As the century of immigration was in full swing and millions of immigrants traveled to the United States seeking opportunities and fortune, the women of the families who found themselves in this new environment faced a crossroads - either hold onto their traditions and ways of life from the Old World or be influenced by the new American society that surrounded them. Based on Ewen’s book Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, “ they were “propelled into a new urban society that redefined the nature of daily life and cultural expectations.” (Ewen 12)
Indeed, the dichotomy of their situation created a tug-of-war between their traditional ways in a patriarchal society and the new future of American society based on consumerism and progressivism. Based on the stories and first-hand accounts accumulated by Ewen, the tales of Italian and Jewish women who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s demonstrate the ever-shifting lives of the women who found themselves in a new foreign land seeking economic prosperity and the arduous reality that awaited them. Indeed, according to Ewen, “the myth contained a transformation to a non-patriarchical, classless world” (Ewen 39). This myth of America pulled forth the families into a vision that did not greet them - their reality was instead a complex path through poverty, crowded spaces, and fluctuating cultural dynamics between generations.
Italian and Jewish women were in a patriarchal and preindustrial Old World, with women being in roles that were subordinate in all aspects of society. (Ewen 22) Yet even within these male-dominated societies, Ewen shares that women created their own spaces and worlds, focusing on household production and family life that they brought to the New World. (26) This essay will therefore examine the transformations that took place for Jewish and Italian immigrant women within the contexts of the relationships with their children, specifically their daughters. While the mothers were challenged to change their traditions and habits, their daughters were raised in a new progressive society surrounded by the “promise of modernity.” (Ewen 212) While almost every cultural aspect of their lives was uprooted, this essay narrows in on the subjects of medicine and birth, marital traditions, and the recreational activities of immigrant daughters navigating the uncharted course of cultural assimilation compared to the traditions of the Old World that loomed over them.
As immigrant women moved to the United States, they brought their Old World beliefs and traditions surrounding medicine and childbirth, centered around the midwife and folklore medicine. Back home, immigrant women depended on the community of midwives to deliver babies, provide care, heal from disease, and share information, thereby creating a network of knowledge. Instead, hospitals in America focused on progressive medical practices that counteracted traditional beliefs. Indeed, “in the old country, medical knowledge was rudimentary, doctors rare, life expectancy short, and infant mortality high.” (Ewen 101)
However, many immigrant women were weary of visiting even with hospital access. As Adirain Valenti describes, “They feared it so much, that if you go to the hospital you die.” (Ewen 101) With midwives being cheaper than American doctors and free time not being at their disposal, the older traditions continued to exist. A prime component was also the fact that doctors were not trusted since, most times, “it was culturally taboo for men to be present at the act of birth” (Ewen 101) and they were more expensive than midwives.
Another aspect of medicine and childbirth that newly emerged for immigrant women was abortions and birth control amid struggles to survive in the tenement housing conditions. According to Ewen, many women were actively seeking birth control methods, as displayed in the case of the illegal birth control center, gaining 464 visitors on its first day. (103) The reaction of Americans to the act of midwives and folklore medicine was negative, with the ideas seen as a tie to “barbarism” and that they should be replaced by the new scientific method and hospital doctors. Thus, the conflict between traditional and modern was displayed amid disease, distrust in male doctors, and a yearning to hold onto the “old ways.”
As the daughters of immigrant families grew older and sought to assimilate into American society, they pursued more independence, often rejecting family bonds and traditional constraints. (Ewen 164) Immigrant daughters found themselves increasingly in the streets, working in factories, interacting with the opposite sex, and being exposed to the cultural consumerism trends of the day. One of the ways that daughters sought social freedom was through dance halls and recreational activities that were not family-centric. Sophinisba Breckenridge describes these family-centric activities as “the entire family participated and the girls were well chaperoned.”(Ewen 164)
Even though Jewish and Italian mothers were concerned, Italian mothers were especially strict, being worried about their “ruined honor.” In one instance, only “wild girls” are described as going against family law that forbade them to attend. (Ewen 165) Indeed, one of the concerns that faced both Jewish and Italian mothers was the interactions with men, whom, as Italian mothers repeated, according to Ewen, “to keep away from men, they only want one thing.” (165) Jewish mothers were also concerned about their daughter's sexual morality and the dance hall’s connections to prostitution. The movies were another form of recreational activity that became an “escape, education, or pleasure” for immigrant girls. (Ewen 178) They provided a place to gain new ideas as the traditional ways of patriarchy and arranged marriage followed them into their adulthood.
Certainly, as young girls became more Americanized, marriage became another battleground for Jewish and Italian families. Contrasting to the arranged marriages and matchmaking in the Old World communities, women found themselves facing their parents wanting “to preserve the customs of the old country.” (Ewen 179) Both the Jewish and Italian communities practiced matchmaking, as Mike Gold describes, his parents were married in the old ways through a “professional matrimonial broker.” (Ewen 179) They believed that love followed marriage instead of defining it, while the new generations were more fearful of this fate and wanted to break out of the parental control that defined their futures. Even though these battles between generations were taking place, many young women in both communities found a way to assert their freedom as “new ideals of romantic love were taking precedence over customary values.” (Ewen 180) Moreover, marriage was also seen as a way to assert one’s independence in a society where family bonds constricted young women. One such example was Helen Reif, a Jewish woman who married a man of her choice, stating that if she had gone with her family’s choice, she would have been “destroyed completely. (Ewen 181)
However, when considering the dichotomy of a new emergence of marriage for love, there were also implications regarding trusting strange men without the family’s support and matchmaking services and the ever-present dilemma of whether or not married women could continue working. Indeed, Ewen describes husbands as “the new czars of the household.” (183) Women who were accustomed to working out of the home and having freedom in the city were now confined to the traditional housework roles and tending to the husbands. Other times, there were cases of husbands deserting the women or pretending to be people they weren’t. Regardless of these disagreements between generations, ritual ceremonies remained “the high point of family and community life.” (Ewen 187)
Through the presentation of oral history and first-hand accounts, Ewen presents the lives of immigrant women in their full complexity and ambivalence, thus displaying that the traditional myth of the immigrant coming to a new land for fortune and industry is far more complicated. Thus, the stories of these immigrant women who came to the New World are both progressive and tragic, demonstrating the yearning to hold onto old traditions and surrender to new cultural progression. On the one hand, the knowledge of their traditions kept the communities together, crafting a thread of belonging through the neighborhoods. On the other hand, such traditions also confined the immigrant women, as the language barriers and customs created everyday conflicts.
As the lives of these women “were torn between traditional affections and the promise of modernity” (Ewen 212), these changes cannot be considered positive nor negative, but simply a primary example of the complexity of crafting an entirely new identity that is to become a “new fabric of existence.” (Ewen 211) These transformations can be viewed as negative when considering the quality of life for the Jewish and Italian women, confined to either crammed housing or unhygienic factories, working around the clock, and facing the high demands of the consumer society and foreign culture. Yet they can also be viewed as positive, as the lives of their descendants transformed throughout the 20th century into new eras defined by the right “to take control of one’s life.” (Ewen 214) In conclusion, the lives of Jewish and Italian immigrant women were defined by an intertwining of old and new, a metaphorical dance between a yearning for tradition and a quest for progress, ultimately culminating in the creation of a new cultural identity characterized by the weaving of past and future - the American woman.
References
Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women In the Land of Dollars. Monthly Review Press, 1985. Accessed 5 August 2023.
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