Peasant Maids, City Women
Peasant Maids, City Women

Author: Christiane Harzig

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1501725548

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From the 1850s to the 1920s, women were 30 to 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States and their migration experiences were shaped by similar social, economic, demographic, and cultural forces. In Peasant Maids, City Women, a truly intercultural project, a team of historians follows several groups of women from rural Europe to the bustling streets of Chicago. Focusing on Germans, Irish, Swedes, and Poles—the four largest foreign-born ethnic groups in the city around 1900—the authors analyze the origins of the immigrants and chart how their lives changed, and explore how immigrant women shaped the urbanization process, creating vibrant public spheres for ethnic expression.In concise social histories of four European rural cultures, the authors emphasize the crucial effects of gender. They explore the contrast between each regional culture of origin and the urban experience of ethnic communities in Chicago. The concept of assimilation, they suggest, involves two different dynamics. In the initial phase, adaptation, the new environment demands major changes of incoming immigrants to meet basic needs. The second dynamic, acculturation, involves changes for immigrants and also for the new culture with which they interact.

Unprotected Labor
Unprotected Labor

Author: Vanessa H. May

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2011-06-01

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0807877905

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Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, Vanessa May explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, Unprotected Labor assesses middle-class women's reform programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions. May argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class home as a workplace even as employers and reformers regarded the home as private space. The result was that labor reformers left domestic workers out of labor protections that covered other women workers in New York between the late nineteenth century and the New Deal. By recovering the history of domestic workers as activists in the debate over labor legislation, May challenges depictions of domestics as passive workers and reformers as selfless advocates of working women. Unprotected Labor illuminates how the domestic-service debate turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing concerns like labor conflict and government regulation into the middle-class home.

People in Transit
People in Transit

Author: Dirk Hoerder

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-08-22

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 9780521521925

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The demographic shockwaves of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe produced tremendous change in the national economies and affected the political, social, and cultural development of these societies. Migration historians have begun to connect the various European migratory streams during this period with transcontinental migration to North America. This volume contains empirical studies on German in-migration, internal migration, and transatlantic emigration from the 1820s to the 1930s, placed in a comparative perspective of Polish, Swedish, and Irish migration to North America. Special emphasis is placed on the role of women in the process of migration. By looking specifically at postwar Germany, Klaus J. Bade underscores the relevance of this history in a concluding essay.

I Go to America
I Go to America

Author: Joy K. Lintelman

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society

Published: 2009-06-25

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0873517628

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An intimate and detailed portrait of young Swedish women who chose to immigrate to America in the nineteenth century--why they left, what they found, and how they survived.

Single Mothers and the State
Single Mothers and the State

Author: Celia Winkler

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780847691319

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U.S. welfare rights activists have long envied women in Sweden, who benefited from social policies that made the incidence of poverty among children and solo mothers among the lowest in the world. This situation has begun to change with the rise of neoliberalism in Sweden from the late 1970s to the middle of the 1990s; social policy that had once dramatically improved the lives of solo mothers began to give way to policies that privatized their problems. Solo mothers in the United States were worse off, as conservative policymakers launched a clamorous campaign to restore the "traditional nuclear family" as the only guarantor of women's and children's well-being, blaming solo mothers for everything from juvenile crime to their own poverty. In this revealing and timely book, sociologist and former legal services attorney, Celia Winkler, charts the policies in Sweden and the United States that transformed the social and economic situation of solo mothers, who are an early warning of more general danger: the canary in the coal mine.

Scandinavians in Chicago
Scandinavians in Chicago

Author: Erika K. Jackson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-12-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 025205086X

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Scandinavian immigrants encountered a strange paradox in 1890s Chicago. Though undoubtedly foreign, these newcomers were seen as Nordics--the "race" proclaimed by the scientific racism of the era as the very embodiment of white superiority. As such, Scandinavians from the beginning enjoyed racial privilege and the success it brought without the prejudice, nativism, and stereotyping endured by other immigrant groups. Erika K. Jackson examines how native-born Chicagoans used ideological and gendered concepts of Nordic whiteness and Scandinavian ethnicity to construct social hegemony. Placing the Scandinavian-American experience within the context of historical whiteness, Jackson delves into the processes that created the Nordic ideal. She also details how the city's Scandinavian immigrants repeated and mirrored the racial and ethnic perceptions disseminated by American media. An insightful look at the immigrant experience in reverse, Scandinavians in Chicago bridges a gap in our understanding of how whites constructed racial identity in America.

Welcome home Mr Swanson
Welcome home Mr Swanson

Author: Ann-Kristin Wallengren

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9187675110

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Between 1840 and 1940, more than one million people emigrated from Sweden to America. The fact that so many chose to leave to seek a better life across the Atlantic was a major trauma for the Swedish nation. Filmmakers were not slow to pick up on an exodus that proved to be of lasting importance for the Swedes’ national identity. In Welcome Home Mr Swanson, film studies scholar Ann-Kristin Wallengren analyzes the ways in which Swedish emigrants and Swedish-American returnees are depicted in Swedish film between 1910 and 1950, continuing on to recent films and television shows. Were Sweden’s emigrants seen as national traitors or as brave trailblazers who might return home with modern ideas? Many of the Swedish films were distributed to the United States, and Wallengren discusses the notions of Sweden and Swedishness that circulated there as a result. She also considers the image of Swedish immigrant women in American films—a representation that bore little resemblance to the Swedes’ idealized view. Wallengren shows how ideologies of nationality had a prominent place in the films’ narratives, resulting in movies that project enduring perceptions of Swedish national identity and the American way of life.

Hope and Danger in the New South City
Hope and Danger in the New South City

Author: Georgina Hickey

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0820327239

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For Atlanta, the early decades of the twentieth century brought chaotic economic and demographic growth. Women--black and white--emerged as a visible new component of the city's population. As maids and cooks, secretaries and factory workers, these women served the "better classes" in their homes and businesses. They were enthusiastic patrons of the city's new commercial amusements and the mothers of Atlanta's burgeoning working classes. In response to women's growing public presence, as Georgina Hickey reveals, Atlanta's boosters, politicians, and reformers created a set of images that attempted to define the lives and contributions of working women. Through these images, city residents expressed ambivalence toward Atlanta's growth, which, although welcome, also threatened the established racial and gender hierarchies of the city. Using period newspapers, municipal documents, government investigations, organizational records, oral histories, and photographic evidence, Hope and Danger in the New South City relates the experience of working-class women across lines of race--as sources of labor, community members, activists, pleasure seekers, and consumers of social services--to the process of urban development.

Gender and Migration
Gender and Migration

Author: Caroline B. Brettell

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-01-19

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 074568792X

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Gender roles, relations, and ideologies are major aspects of migration. This timely book argues that understanding gender relations is vital to a full and more nuanced explanation of both the causes and the consequences of migration, in the past and at present. Through an exploration of gendered labor markets, laws and policies, and the transnational model of migration, Caroline Brettell tackles a variety of issues such as how gender shapes the roles that men and women play in the construction of immigrant family and community life, debates concerning transnational motherhood, and how gender structures the immigrant experience for men and women more broadly. This book will appeal to students and scholars of immigration, race and ethnicity, and gender studies and offers a definitive guide to the key conceptual issues surrounding gender and migration.