 50 percent were under twenty years old.¹⁰ As a surprisingly candid manufactuer explained, “I want no experienced girls, they know the pay to get … but these greenhorns … cannot speak English and they don’t know where to go, and they just come from the old country, and I let them work hard, like the devil, for less wages.”¹¹

The vagaries of fashion created a demand for specialty items, and this work too was in the hands of immigrant women. Hand embroidery, for example, was a skill that Italian women brought with them. Calling on this cheap source of labor, the fashion industry created styles that required this skill.¹² Willowed (ostrich) plumes and artificial flowers were other caprices of fashion that created work in the home for immigrant women.

Compelled by necessity and desire, young immigrant women were seduced by the offerings of mass production. Donning ready-made clothing was the most visible sign of Americanization. Greenhorns quickly learned to be ashamed of old-world clothing. Americans ridiculed them in the streets or in school, and some garment manufacturers refused to hire women dressed in “un-American” clothing. All around them, movie posters, billboards, and chromos adorned women in sumptuous fashionable garments.

But the ability to participate was limited. Wages were not sufficient to enable these young workers to consume the better items they produced; they purchased the cheapest of the line, not in the new palaces but from peddlers and shops in the neighborhood. Although the clothing was cheap, it was very much in style. What the East Side lacked in quality it made up in quantity: “Does Broadway wear a feather? Grand Street wears two. Are trailing skirts seen on Fifth Avenue? Grand Street trails its yards with a dignity all its own.” On the Lower East Side, Grand Street was a sartorial marketplace and a fashion boulevard all in one. On the weekends it looked like “Broadway and Fifth Avenue only very much more so. Its wide sidewalks show more fashion to the square foot on Sunday than any other part of the city.”¹³

None of this was surprising. The women who worked in the industry had easy access to the new styles. As a New York Tribune reporter put it in 1898:

But, in the matter of dress, it is natural that the East Side should be strictly up to date, for does it not furnish clothes for the rest of the town? If my lady wears a velvet gown, put together for her in an East Side sweatshop may not the girl whose fingers fashioned it rejoice her soul by astonishing Grand Street with a copy of it next Sunday? My lady’s in velvet, and the East Side girl’s is the cheapest, but it’s the style that counts. In this land of equality, shall not one wear what the other wears? Shall not Fifth Avenue and Grand Street walk hand in hand?¹⁴

The Lower East Side, the center of the garment industry, was also the first home of the newly arrived immigrants. Between 1900 and 1905, the greatest density of population in the entire country was on New York’s Lower East Side—sections of the Tenth Ward had as many as 750 people per acre.¹⁵ While there were other immigrant neighborhoods in Manha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. A Tale of Two Cities
• 2. In the Old World
• 3. Steerage to Gotham
• 4. First Encounters
• 5. Agents of Assimilation
• 6. Our Daily Bread
• 7. How Many Tears This America Costs
• 8. In Sickness and in Health
• 9. House and Home
• 10. The Land of Dollars
• 11. New Images, Old Bonds
• 12. City Lights
• 13. The Ties That Bind
• 14. Sweatshops and Picket Lines
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index