Twenty-three million Southern and Eastern Europeans immigrated to the United States between 1890 and 1920. Some were exiles from religious persecution and others were stimulated by global conditions of economic modernization to seek opportunities in a country rich in the lore of opportunity.
Many of the personal encounters through which immigrants redefined U.S. culture transpired through "Americanization" campaigns sponsored by federal, local, and private organizations in the 1910s. The Americanization movement encompassed thousands of local civic organizations, English language classes, a national committee, settlement houses, domestic science classes, and immigrant protective services sponsored by organizations such as the YWCA. Although explicitly racist, exclusionist sentiments that argued for the racial unassimilability of nonwhite people diminished the movement by the 1920s, its governing, assimilationist objectives in the 1910s were to "reeducate" the native-born American, to interpret America to the immigrant and the immigrant to America, to elicit a voluntary consent to citizenship from the newcomer, and to cultivate in the immigrant thereafter patriotic loyalty.
Well-educated, white, middle-class women such as Lillian Wald and Jane Addams, who lived in immigrant community settlement houses—hubs for the effort to Americanize the female immigrant—or who volunteered to teach language, civics, and housekeeping classes, helped to devise an Americanization program that hinged in many respects on the immigrant woman. Female social workers engrossed in urban life argued that since immigrant women would raise the next generation of citizens it was imperative that she be inculcated as a family conduit in America's way of life. Although topically diverse, Americanization programs consistently endeavored to replace what appeared to be antimodern, Old World customs with more efficient, modern habits. Classes, conducted in English, included food preparation, home sanitation, civics, hygiene, child rearing, and other family topics. Americanization programs often reversed traditional power relations between husbands and wives or parents and children. Because they tended to speak English and become "Americanized" faster, children became "authorities" on America before their parents did.
What would it have meant to be an Americanized immigrant woman, and did middle-class apostles succeed in their efforts to instill nebulous U.S. values? These questions have generated a familiar mythology among scholars, typically centered on the male immigrant and his "rags-to-riches" heroic assimilation into U.S. culture or, by other historians' accounts, on his triumphant resistance to assimilation and his preservation of an indigenous culture against the intrusions of the condescending, meddlesome Americanization officer. The substance and outcome of Americanization were undoubtedly more complex than these myths allow. First, Americanization efforts balanced crucially not on individual assimilation but on the diffusion of modern, heterosexual norms among immigrant populations, often by female Americanization officers.
Second, the American culture of native-born, middle-class women involved in immigrant life did not remain a static reference point for the immigrant woman to either embrace or reject. Instead, native-born women reinvented gender and sexual relations for themselves along modern lines through interpreting America to the immigrant. Immigrant cultures, in turn, reinvented themselves through reference to the modern life promised by America. Hence the appropriate metaphor for the encounter between immigrant and native-born women is perhaps not the "melting pot" but "alchemy," the creation of a new cultural, female identity partially through interactive Americanization programs.
This alchemy—and the central role of sexuality in the modernization of the United States in the 1910s—is most obvious in one of the compositional staples of both the immigrant woman's autobiography and the female social worker's musings on immigrant life: arranged marriage and romantic love. Asian and Southeastern Europeans, who composed the majority of immigrants in the early 1900s, were more familiar culturally with customs of arranged marriage (families would negotiate marriages through dowry exchange and formal contracts for their daughters), than the ambiguous and decidedly modern enticements of the "true-love" match that appeared central to the American way of life.
Social workers joined other modern immigrant women in criticizing arranged marriage customs as antimodern and un-American in their denial of sexual choice. They also questioned arranged marriage as a violation of both heterosexual intimacy and privacy, certainly the soul of modern American rights to conduct social relations free of tyranny. In the context of legal restrictions on the importation of women for prostitution, immigration officers and, in a subtler way, caseworkers at Edith and Grace Abbott's Immigrant Protective League, in Chicago, for example, tended to link arranged marriage to coercion or to economic sexual bargains. One caseworker in 1922 intervened on behalf of an eighteen-year-old Syrian girl, Rachel Badad, who had been detained on Ellis Island. Rachel had been detained because authorities refused to believe that her second cousin, David, who was born in Chicago, was her affianced. She was excluded because she supposedly lacked a "genuine" bond to her fiancé. The social worker checked the home conditions in Chicago and followed up on character references. She could only secure admission for Rachel if the family "agreed to postpone the proposed marriage till the young people got to know each other better." She explained, "When the family learned what a shocking thing such [an arrangement] seemed to us in this country, they were willing to be very American and to allow her a choice" of marrying either David or one of his brothers.
On the West Coast, the Japanese and Korean immigrant practices of procuring brides through proxy by the exchange of pictures and letters were discontinued by the Japanese as a result of public protest and consequent pressure from the Japanese American business community in 1920. In Japanese and Korean cultures, marriage had always been a matter of family negotiation for which the betrothed needn't be present. As a consul explained in 1907, the woman became "not only a wife but an internal part of [the husband's] family.... The social unit is not the individual, but the family." Precisely because "picture brides" married for family interests, they appeared to immigration workers to be like merchandise rather than modern U.S. individuals with free choice in social and sexual relations.
Settlement workers, more empathetic to the antimodern family networks of immigrant life, championed privacy as the remedy to women's servile condition. Social worker Ruth True condemned the confounding of economic and personal relations in the immigrant family, citing the girl's expected economic contributions as a diminution of her freedom and humanity. Another observer of immigrant life, Florence Kitchelt, recorded a triumphant story of a German immigrant who fell in love with and married an Irish Catholic against her parents' wishes. "To free herself from their yoke ... she had to choose between her parents or him," Kitchelt concluded. "She chose—the choice every woman makes when it comes to final issue. She returned to her husband and they lived happily ever after."
It is crucial to recognize that as confidently as Kitchelt pronounced that the romantic couple lived happily ever after, her concepts of privacy and personal freedom were hardly timelessly American values: marital choices in Victorian American middle-class culture, while not arranged, typically entailed some consideration of pragmatic, familial, and economic concerns. U.S. citizenship and freedom were hardly defined by romantic love and choice in the 1800s. Educated, native-born women involved in Americanization, then, refined or perhaps created their own standards of heterosexual modernity through attempting to uplift presumably antimodern immigrant cultures.
For their part, immigrants often resisted true love as a seduction of an individualist culture that ironically enslaved its citizens in their impetuous longings by casting them adrift from extended familial networks in a country with exaggerated standards of personal choice. As one unpublished autobiography recalls, "My daughter calls me old fashioned but I laughed from her. To be so a slave to a man would I never be. One makes one self cheap to give [oneself] away to husband.... Where Julia loves she cares not for herself. She says, "Take what I have, your life it is all but I, I am a nothing." A Lower-East-Side matchmaker, put out of business by modernity, would have agreed. "[Immigrants] have learned how to start their own love affairs from the Americans," he lamented, "and it is one of the worst things they have picked up.... The love which they have learned to put so much faith in dribbles out in trips to Coney [Island]. In a month they are finding ways of getting rid of each other."
However ambiguous the course of modern heterosexual love, it is important to recognize, in any event, that sexual choices for the immigrant woman bore a crucial relation to her concept of true U.S. citizenship. Immigrants aspired to become sexually modern or resisted the advances of sexual modernity in conversation with the idea of U.S. citizenship. So, too, did female Americanization officers redefine their own values through immigrant culture. They attempted to interpret the United States to the immigrants, but in the process they inevitably reinterpreted and reinvented U.S. sexual roles for themselves along demonstrably modern lines.
Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture of the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985); Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Anzia Yezierska, Breadgivers (New York: Persea Books, 1925).
Pamela Haag
See also
Immigration;
SettlementHouse Movement.
