America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Other women had heard rumors in Europe that their status might be higher in America, and that the balance of power between husband and wife might become more even after they emigrated. Word had gotten back to some villages that in America husbands helped with the housework and the children—a cataclysmic idea. Anyone who believed that particular story was probably disappointed. Although some social workers did notice out-of-work immigrant husbands doing the dishes while their wives sewed to make extra money, those sightings were rare. For the most part, immigrant wives were expected to take care of the house no matter how many extra duties they took on, and immigrant daughters were expected to help, even if they spent six days a week at a factory.

  The immigrant women who arrived during the Gilded Age were much less inclined to write about themselves than those who came in the twentieth century. Two of the few who did were Rose Cohen and Rosa Cavalleri, and the histories they left were both typical and unique, like every other woman who made that remarkable trip.

  Rose Cohen was named Rahel Gollup when she came to the United States in 1892 at the age of twelve. She was sent to join her father, who had escaped earlier from a Russia that persecuted its Jewish families but would not permit them to leave legally. The wagon Rahel and her aunt were being smuggled in made it over the border, but another wagon in their party was discovered. “As we started off again I heard the crying of children in the distance and shooting,” she wrote. In America, Rahel took the name Rose when someone warned her that “Rachel” was called out by the tough men who hung around the bars whenever a pretty Jewish girl passed by. She quickly went to work in the New York garment trade to help her father earn money for her mother’s and siblings’ passage. Her mother, brothers, and sister arrived safely, but without most of the family’s belongings. Rose’s mother had been assured at the boat that she could bring only the luggage she could carry. She discovered later it was a lie, told to her by a man who was eager to buy her possessions cheaply.

  Rosa Cavalleri came to the United States in 1884 to join a husband she loathed, the product of an arranged marriage. An illegitimate child, abandoned at birth, she had grown up in a rural village in northern Italy and was married at age fourteen to a much older man. Unable to speak English and virtually illiterate, Cavalleri began her American life cooking for the Italian workers at a mining camp in Missouri. She ran away when her husband purchased a bordello where he attempted to make her work as the manager. She wound up living in Chicago, married to a second husband she chose for herself and trying to help support their children by working as a cleaning woman.

  The immigrants who arrived on the East Coast between the Civil War and World War I were primarily from Europe. Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians came first. They were followed by Rose and Rosa’s generation of refugees, who came from Eastern Europe and Italy. Most émigrés arrived at Ellis Island in New York, invariably confused and exhausted from an unpleasant and dangerous voyage. Health inspectors checked every immigrant, and while the inspections were not particularly rigid, people were routinely refused entry. Often it was a child, leaving the mother with a sort of Sophie’s choice—whether to go back to Europe with the rejected son or daughter or stay with her husband and other children. “When they learned their fate, they were stunned,” wrote Fiorello LaGuardia, who worked as an interpreter at Ellis Island when he was young. “They never felt ill…and they had no homes to return to.”

  The terrors and heartbreak at Ellis Island were minimal, however, compared with what Chinese immigrants were going through on the West Coast. An 1882 law made the Chinese the only ethnic group prohibited from coming to America, with a few narrow exceptions for diplomats, merchants, students, and their families. At Angel Island Immigration Station—their point of entry after 1910—one study found the Chinese immigrants were asked anywhere from several hundred to a thousand questions, many of them aimed at catching them in some minor lie or error that would disqualify them from entering. “It was like being in prison,” said Law Shee Low, who was locked in a barracks with other women, waiting days, and sometimes weeks, to be interrogated.

  “AMERICA IS A WOMAN’S COUNTRY”

  Every woman who came to America from another country wove her new life out of the strands of her own character, her family’s support, and sheer luck. But the culture of the country she came from could also make a big difference. Irish women often came on their own, young and single, and as a group they were less focused on marriage than girls from other countries. (The Irish were the only ethnic group with a majority of female emigrants. At the other end were some of the Balkan areas, where only 10 percent of the immigrants were women.) Italian women came with their fathers or husbands. Often the men, like Rosa Cavalleri’s first husband, emigrated first and sent for their families later. Most immigrant women spent their evenings at home while their husbands congregated in saloons or lodges with their fellow countrymen, but German wives often went with their husbands and children to beer gardens where they all sat together, listening to music, singing, and eating. Italian girls were kept close to home and were seldom allowed to go out without supervision. Jewish girls had more freedom, and their husbands and fathers were more likely to encourage them to take classes or go to settlement house lectures. The Jews tended to come to America as families, fleeing persecution and knowing they could never return to Europe. But Germans went back frequently, as did Italians. Overall, one in three immigrants returned permanently to their home countries.

  No matter what their ethnicity, most immigrant women were the financial officers of their families. Their husbands turned over their pay, keeping only enough for carfare, lunch, and the great variable of “entertainment.” The wife saved up and paid the rent, bought the food, and allocated money for other expenses. One of the great cost centers was sending money back home or putting aside funds to bring other relatives over. An immigrant mother proudly boasted that none of her children had ever opened their own pay envelope, and a “good” husband did the same. Even men who controlled the purse strings in the old country deferred to their wives once they reached America. Ukrainian men told an interviewer that they had given up their old tradition of handling the money. When asked why, they laughed and said, “America is a woman’s country.” An Italian immigrant said that when his father first came to America by himself, he gave his paycheck to a friend’s wife, who kept his money until there was enough to pay for his family’s passage.

  But getting the family workers to turn over their pay was not always easy. Many men withheld money for drinking at a neighborhood saloon. A social worker described a man who “gave his wife five dollars on a Saturday night and when she said ‘Is that all?’ he put the five dollars back in his pocket.” Girls tended to hand over their pay without a fight. “It was the respect to bring and give your mother the money,” said an immigrant, Mollie Linker. Jane Addams surveyed 200 Chicago working girls and found that 62 percent gave their mothers every penny they earned. Only 5 percent really had full use of their salaries. Boys were more inclined to keep some money back for themselves or simply pay a given amount for board.

  Handling the finances of a poor immigrant family was a tough job. When funds ran short, the wife had to placate creditors, scrounge money from friends and relatives, or talk storeowners into allowing her to run up a tab. In families unfamiliar with the concept of monthly rent, it was the wife who had to learn the discipline of putting something aside every week, no matter how urgent the family’s other needs. The wife organized the children to go scrounging for bits of coal or wood for fires. She knit the family into a larger community of female neighbors who supported each other during all the crises of their crisis-packed lives.

  The classic first home for a nineteenth-century immigrant family was a New York City tenement of three rooms, each perhaps ten feet square. The front room looked out on the street, the back room on an airshaft. The kitchen was in the middle, the better to heat the entire apartment, but it was almost completely dark and badly
ventilated. To light the gas lamps, the tenant had to put a coin in a meter, but few immigrant families had coins to spare, so they used candles or kerosene. As time went on, the outdoor privy was replaced by a water closet in the hallway. But the plumbing was unreliable, and the frequently backed-up water closet was not necessarily a great improvement.

  Running water—from a backyard pump or hallway faucet or even in the kitchen sink—was another matter. “Water…to my mother was one of the great wonders of America—water with just a twist of the handle and only a few paces from the kitchen. It took her a long time to get used to this luxury,” said Leonard Covello. Nevertheless, for many, their first American home was less appealing than the place they had left behind. In the summer, tenement apartments were so hot the Boston Board of Health recommended that mothers take their babies to the rooftops at night. (Men and women regularly fell to their deaths when they rolled off a roof in their sleep.) In the winter, the tenements were so cold that people went to work even when they were sick just so they could get warm. The wives, who worked at home, had no escape. Women who had lived in the Italian or Russian or Irish countryside were crammed into neighborhoods where 30,000 people lived in an area equivalent to five or six city blocks. One tenement described by Jacob Riis had 170 children, and a 14-foot-square yard for them to play in.

  No one in the tenements had any privacy—apartments looked into one another across the narrow airshafts, and women often carried on conversations with each other while working in their respective kitchens. A husband and wife knew that half the neighborhood could hear them arguing, or making love. A typical family might be composed of parents, who slept in the back room with the smallest child; a boarder, who claimed part or all of the front room for himself, and the other children, relatives, and visitors who slept on the floor, on chairs in the kitchen, or anywhere else they could fit. The barriers between inside and outside tended to blur. Children played in the streets, adults sat and talked in the hallways. Young women who wanted to visit with admirers regarded their front stoop as an extension of the house. “It was nothing unusual to receive ‘company’ on the street,” said Rose Cohen.

  Housewives were engaged in a constant struggle to keep their husbands home at night, and out of the saloons where each man felt compelled to “treat” his friends to a round of drinks. “A kind of obligation of honor was created which required the individual to continue drinking until everyone in the group he was part of had the opportunity to treat everybody else,” said a reformer. The custom of treating—which must have been invented by a bartender—virtually guaranteed that any customer who walked into a saloon would walk out, at minimum, tipsy. Women hated it—partly because no one wanted to be confronted with a drunken husband late in the evening, but even more because it threatened the family future. Drinking cost money, and it made it less likely that the husband would get up in the morning and go off to a job that was probably both unpleasant and exhausting.

  Despite the chaos and crowding, immigrant wives tried to create something that resembled a parlor, where their husbands and sons would want to sit and read or play cards or talk with friends. Most readily sent out for a pail of beer or bottle of wine if it kept their men at home rather than in the bar. The parlor was also a place to show off their acquisitions and demonstrate their status. “The walls are hung with gorgeous prints of many hued saints, their gilt frames often hanging edge to edge so that they form a continuous frieze around the walls,” reported a visitor at the home of Slavic immigrants in Jersey City. “The mantel is covered with lace paper and decorated with bright colored plates and cups, and gorgeous bouquets of homemade paper flowers are massed wherever bureaus or shelves give space for vases.”

  “I WORKED AND ROCKED THE BABY WITH MY FEET”

  Immigrant families agreed with native-born whites that women should quit their jobs when they married and stay home to tend the house and children. If married women needed to find work in factories, they learned to hide their wedding rings, because employers shared the common prejudice. “The boss said that a woman that is married cannot keep her mind on the job,” reported a bookkeeper. But the cultural ban was on working outside the home, not work itself. Many women were paid by the piece to sew garments in their apartments. That allowed them to stay with their children, but the working conditions could be even less pleasant than a factory because the tenements were so dark. Lighting was particularly important for garment workers who were expected to sew with a tiny backstitch; it took even an experienced needlewoman twelve hours to finish one shirt. And although the women were in the same place as their children, they were far from able to really mother them. “I used to cry because I could not spend time with the baby,” said a Manhattan piece worker. “I worked in the house but I had no time for the baby. I put the baby in the rocker by my feet and I worked and rocked the baby with my feet.”

  Women also took in boarders—even if they were already cramped in three-room apartments that could barely accommodate the immediate family. Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of immigrant families in the late nineteenth century had boarders, which meant the housewife had a secondary occupation as landlady and sometimes as a short-order cook. To make things even worse, the husband sometimes set himself up as a garment industry subcontractor and ran the business out of the home. Those tiny sweatshops, which were very common on New York’s Lower East Side, took up the front room of the tenement apartment, where employees ran sewing machines and cut fabric while the presser prepared the garments for delivery in the kitchen. The presser needed to keep his irons heated on the stove, so the fight for space with the housewife, who had to heat water for laundry and feed her children, must have been fierce.

  A wife spent a great deal of time running up and down the stairs—tenement houses generally had five floors, with the cheapest apartments on the top. Even if the building provided water and a hall toilet, she had to make several trips to the basement each day for coal. Few apartments had much in the way of refrigeration, so every meal required a run to the store for fresh food. Checking on children, throwing out dirty water, delivering piecework to the contractor—the women, who were frequently pregnant, spent their lives climbing. Cleaning was a constant battle given the city soot and the number of people using every inch of a tenement apartment. But although the public tended to think of immigrants as dirty, many charity workers reported arriving at a home that was devoid of furniture and finding a woman scrubbing the floor.

  The dirt outside, however, continually threatened the health of the families. In Chicago, garbage was deposited in wooden boxes attached to the street. “Those swill boxes in the alley used to stay so packed full that the covers were all the time standing up,” said Rosa Cavalleri. “Oh my, oh mercy! It was stinking so the poor little children were holding their noses when they ran back the alley to come home…. After the wagon passed to shovel the box out—they weren’t careful how it was falling—all the alley was full of white worms…. The garbage was terrible, terrible! I don’t know why everybody in Chicago didn’t die.” Cavalleri said that even the local settlement house, where she worked as a cleaning woman, had huge rats that ran under the diners’ legs during dinner. Lillian Wald, who ran a visiting nurse service at the Henry Street Settlement in New York, wrote that no matter how clean the immigrant family, the old tenements in which they lived were so full of vermin that a nurse who sat up all night with a sick child came back “with face and neck inflamed from bites.”

  “SURE, SIX DAYS IS ENOUGH TO WORK”

  Many middle-class Americans’ first interaction with the new immigrants was in their own homes, where foreign-born servants quickly replaced native-born girls who were heading for the department stores and business offices. For the American housewife, having a servant was the difference between respectability and commonness. Common people answered their own door, and common women were forced to clean their own stoves and wring their own laundry. Respectable people had a “girl” who opened the door and told t
he caller whether or not her mistress was “in.” Servants also served dinner to the family and performed all the sweatier chores around the house. The anonymous author of the guide to economical housekeeping Six Hundred Dollars a Year wrote: “Humble as was our position in the great world we had a certain status to maintain. We must live in a respectable house, we must dress genteely at least, and keep a servant, too.” In her careful budgeting, she allotted $1.50 a week for the servant’s wages.

  The live-in domestics’ workweek was about 50 percent longer than the factory workers’ and they were always on call. They could not entertain visitors in their rooms. “Especially is objection made to the fact that her evenings are not her own,” said a report prepared on the subject of the servant shortage. Lucy Salmon of Vassar College interviewed former domestics in 1897 and found that they preferred waitressing, fruit picking, and work in canneries or factories. Reformers generally believed the life of a servant, under the supervision of a middle-class American housewife, provided the most morally secure surroundings for a single woman. They never quite reconciled this with the fact that domestic service was the occupation most likely to make women feel they would prefer life on the streets. A social service investigator interviewed the assistant manager of the Door of Hope Mission, who had received at least 1,000 wayward girls, and noted: “Questioned as to the relative safety of occupations, assigned domestic service as far safer for a girl than store or factory, but admitted that they got very few factory girls and very many domestics. Did not attempt to account for this.”