I thought that Nancy Foner’s contrast in chapter four between the earlier and more recent female immigrants really put things into perspective. The progress migrant women have made over the last few decades is remarkable. The fact that female immigrants outnumber male immigrants in New York today would’ve been unthinkable a century ago.
In addition, I thought it was interesting to learn that despite the common misperception that migration was a liberating experience for European immigrants, it had the exact opposite effect on migrant women. In fact, the older women were the ones who ended up even more constrained and isolated than they had been in the “old world.”
I also found it shocking that daughters (particularly of Jewish families) brought in almost half of their family’s yearly earnings. Out of all the family members, I would have thought that the husbands and then the sons would have been the ones to bring in the majority of the family’s income. When I first read that “boys were less pressured to contribute all their earnings and typically received larger allowances than their sisters.” I assumed that this was justified because boys needed to begin saving up money so that they’d be able to support their future wives and families. However, this wasn’t mentioned and it seemed more like the boys just had more financial and recreational freedom than the girls. In the same regard, I was surprised that the girls’, or rather their parents, wouldn’t put aside some of the money earned for a dowry. Moreover, this idea of the daughters providing and supporting their families to a point where they surrendered their “untouched and unopened” envelopes over is quite inconsistent with the fact that once the girls were married off they weren’t expected to work or generate any kind of income at all.
Lastly, after reading about the harsh conditions and long hours the migrant girls endured I was relieved to read that once married “hardly any Jewish wives worked.” Yet at the same time, I wondered how weird the transition must have been for them, transitioning from a gruesome, but social, work environment they has had as girls to a lonely and insulated life as a housewife.
