Back to Do History: Children in History

ARRIVAL AND ADJUSTMENT

In Italy, the peasants live mainly in the open air. Their houses had large rooms with stone floors which required no scrubbing. The washing of the clothes was done at nearby streams.... There were no stoves which required care. When the peasants immigrated here, they naturally settled near their friends and relatives who lived for the most part in already crowded areas. These sunshine-loving people were forced to live more or less in dark rooms; small ill-smelling tubs repalced their outdoor creeks; pulley lines their fresh green grass; wooden floors which require scrubbing, their hard stone floors. Housekeeping here required the use of tools of which they had no knowledge. The writer has come into contact with many immigrant women who had never seen a scrubbing brush. When to these new experineces is added the strangeness of the new country, strange langauge, and the evils which necessarily accompany congestion, and pooverty and the upbringing of American-born children, the wonder is that they adjust at all.

Source: Marie Concistre (1943) quoted in Francesto Corasco and Eugene Bucchioni, The Italians (Clifton, N.J., 1974), 237

In the summer of 1895, Maria Ganz and her mother arrived in New York City to join Maria's father. When her mother saw their apartment, she cried: "So, we have crossed half the world for this?"

I can see her now as she stood facing my father, her eyes full of reproach. I am sure it had never occurred to poor, dreamy, impractical Lazarus Ganz that his wife might be disappointed with the new home he had provided for her. The look of pain as he saw the impression the place made on her filled me with pity for him, young as I was. A five-year-old child is not apt to carry many distinct memories from that age of life, but it is a scene I have never forgotten.

Source: Maria Ganz, Rebvels (New York, 1920), 4.

The sunlight and fresh air of our mountain home...were replaced by four walls and people over and under and on all sides of us. Silence and sunshine, things of the past, nhow replaced by a new urban montage. The cobbled streets. The endless monotonous rows of tenement buildings that shut out the sky. The traffic of wagons and carts and carriages, and the clopping of horses' hooves which struck sparks at night.... The clanging of bells and the screeching of sirens as a fire broke out somewhere in the neighborhood. Dank hallways. Long flights of wooden stairs and the toilet in the hall.

Source: Leonard Covello, The Heart is the Teacher (New York, 1958), 21.

Asked if she liked America, an Italian homeworker replied in 1911:

Not much, not much. In my country, people cook out-of doors, do the wash out-of-doors, tailor out-of-doors, make macaroni out-of-doors. And my people laugh, laugh all the time. In America, is is sopra, sopra [up, up, with a gesture of going upstairs]. Many people, one house; work, work all the time. Godo money but no good air.

Source: Elizabeth C. Watson, "Home Work in the Tenements," Survey, 25 (1910), 772

When I came to this country, the first thing I see is those big stores. I said there is the Hecker's flour...there is the condensed milk! When I was married...one day I was shopping and I came home crying; he says what happened to you. All the things I bought in the stores, what I got in Vienna and I could only dream about, not even taste it. And here I see it on the shelf. I bought everything and I'm gonna go there every day and I'm gonna buy it.

Anna Kuthan quoted in Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 66

The Italian daughters or sisters, who in Italy used to work around thehosue or in the fields, never receiving compensation, sees the "girl on the lower floor" [Irish and American working women] go out every day and earn good money that gives her,w hat appears to the newcomer, not only splendid independence, but even the undreamed of joy of wearing Grand Street millinery. The home becomes hateful.

Gino Speranza, "The Italians in Congested Districts," Charities and the Commons, 20 (1908), 56.

I was such a greenhorn, you wouldn't believe. My first day in America I went with my aunt to buy some American clothes. She bought me a shirtwaist, you know, a blouse and a skirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat, such a hat I had never seen. I took my old brown dress and shawl and threw them away! I know it sounds foolish, we being so poor, but I didn't care. I had enough of the old country. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn't get over it. I said, boy, Sophie, look at you now. Just like an American.

Sophie Abrams quoted in Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 68

There was a counter covered with glass and all manner and kinds of sweets such as we had never seen. Candy, my father told us, grinning. This is what we call candy in America. We were even allowed to select the kind we wanted. I selected some little round cream-filled chocolates which tasted like nothing I had ever eaten before. The only candy I knew was confetti, which we had on feast days or from the pocket of my uncle, the priest, on some special occasion.

Leonard Covello, The Heart is the Teacher, 23

[The immigrant Jew] quickly notices those negative features which live on the surface of American life: the hunt after the dollar, the drift toward materialism, and he is forced ot the dangerous and cynical conclusion that America--and here I repeat what one may ferquently here from the lips of Jewish immigrants--is the land of bluff, that religion, morality, politics and learning are a sham and the only thing of value in this country is almighty Mammon.

Source: Israel Friendlander, "The Americanization of the Jewish Immigrant," Survey 38 (1917), 105

AMERICANIZATION

Once at school, I remember the teacher gave each child a bag of oatmeal to take home. This food was supposed to make you big and strong. You ate it for breakfast. My father examined the stuff, tested it with his fingers. To him, it was the kind of bran that we gave to pigs in Avigliano. "What kind of a school is this?" he shouted. "They give us the food of animals to eat and send it home to us with our children.

Source: Covello, The Heart is the Teacher, 33

I hear a knock on the door and a lady comes in. She had a white starched dress like a nurse and carried a black satchel in her hand. I am from the Social Betterment Society, she tells me. You want to go to the country. Before I could something she goes over to the baby and pulled the rubber nipple from her mouth and to me she say you must not get this child used to this; this is very unsanitary. Gott in Himmel, I beg the lady. Please don't begin with that child or she'll holler her head off. She must have that nipple.

Source: Anna Yezierska, "The Free Vacation House," Hungry Hearts, 98-99

Italian families complain about the blunt, aggressive way in which some social workers burst into their homes and upset the usual nature of their lives, undressing children, giving orders not to eat this or that, not to wrap up babies in swaddling clothes and so forth. The mother of five and six children may be inclined to think with some reason that she knows a little more about how to bring up children than the young looking damsel who insists upon trying to do it.

Source: Enrico Sartorio, Social and Religious Life of Italians in America (Boston, 1918), 58

In our old village [in Sicily] it was shameful for a wife to do outside work. When I came to America I never believed I would have to go to work outside my home. But look what happened! My husband made a meager living, so what are children for if not to help their parents. What was I to do? With Carolo in school it was bad enough. Without Jennie's help, who spent the better part of the day in school, I was compelled to go to work myself.... Thank God I managed to squeezse out a day here and there so that Jennie could stay home and work on peices of embroidery.... I was lucky the school inspector was a nice man.

Source: Covello, Social Background, 292-93

In my early years...we were highly critical if not disrespectful of the many traidtions that the old folks wanted us to live up to and conform to.... Many of my Italian friends would say, "They have lived their lives in their own way. We want to live our lives in our own way and not be tied down to fantastic customs that appear ridiculous not only to us but partiuclarly our American friends." We never invited our "American" friends to our home. And while "American boys took their parents to some school functions, we did not take our parents, but never even told them they were taking place. This was our life.... The deadline was the threshold of the door of our tenement. Beyond that the older folks went their way and we went ours.

Source: Covello, Social Background, 340

His sister was fifteen and mature for her age. She wished to enjoy the companionship of her classmates in high school, boys as well as girls. Her parents refused to let her go out in the evening except in the company of her older brother or with an adult member of the family as chaperone. The brother, also resentful of the old world standars in the new...told the parents they were going out together. By previous arrangement, the two of them met the young man a few blocks from the apartment, and the brother went to spend the evening as he chose, leaving the two to go to a movie or dance. The three met again at an appointed time, and the brother and sister came home together.

Source: Covello, Social Background, 252-53.

LABOR

When we first came, we expected a struggle. For the first year or so, it was a struggle to put up a home; to transplant the family, it's very hard. In any fmaily that transplanted itself from one country to another, you've got to expect drastic change. My father, my mother and myself went to work, the other three went to school. My mother hadn't worked before. She didn't like it, of course, but we knew that. We were prepared to face that. When I first came, I didn't expect to work. I had been a schoolgirl before. Here, I went to work. I resented this because at my age I wanted to go to school But the situation was such that I had to go to work; there were six people and the earning was very little.

My two aunts took my mother and myself to the shop they worked in and we were hired. My mother found this adjustment hard. Both Jewish and Italian worked there. Both groups were fresh immigrants and couldn't speak English. I only heard English from my brothers and sisters when they came home from school. I was quite miserable for the first few years. I couldn't speak English. I didn't like the work or the surroundings. My mother was more miserable. She found this situation took difficult. I didn't find it as difficult because I was a child. It was something of an adventure for me.

The children had to take care of themselves. My brother was twelve, my sisters eight and six. We were a very close family. My mother told her son what to buy at the butcher's and the market when he came home from school. He always shopped the day before it would be prepared for a meal. She told her two daughters how to prepare meals from food. We all cleaned the house. My father didn't help with fmaily and domestic matters though. Forget that. That was out. He was a man. My mother trained us all in how to work things out. After she quit, we still did a lot of work but it was nicer to come home at night when the whole family sat down together and we could be in harmony again.

Grace Grimaldi in Ewen, Immigrant Women, 95

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 was not possible. I was willing to help my mother because I had a sense of togetherness. I felt as if the younger children were mine as well as my mother's. My whole salary went to the fmaily. If there wasn't enough, I did without.

Lenore Kosloff in Ewen, Immigrant Women, 100

If a girl came in even a few minutes late, the lost time was charged against her pay. We were not permitted to talk to each other. Sometimes, some girl, unable to endure the silence any longer, would begin humming a tune which would be taken up by others near her. Marks, the foreman, would question us until he had learned who began the singing. Then he would deduct three hours from her pay. If any girl objected to this treatment she was told to look for work elsewhere. It was my first real job and I was afraid of losing it, so I tried to keep silent. But for a lively girl like me to keep her mouth shut for eleven hours is torture; it almost drove me wild.

Maria Ganz, Rebel, 73

FAMILIAL TENSIONS

A Jewish mother wrote to the Jewish Daily Forward about her daughter:

During the few years she was here without us she became a regular Yankee and forgot how to talk Yiddish....She says it is not nice to talk Yiddish and that I am a greenhorn....She wants to make a Christian woman out of me. She does not like me to light the Sabbath candles, to observe the Sabbath. When I light the candles, she blows them out. Once I saw her standing on the stoop with a boy so I went up to her and asked her when she would come up.... She did not reply, and later when she came up she screamed at me because I had called her by her Jewish name. But I cannot call her differently. I cannot call her by her new name.

Source: Robert Parks and Herbert Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York, 1921), 63-64

If you don't keep control over them from the time they are little, you would never get their wages when they are grown up. Another one said, "Ah, of course, she [the speaker] doesn't have to depend on her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with them, because if they don't give money to her, she can get along without it.

Source: Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics

The men have the saloons, political clubs, trade unions or barber shops, the young people have an occasional ball to go to or a cheap theater...while the mothers have almost no recreation at all, only a dreary round of work day after day with an occasional doorstep gossip to vary the monotony of their lives.

Source: More, Wage Earners' Budgets, 12

While the majority of them turned their money over to the family chest, there was quite a significant minority who would themselves be holders of their earnings, pay regular board to their families, and either save or spend money for themselves. This change in their lives which allowed them the right to do whatever they pleased with their own money, and gave them standing and authority because of their earnings and contributions, was for them a very significant item in their lives. They acquired the right to a personality which they had not ever possessed in the old country.

Source: Abraham Bisno, Union Pioneer (Madison, 1967), 212

I gave my mother the pay envelop and she gave me 10 cents a day. One day I wanted a more expensive blouse than my mother would allow. My father came in on this argument and settled the dispute. He said to my mother, I should be my own boss and pay a certain amount into the household. This way I could take care of myself and buy what I wanted. I used the money for clothes for myself, my sisters, fancy curtains and other goodies, even though my mother complained.

Judith Weissman quoted in Ewen, Immigrant Women, 108

Julius Drachler states:

The fear of losing the children haunts the older generation. It is not merely the natural desire of parents to retain influence over the children.... It is a vague uneasiness that a delicate network of precious traditions is being ruthlessly torn asunder, that a whole world of ideals is crashing into ruins; and amidst this desolation the fathers and mothers picture themselves wandering about lonely in vain search for their lost children.

Souce: Leonard Covello, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child (N.J., 1972), 314

POVERTY

In times of hard luck, the temporary deficit of the family will be met by relatives and friends. This was the expected form of behavior because in Italy "everybody helps everybody else." If the head of the household falls ill, the neighbors drop in daily to see how he is, and rarely does one leave without slipping into the sick man's hand a nickel, dime, or quarter. Not the slightest thought of charity is entailed by the act, either in the giver's mind or the receiver's. It is understood, however, that an act of kindness will be reciprocated when the occasion arises.

Josephine Roche, "The Italian Girl," in Ruth S. True, The Neglected Girl, vol. 2 (New York, 1914), 107.

The evicted woman kept staring at the litter of cheap things in which she must have taken no end of pleasure and pride while she had been gathering them one by one in the making of her home, now left in pieces on the street, a symbol of eviction and destitution. Occasionally,s he would make the last sacrifice. She brought out a china plate from the folds of her dress and placed it on one of the chairs. People would drop pennies perhaps even nickels and dimes into that plate--enough to save her from being wholly destitute.

Ganz, Rebels, 77-78

This site was updated on 23-Nov-09.