On Daughters of the Shtetl

This is a really nice, readable work on Jewish women’s immigration to the United States, although a bit dated at this point. Glenn here is responding to a series of scholars publishing on Jewish immigrants to the United States. They essentially argued, “yeah, Jewish women in the United States were mostly relegated to the domestic sphere,” and this is in marked contrast to their earlier lives in Eastern Europe, where they were often celebrated for being breadwinners (especially if married to men who remained idle in their pursuit of scholarship)—although, they were often relegated to an inferior position at the same time.

When Jewish women arrived in the US, they found that conditions were almost an inversion of their position in Eastern Europe. Although women in the US lacked many basic rights, they were not necessarily viewed as being fundamentally inferior. Instead, they were often praised, although men demanded that they inhabit a different “sphere” than them. As a result, women did not experience the same sense of inferiority, but the expectation was that they would not participate in wage labor unless absolutely necessary or in the short period of time between adolescence and marriage.

In some ways, the earlier scholars are right. Many women, especially immigrant wives, didn’t work and maintained themselves wholly in the private sphere. However, there is far more to that story. Immigrant daughters were remarkably active in the public sphere, and they combined the best of both Old World and New World situations—they were no longer ridiculed as inferior in the United States, but they also frequently maintained their independence through wage labor. Even after they married, they often continued to work. That is not to say that working is something that most immigrant women desired—they didn’t, many hoped to attain the middle-class standard of female domesticity. However, they also did not feel ashamed of working, and they became increasingly active in the nascent American labor movement, organizing numerous labor unions throughout the country and participating in countless strikes, especially in the garment industry.

Jewish immigrant women to the United States were neither wholly “uprooted” from their European context, as suggested by Oscar Handlin, nor were they fundamentally conservative in maintaining their Old World identities, as claimed by many scholars active in the 80s and 90s. Instead, they combined both. They modernized without necessarily Americanizing. The conceptions of modernization and Americanization seem a bit quaint now, but I think Glenn does a nice job of pushing past both and setting the stage for later, more sophisticated work.

This one is definitely of interest for those interested in labor history, gender history, or American Jewish history. It’s clearly argued, convincing, and readable. I can’t ask for much more than that.