The World of the Daughters

The World of the Daughters

Introduction

Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia to the United States – specifically to New York City’s Lower East Side – from the end of the 19th century until after World War II plays a significant and important role in Jewish history, and it does so in US history as well. By looking at this feature of the American past, one can get an impression not only of what that immigrant life was generally like during that time, but also of the distinct culture that emerged in the Lower East Side as more and more Jewish immigrants came to settle there. As different as the United States was from the countries these people came from, as different were their new lives. Naturally, this had an impact on how people dealt with difficulties, on how they upheld their beliefs and traditions, and on how they behaved and felt in general. Whole families were affected by these changes. In this paper, we are going to discuss what life in the “New World” was like for young immigrant girls, for the unmarried daughters of Jewish families in the Lower East Side. We will be considering the following questions: How did the role of Jewish immigrant daughters within their families change and what difficulties emerged in the process? What challenges did these girls have to face and how did they cope with them? Why is this specific period of history important for Jewish and American history in general? In the search for answers to these questions, we will briefly look at how life was like for Jewish daughters in the “Old World” in Eastern Europe and Russia and then discuss the changes during and after the immigration process.

Retrospect: Life in the “Old World” of Russia and Eastern Europe¹

Most Jewish families in the “Old World” lived in small settlements called “shtetl”. In the shtetl, a girl was supposed to stay at home most of the time. While her brothers went to bible school, the girl learned from her mother how to manage the household and to adhere to Jewish traditions. Some girls who were lucky also learned from their mothers or grandmothers how to read, and an even smaller percentage of girls was allowed to be educated by hired teachers if the family could afford this. In the cities, girls sometimes had the opportunity to go to a girls’ school. It was not considered wrong for a girl to receive a basic education, however, when it came to deciding which child should be privileged regarding education, boys were given the preference because it was their destiny as males to become scholars. As a result, some girls had the feeling that they were not “worth” as much as their brothers.

“In Russia, a woman was nothing. […] When my father used to pray in the morning with his prayer shawl, I used to hear him say in Hebrew, ‘Thank God, I’m not a woman.’ A girl wasn’t much.”²

Girls did not engage in a professional occupation, but when they married and left their family they helped their husband with his small business, which was mostly integrated into the home. Teenage girls that were not yet married also helped in their fathers’ workshops, along with their mothers.

It was normal for girls that their parents would either choose a husband for her on their own or that they would assign a schadchn, a matchmaker, with this task. The matchmaker then negotiated with both parents how much the dowry would be.

Most of these traditional patterns were at first continued within families that emigrated to the United States.

Arriving in the “New World”³

Jewish girls and young women from Eastern Europe and Russia emigrated to the United States either with their families or on their own.

“Young women traveling alone underwent a special kind of scrutiny at Ellis Island. Every year after 1900 several thousand young single Jewish women emigrated to the U.S. by themselves. Although girls under sixteen were not supposed to be admitted without an accompanying parent, many lied about their age to avoid deportation or detention.”⁴

Most of these women intended to join family members that had emigrated before them. One of the dangers they faced was that they could be sold into prostitution without being aware of it (for instance, somebody offering a seemingly ‘decent’ job could actually be a pimp looking for prostitutes). Most of the girls had been warned by their parents who themselves had read about it in newspapers, and so they were very frightened and dared not to trust anyone while at the same time they had to try and find their way around in the new country. By about 1910, immigration agents and philanthropic groups at Ellis Island assisted these women, interpreting for them and making sure they met with their relatives. Usually, those girls and young women that arrived with their families were, of course, better protected.

Like any other immigrant, girls had to cope with the fact that they were considered “greenhorns” when they arrived and especially looked down upon by the German Jews that had immigrated several decades before.

Whether they came alone or with their families, most immigrants had little money and could only afford the cheapest housing there was – in tenement buildings which were several stories high.

Jewish immigrant parents eagerly sent their children to public schools in the United States. This was not primarily due to the fact that these schools were free of charge (other immigrant cultures rejected to send their children to U.S. schools and instead organized their own school system). They were much rather influenced by the ideas of humanism, socialism, and Zionism that had developed among them during the decades before in the Old World.⁵ Most Jewish parents felt that everyone should seize any possibility to become a “better person” – both in regard to education and in regard to morals. Moreover, they reckoned that it would do their children good if they learned the English language and became americanized at school. Education was considered very valuable, and parents embraced any opportunity for their children (and for themselves, if possible) to receive it. Now, daughters were also allowed to go, to a wider extent than ever before – at least until they reached the age of about 14. Girls were not supposed to stay in school as long as their brothers but rather to quit learning as soon as they were considered young women. The economic hardship the families were facing forced them to take their daughters out of school. While in the shtetl there had been a tightly knit economic network which allowed families to sustain themselves even if the male members studied all day, in the industrialized New World they faced the challenge of making a living. Married women usually did not go out of the house to work, fathers often did so unwillingly and unsuccessfully, and sons were supposed to go to school – so the task of financially supporting the family fell mostly to the daughters at age 14 and older (sometimes even younger).⁶

Going to Work and the Loss of the Childhood⁷

Immigrant daughters at that time worked as finishers or operators in sweatshops (“greenhorn trades”), whereas Jewish girls who had grown up in the U.S. worked as salesladies or typists, a sort of ‘compromise’ between a teacher (the job many women dreamed of) and a finisher.⁸ The factories in which they worked were often controlled by former German Jewish immigrants or their offspring. Most of the few girls who were so fortunate to be allowed and financially able to continue their education until they finished college became teachers.⁹ However, this was not common at all, at least not until after the second generation of Jewish immigrants had grown up.

Irving Howe sums up the specific problems which came with the roles female members of the Jewish immigrant community had to play – as well as what had to happen when Jewish tradition clashed with American lifestyle – as follows:

“For girls in the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods there were special problems, additional burdens. Both American and Jewish expectations pointed in a single direction – marriage and motherhood. But the position of the Jewish woman was rendered anomalous by the fact that, somehow, the Jewish tradition enforced a combination of social inferiority and business activity. Transported to America, this could not long survive.”¹⁰

Many parents only reluctantly accepted the fact that they had to send their daughters to factories instead of keeping them at home. It was known that working conditions in the factories were more than harsh and that workers suffered from oppression by their employers (see below). They also saw that their daughters would gain social (and maybe financial) independence by working and considered this hazardous to their traditional way of life. They feared that their children would be “lure[d] from the Jewish path”¹¹. But most of the time they simply had no choice. Even if the fathers did go to work they usually did not gain enough money to support the entire family. Multiple sources of income seemed to be the only solution to this problem. It has to be noted that, depending on how deeply the family was in financial need, some boys were also taken out of school and sent to work.

The girls were not delighted as well when they were confronted with the fact that they would have to stop learning and go to work instead. Those who arrived as teenagers or those who had not been allowed to attend a public school in the first place had a limited, at best, command of the English language. As mentioned, working conditions in factories were very bad at that time. Factory workers often had to pay parts of their already low wages for the equipment they worked with. In addition, work was hard and unstable, and working hours were long. Even though the first labor unions had been formed by the turn of the century, most Jewish young women did not dare to join or voice their opinion at all since they had not been brought up to do so¹². Moreover, in most families the paycheck the working children received had to be turned over to the mother immediately because she was the one who had control over the family economy (sometimes the fathers also had to hand their money over). Most girls did not protest, either because they did not dare to or because they themselves felt the responsibility they had for their families. Some girls, however, demanded their right to keep at least a small part of their earnings. Others cheated by changing the amount that was written with pencil on the paycheck envelope and thus taking what they considered their share. A small percentage of girls even ran away to become independent from their families.

The feeling of responsibility that was thus put on the daughters and the impact of a working life led to a change in their personalities: They quickly turned from children into responsible, grown-up women. This was not only due to economic factors. Immigrant children often taught their parents to speak English and told them what they had learned in school about American culture, law and politics – thus changing the roles that parents and children normally had. Seeing their supposedly uneducated and idle parents, many felt they were the actual leaders of the families, even though their parents would never admit such a thing and by all means tried to maintain their status as responsible parents and heads of the household.

Girls who were by law too young to go to work lied about their age and hid from the child work inspectors. Many had a feeling of losing their childhood in the process.

“I accepted my responsibility to help support my family even though this meant I wouldn’t go to high school. I wanted to go to school, but I knew this wasn’t possible. I felt as if the younger children were mine as well as my mother’s. My whole salary went to the family. If there wasn’t enough I did without.”¹³

Jewish Women in the Labor Movement

The largest and most important Jewish labor movement was the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU, mostly led by men), organized in 1902. In the beginning, they were not very successful. They had little money to spend on their projects, and most Jewish women rather worked quietly than claim better conditions and protest against being exploited. It has to be considered that these female workers were in their teens or early twenties, which made it even harder for them to stand up and show courage. So they rejected to join and support the unions in the beginning. They also rejected to go on strikes due to problems that had occurred during small former strikes when girls had been beaten down by strikebreakers.

Several factors, such as the depression of 1907 to 1908 and the impacts of the Russian Revolution, led to a change of this situation by 1909. A series of strikes in Jewish occupational areas erupted, the main reason being that the women then slowly developed a sense of community and started to be more active and stand up against the violent strikebreakers. During the “uprising of the twenty thousand” (November 1909 to February 1910) twenty thousand shirtwaist makers went on one of the biggest strikes in American history up to that date. The strike was initiated by an incident during a union meeting, when Clara Lemlich, a frail teenage worker, suddenly went up to the platform and held a touching speech about her hardships in Yiddish. This caused the other women to join and call for the strike they had actually all been waiting for during the last months. As a result of the strike their working conditions were improved, but the ILGWU did not gain the official recognition they had hoped for. However, the union’s impact and the importance of its socialist ideas had risen a great deal and would continue to rise over the following decades. This development had a significant impact on how the girls that worked in factories felt about themselves and their social status. Girls that dared to speak up and face the dangers of striking (one could still be beaten down by strikebreakers) in order to achieve better conditions for themselves and their fellow workers gained a higher degree of self-esteem, and they felt that they were stronger as a group than they had been on their own. Those strikes did not yet mean that conditions would be perfect afterwards, sometimes on the contrary – still, those improvements that were pushed through gave workers a sense of pride, the meaning of which one should not underestimate. By looking at this development in the labor movement, along with the other social changes that occurred slowly and steadily, one can sense the changes in attitude that Jewish girls went through: Fighting for one’s rights was a new concept to the Jewish community, let alone to its female members. This, too, had to have an impact on the girls’ private lives as well, which is why the topic is mentioned in this paper.

The Relationships Between Daughters and Mothers

First of all, it has to be noted that Jewish immigrant mothers, like their husbands, had a hard time adapting to the new environment in the United States. Their lives centered around their home and their family, and many women had no contact with any American institutions outside the home.¹⁴ There was another problem: The concept of adolescence was new to most immigrant parents, they had not been confronted with that in the Old World where children did not have “an extended childhood marked by school and leisure”¹⁵ but were brought up ‘safely’ within the family. Even so, some mothers felt sympathy for their daughters’ struggle to live a decent, independent, and respectable life. They recognized that they had actually faced similar difficulties when they were young, even if that had still taken place in the Old World. Not all women in the shtetl had totally accepted the roles assigned to them, and some had tried to make life more enjoyable by arguing carefully with their fathers and/or husbands about their rights and wishes. If that had been unsuccessful, they often projected their personal goals onto their daughters, wanting them to live the life they had never been allowed to live. Still, they normally adhered to Jewish traditions and expected their daughters to do the same. The range of actions the daughters were allowed to take was therefore limited. If a girl, for instance, wanted to marry a non-Jewish boy the mother would usually not give in to her wishes. But if daughters wished to continue their education and the family’s financial situation allowed it, many mothers supported those intentions and tried to convince their husbands to do the same, sometimes even successfully. As many fathers lost their roles of the family’s unquestionable leader in the New World, the mothers took control of the process of making decisions, often to the advantage of their daughters. Usually the wishes of the daughters were modest instead of revolutionary or shocking. As a result, there was a strong bond between many mothers and daughters. However, depending on the individual character of those involved, the fights that usually accompany the stage of adolescence and specifically took place between Jewish immigrant family members – facing hardship and changing roles – could become so bad that within some families the ties were strongly severed.

Problems often occurred when fathers (or both parents) planned to marry their daughters to someone they considered a good match, as tradition stipulated it. Daughters in the Lower East Side who had gained a certain amount of independence also wanted to decide over whom they would marry. They often had boyfriends whom they secretly met with. Arranged marriages led to many broken hearts, and it depended on the girls’ courage whether they would give in to such plans and on the mothers’ views whether they helped their daughters to get around them.

Where bonds with the family were severed or missing, young girls looked elsewhere for social contact – they often went to clubs and/or joined political groups.¹⁶ There, they could meet with peers, people of the same generation that had similar backgrounds and interests. Some girls also went to dance halls during their leisure time, which often led to trouble between parents and children – parents did not want their daughters to come too close to the young men they met there. They were strongly opposed to the fact that their girls actually danced with boys, and they feared that their children could become too lenient regarding sexuality and morals, things that they felt one could not take too seriously.

The Daughter’s Role in the Family

As has already been mentioned, the dominating Jewish opinion that girls were not worth much did not really change in the New World. Even if the daughter of a first generation immigrant family was the only one who had an income and even if she handed her entire income over to the family, she was looked down upon by her father and brothers. So, while their brothers studied, girls took part of the responsibility for the family’s economy and still faced rejection. That was even more of a problem regarding the changing role of the fathers in the United States. As mentioned previously, they were no longer the proud men and the role models that went to study in order to become a scholar, but they rather spent their time at home or in the “landsmanschaftn”, groups organized by Jewish fellow countrymen. Immigrant Jews of the first generation could meet there and talk about the “good old days” in Eastern Europe. Children soon began to feel ashamed of their seemingly idle fathers – men who felt unhappy about losing their status and who then retreated into isolation and desperation. The children had to “take over”, and even though in most families the traditionally more pragmatic mothers still organized the household, the fact that the children had to go to work and bring money home gave them a big share of family responsibility. In addition, they were the ones who learned the American language and who were better able to adapt to the culture of the New World. These advantages led to a feeling of superiority over the parents, and this in turn led to even bigger problems in family life. Jewish daughters tended to be less rebellious than their brothers. Instead, they suffered silently or stated their opinions only very carefully, with their problematic role in the family often creating an atmosphere which could be described as biased and unfulfilling for all of its members. In short, a daughter often faced the problem that she was forced to support the family instead of being able to pursue an education, while the male members of the same family looked down on her and her rights as well as her independence were seriously restricted, almost in the same way as it had been in Eastern Europe. This ambiguity was by no means true for all of the Jewish immigrant families. In some families there was indeed an atmosphere of trust and sympathy toward one another, therefore some daughters received guidance and assistance by their mothers or their sympathetic brothers, some were also supported by their not too orthodox fathers. Some were even granted their wishes to remain in school or to go out to dances – but many were left to a feeling of being misunderstood and lonely.

When Daughters became Mothers

Traditions of the Old World left it to the parents to choose their daughter’s future husband. As one can imagine, this habit was just another one that had to be challenged in immigrant families in the United States. As girls slowly developed their sense of independence they found it hard to follow such a tradition. Being told not to go out at night was one thing, a rule that daughters could at least reluctantly obey to without sacrificing too much. However, being told which man they should marry seemed too big an interference in their lives to be acceptable. No matter how strictly parents watched their daughters, they could not really avoid the fact that girls fell in love with boys from their neighborhood. If the chosen one was a man of a “good” and respectable family, parents could accept the marriage due to the fact that they would probably have chosen someone just like him. But problems occurred when the man did not seem eligible to marry their daughter. In this case, too, mothers sometimes interfered and talked their husbands into letting the daughter go with the one she loved. But, depending on how traditional or obedient the mother was herself, the parents either agreed on the subject anyway, or the father simply did have the last word. So the daughter had to either downright confront him with the fact that she would not obey his wishes and/or run away, or she had to marry the man her father had chosen for her. Many girls, out of fear of confrontation, reluctantly did the latter – often leading to broken hearts, sometimes even suicides, in both the young women and the young men. Some women were so lucky to eventually learn to love the men that had been selected for them, despite of their initial desperation. However, the number of such cases was probably low.

Second generation families found it easier than those of the first generation to live in the United States. They considered themselves American and they could teach their children to speak English as well as, sometimes, Yiddish, Hebrew or the language of the country from which their parents had come. They understood what life in the ghetto meant for a family and what their children went through at school and at work. Still, they faced the problem of handling the family’s economy as their parents had, and they had to send their children to work in the ever-growing industries. So it is likely that some family stories and hardships repeated themselves over the generations. Most women tried to maintain Jewish tradition and culture at home and, depending on how they had been brought up by their parents and developed their attitude toward their role, they tried to be a good wife and mother, conscious of their Jewish background. However, even more women of this generation than of the one before tried to support their daughters and to make possible for them what had been denied to themselves. Most fathers, who had often been the rebellious sons of before, slowly had to accept the fact that in the United States women had a different role than in the countries of their fathers.

Conclusion

Considering the aspects of Jewish immigrant life in the Lower East Side depicted in this paper, one fact seems obvious: The daughters of these immigrant families struggled with their new lives. They not only had to adapt to a new environment and did not know exactly how to face the challenges along the way, they also saw how their families, being confronted with the same task, were having trouble as well. They were caught in a trap of two different roles: The role they had played in the Old World and in traditional Jewish lifestyle and the role they had to play in the New World in order to make a living and to keep up with the pace of changes that occurred everywhere around them. The way the girls handled those problems was different depending on their character, their strength and willpower. In addition, it depended on how their families coped with these problems. Some families wished for their children to become americanized and allowed their children to adapt to the new environment in the way that was necessary for them. Even so, concepts of what was “necessary” often differed, and the trouble that generally occurs whenever children grow up and become adolescents could not be avoided in most of these families as well. In other families the parents did not manage to live up to American standards themselves, clinging to old traditions and often failing in the process of adapting to their new lives. Therefore, their children had to take responsibility for the family and often take on the roles their parents should have actually played, while at the same time not receiving any appreciation by them. They were measured by old standards and expected to adhere to traditions that were not compatible with life in the Lower East Side. Due to the fact that the status of women within the social pattern of Jewish communities was in some respect lower anyway, Jewish immigrant girls often went through deep struggles in the Lower East Side.

Only as time went by, and with many ups and downs, Jews in America slowly adapted to their environment while at the same time trying to preserve the heritage of their mothers and fathers.

Appendix

Endnotes

Bibliography

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars – Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890 – 1925. Monthly Review Press, New York 1985.

Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl. Cornell University Press, New York 1990.

Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews in America – Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History. Simon & Schuster, New York 1989.

Howe, Irving. The World of our Fathers. Harcourt Trade Publishers, San Diego 1989.

Markowitz, Ruth J. My Daughter, the Teacher – Jewish Teachers in the New York City Schools. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1993.

Sacher, Howard M. A History of the Jews in America. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1992.

Stahl Weinberg, Sidney. The World of our Mothers. Schocken Books, New York 1988.

[...]

¹ For this chapter see Susan A. Glenn, “Daughters of the Shtetl”, and Elizabeth Ewen, “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars”.

² Quote by Jewish immigrant daughter Ida Richter in “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars” by Elizabeth Ewen.

³ For this chapter see Susan A. Glenn, “Daughters of the Shtetl”, and Howard M. Sachar, “A History of the Jews in America”.

⁴ Susan A. Glenn, “Daughters of the Shtetl”.

⁵ Howard M. Sachar, “A History of the Jews in America”.

⁶ Elizabeth Ewen, “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars”.

⁷ For this chapter see Elizabeth Ewen, “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars” (especially regarding the loss of the childhood) and Irving Howe, “The World of our Fathers”.

⁸ Irving Howe, “The World of our Fathers”.

⁹ Ruth J. Markowitz, “My Daughter, the Teacher”.

¹⁰ Irving Howe, “The World of our Fathers”.

¹¹ Irving Howe, “The World of our Fathers”.

¹² See next chapter.

¹³ Leonore Kosloff, a Lithuanian Jew, was thirteen years old when she started to work. Quote taken from “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars” by Elizabeth Ewen.

¹⁴ Sidney Stahl Weinberg, “The World of our Mothers”.

¹⁵ Elizabeth Ewen, “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars”.

¹⁶ Elizabeth Ewen, “Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars”.