Workshop to Office

In turn-of-the-century New York, Italian immigrant daughters spent their youth in factories while their mothers did irregular wage labor as well as domestic work at home. By the I940s, Italian-American girls were in school, socializing and preparing for white-collar jobs that would not begin until they were eighteen. Drawing on a range of sources from censuses to high school yearbooks, Miriam Cohen examines shifting patterns in the family roles, work lives, and schooling of two generations of Italian-American women. Paying particular attention to the importance of these women's pragmatic daily choices, she documents how major social and political changes helped create new opportunities and constraints for the second generation. While financial need was a powerful factor in determining the behavior of the first generation women, Cohen shows, they and their daughters succeeded in adapting family survival strategies to new work patterns. Once the second generation was married, their careers mirrored those of the first in many ways: they raised children, cared for the home, and took on paid employment when necessary. Unlike their mothers, however, these Italian-American wives could also participate in the growing consumerism surrounding home and childcare. Throughout, Cohen compares the changing Italian-American experience with that of Jewish women, discovering significant similarities in these experiences by 1950. As well as presenting a nuanced portrait of one group of ethnic working-class women, Workshop to Office demonstrates the impact of political developments on individual lives. It will spark lively debates among students and scholars of social history, immigration history, labor history, women's history, and the history of education in the United States

Geography · Political science · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Demography · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Medicine · Race, History, and American Society · Gerontology

• Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo, Part II

  Donna Gabaccia, Donna R Gabaccia•Journal of Modern Italian Studies•1998

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• Did Manufacturing Matter? The Experience of Yesterdays Second Generation

  Open Access•R Waldinger•International Migration Review•2007

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• Guiding the Working-Class Girl

  Open Access•Patricia Carter, Patricia Carter Patricia Carter•Frontiers A Journal of Women…•2017

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• The Mexican Immigration Debate

  Open Access•Michael B Katz, Mark J Stern et al.•Social Science History•2007

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• Gender and Jobs in the Jewish Community

  Nancy L Green•Jewish Social Studies•2002

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• A “Good Mixer”

  Open Access•Cristina Viviana Groeger•History of Education Quarterly•2018

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• Fashioning Political Identities

  Open Access•Nan Enstad•American Quarterly•1998

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• Women and Immigrants in the Sweatshop

  Open Access•Nancy L Green•Comparative Studies in Society…•1996

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• Women's Work in a Rural Community

  Open Access•Glenda Strachan, E Jordan et al.•Labour History•2000

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