Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

by Susan A. Glenn

In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the "New Womanhood." She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers' unions.

Genres: History, Labor, Nonfiction, American History, Immigration, Judaism, Read For School

328 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1990

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and interesting look at the lives of immigrant Jewish women in New York and the intersection of their labor activism with the actions of other American women during the early 20th century.

[Lucy Shahar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for a seminar I’m auditing at Columbia: Jews and the City. It’s a rarity - a scholarly book that actually readable. It provides fascinating insights into the lives if the first generation of immigrant Jewish women from Eastern Europe.

[Nye Canham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful look at the life experiences and trajectories of immigrant jewish women.

The middle third drags, and there are points where Glenn writes something summative that glosses over important contradictions.

Then, in the last two chapters, it picks up again, through the tumult of the great clothing strikes and the revolutionary upsurge between 1908-22 and the construction of the unions from the raw mass of immigrant Jewish and Italian workers. There is a great drama here and I wish Glenn had spent more time on the experience of the strikers, but I don't think it's necessary for the book's purpose. In some sense, this decision to leave the strike waves under explored is good, it keeps the drama understated and the tone even.

In the final pages, the book gets genuinely heartbreaking. The unions win some, lose some. The American working class, off-stage, makes its tenuous pact with capital. The proletarian girls of the lower east side and Chicago become the mothers of middle-class suburbanites. The old world dies, the new is never born. The protagonists of the great strikes are left almost voiceless, alienated from their husbands and their daughters, neither workers nor bourgeois victors.

I am the son of a needletrades union, UNITE HERE, a the descendant of ILGWU and ACT (through ACTWU), and I grew up in a social and ideological millieu that looked to immigrant workers and women workers as the natural leaders of social struggle in the United States. Now deep in the dull gray years of our own reactionary 20's, when political liberalism has abandoned democracy and abandoned labor and the right froths once more over 'hyphenated americans,' it's hard not to look back on our past, with all its possibility and all its ruin, and feel oneself a pathetic, weak thing. These women built the unions that made the CIO and the New Deal possible. When our time is out, what will we have built?

[Jaynie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched source on the working lives of urban Jewish immigrant women at the turn of the century.

[Miriam Borenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Daughters of the Shtetl, Susan Anita Glenn examines the lives and experiences of young, working class Jewish women migrating from Eastern Europe to America in the early twentieth century. Glenn argues that young Jewish women had begun modernizing voluntarily before migration, a change that persisted and flourished in transition from the old world to the new. She suggests that neither being “uprooted” from their cultures nor entrance to the United States created “new Jewish womanhood,” but that they themselves fashioned new roles in home and industry—contributing to the larger movement of “new womanhood” in America.
Glenn initially inspects Jewish family life in Eastern European shtetls, identifying the roles of both single and married women. She particularly considers the traditional role of the latter as breadwinners supporting the scholarly pursuits of their husbands. Immigrating to America, Jewish families found very different notions of women’s roles both in the family and in the workplace. Though the study of married women is a necessary piece of the story, Glen dedicates the bulk of Daughters to single Jewish women, and to the garment industry in America.
Glenn appraises several aspects of Jewish women’s unique influence on the workforce in several areas including sweatshops, union organizing, conflicts, protests, and politics. That Jewish women contributed to labor politics and unions at this time needs little qualification (though Glenn constructs a highly accessible narrative). More importantly, Glenn emphasizes the effect that these experiences had on young Jewish immigrant women in their religious, familial, and personal lives. Participating in the radical culture of politics and labor helped shape a new Jewish American identity which bridged the old world and the emerging American new womanhood.

[Suzanne]

This is like reading a doctoral dissertation...maybe it was adapted from one? Got about halfway through and gave up.