In Chapter 4: Immigrant Women and Work, the sentence that I found particularly interesting was, “ The Chinese say that women hold up half the sky…” (109). Growing up, I’ve heard my mother say this phrase many times. However, as I got older I realized how this was untrue on many levels, as Foner points out as well. I thought women always did more than their share as they tried to balance family and work. Although my mother was under a great deal of stress, she had no one to complain to because she saw it as her responsibility. This phrase, I felt, was a way to empower her in her times of stress. It allowed her to keep working, knowing that what she was doing was important to the family as well.

What was also interesting in this chapter was how Foner describes how life in America increased the freedom and power of women in the household. Even though the depiction of the immigrant experience is filled with hardship and suffering, it is good to know that there were benefits that women experienced as well. This change, however, probably contributed to the assimilation of other cultures in to American culture. Women are more likely to give up their traditions, if they saw them as oppressive, and adopt the American culture and pass those ideas onto their children. Men were probably the ones to hold on to their traditions more because releasing that grasp would mean lowering the amount of power they held in the household.

-Wendy Li