women history

CHAPTER 7

Women in an Expanding Nation

CONSOLIDATION OF THE WEST, MASS IMMIGRATION, AND THE CRISIS OF THE 1890s

TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SHIGE KUSHIDA arrived in San Francisco in 1892. American influences had already reached her in her native Japan. She was Protestant, Western-oriented, and one of the few women who dared to speak in Japan before a mixed audience of men and women. She intended to get an education in the United States and return to her home country, but her experience, like that of so many other immigrants, did not go according to plan. Instead of studying, she married another Japanese Christian and settled in Oakland. There she raised her children and became a leader of the Issei (first-generation Japanese American) community. She saw to it that her daughters got the education she did not.1

The life of Shige Kushida Togasaki illustrates two grand historical processes that were reshaping American society at the end of the nineteenth century. First, the United States was beginning an unprecedented wave of immigration, which brought with it tremendous social challenges and national transformations. Second, the western part of the continent was being consolidated into the American nation. The frontier — in the sense of a westward-moving line of American settlement — was entering its final stages and, according to the 1890 census, coming to a close. Western settlement, which seems like a quintessentially American phenomenon, and mass immigration, which brought the nation into greater interaction with the rest of the world, shared important links. Both involved enormous movements of people across oceans and continents, bringing different cultures into contact and sometimes into conflict. Both involved efforts to “Americanize,” sometimes violently, different cultures into the national mainstream. Both developments were motivated at the individual level by hopes for better lives, greater prosperity, and more personal freedom. And yet both processes dashed hopes as much as they realized them, among the immigrant poor and especially among the Native Americans pushed aside by continuing westward expansion.

Mass immigration and the consolidation of the West together helped to set the stage for a major economic and political crisis in the 1890s, as discontented immigrants, farmers, and wage workers found ways to challenge what they saw as a failure of America’s democratic promise, notably the unequal distribution of America’s new wealth and the unwillingness of the two established political parties to offer any vision of a better social and political path. The resolution of the crisis in favor of corporate power and the established political parties prepared the way for America’s first forays abroad as an imperial power.

In all these developments — western consolidation, mass immigration, the political and economic crises of the 1890s, and the beginnings of American imperialism — women were involved, active, influential, and, as a result, changed. In these two great movements of people into and through American society in the late nineteenth century, men initially predominated, but women soon followed. When they did, families were formed and temporary population shifts became permanent new communities. By the early twentieth century, American women’s participation in the radical challenges of the 1890s, along with their support for or criticism of their country’s ventures abroad, had made them a significant new force in U.S. political life.

1862

Homestead Act passed

1867

National Grange established

1867–1868

National Indian reservation policy expanded expanded

1875

Page Law excludes Chinese women suspected of prostitution

1876

Lakota Sioux defeat U.S. Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn

1877

Farmers’ Alliance begins to develop in Texas

1878

First federally supported Indian boarding schools established

1879

Women’s National Indian Association founded

1880–1914

Second great wave of immigration from overseas

1881

Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor published

1882

Chinese Exclusion Act passed

1883

World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed

1883

Sarah Winnemucca publishes Life among the Paiutes

1880s

Buffalo herds in Great Plains near extinction

1885

Emma Goldman emigrates from Russia to Rochester, New York

1885

Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor

1886

Surrender of Geronimo and Lozen; end of Apache resistance

1887

Dawes Severalty Act passed

1889

Jane Addams establishes Hull House in Chicago

1890

Massacre at Wounded Knee

1890

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives published

1890

Federal census declares that frontier line is “closed”

1891

Queen Liliuokalani becomes monarch of nation of Hawaii

1892

Immigrant receiving station established at Ellis Island in New York Harbor

1892

People’s Party formed in St. Louis

1893

Illinois Factory and Workshop Inspection Act passed

1893

Chicago hosts World’s Columbian Exposition

1893

Frederick Jackson Turner delivers paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

1893

Colorado women win equal voting rights with men

1893–1897

National economic depression

1894

Pullman strike and national railroad disruption

1895

Illinois Supreme Court invalidates state limits on women workers’ hours

1896

Idaho women enfranchised

1896

Populist Party collapses as William McKinley defeats William Jennings Bryan for president

1896

Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones’s fame as labor agitator begins

1898

United States goes to war against Spain in Cuba

1898

United States annexes Hawaii

1899–1902

United States fights Filipino independence movement

1900

Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical writings begin to appear in the Atlantic Monthly

1903

President Theodore Roosevelt speaks out against “race suicide”

1907

U.S. and Japanese governments issue “Gentlemen’s Agreement” to limit Japanese immigration

1910

Mexican Revolution spurs immigration to the United States

1910

Angel Island immigrant receiving station established in San Francisco Bay

CONSOLIDATING THE WEST

American settlement reached the Pacific Coast before the Civil War, but the continent’s broad heartland remained largely Indian territory. This changed in the last decades of the nineteenth century as white settlement and expansion overtook the Great Plains. The tremendous postbellum growth in industrial capitalism traced in Chapter 6 had as one of its major consequences the steady integration of the entire continent into the national economy. The growth of the transcontinental railroad system constituted the infrastructure for a booming national market that could provide eager consumers throughout the country with the beef, wheat, and lumber produced in abundance in the broad expanse of the trans-Mississippi West.

These western lands were consolidated as part of the American nation through two main processes, which were distinguished as much by their gender practices as by anything else. Large numbers of single men and a few women went west to realize quick profits or find jobs in the region’s mines and on its cattle ranges. This form of American expansion has long been celebrated as the “Wild West” in national legend and popular culture. But there was also a “Settler West” in which primarily white migrants colonized the prairies of America’s heartland. Women and women’s labor were as fundamental to this Settler West as men and men’s labor were to the other.

Native Women in the West

Despite their differences, both kinds of westerners shared a basic premise: Indians would have to be removed to make way for the new settlers, for their economic ambitions, and for what they regarded as their superior civilization. Here, the U.S. Army, fresh from its victory over the Confederacy, was crucial. After 1865, federal forces moved with full strength against the western tribes to wrest control of the Great Plains and open these huge interior expanses to white settlement. Native American raids against encroaching white settlers provoked military retaliation in an escalating series of wars that wore away at Native unity and resources. There were occasional Indian victories, most famously the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana, in which Lakota Sioux warriors annihilated the U.S. Seventh Cavalry commanded by George A. Custer. The army was able to keep Native peoples in a state of constant defense, wearing away at their ability to resist.

Bands of Native Americans who resisted pacification were regarded as “hostiles” who could be killed with impunity by Americans. Made up not only of male warriors but also of women and children, they moved constantly to elude pursuing troops. One of the last such groups was Geronimo’s band of Warm Springs Apache. His female lieutenant, Lozen, exemplified the Native American practice of allowing exceptional individuals to cross the gender divide. Lozen never married, was skilled in tracking the enemy, and performed the spiritual and military duties of a true warrior. Her brother called her “strong as a man, braver than most, and cunning in strategy.”2 For almost a decade, she helped her people evade and attack the U.S. Army, until the Apaches finally surrendered in southern New Mexico in 1886.

The massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in the winter of 1890 is often cited as the tragic end to the Indian Wars. Following their defeat at the Little Big Horn, U.S. Army troops had relentlessly pursued the Lakota Sioux. Deeply dispirited, the Lakotas began a new religious practice, the Ghost Dance, which promised restoration of their traditional lands and lives. Male and female dancers alike wore special robes, said to be designed by a woman, that they believed would protect them against bullets fired by white people. Believing that the Ghost Dance signaled a new organized insurgency, skittish soldiers fired on a camp of mostly unarmed Native people, killing many hundred. “Women with little children on their backs” were gunned down, one white witness to the Wounded Knee massacre recalled, and in blizzard conditions it was many days before their frozen bodies could be retrieved and buried in a mass grave.3

Assaults against the Plains Indians took forms other than outright military conflict. By the 1880s, hunters and soldiers with new high-powered rifles had decimated the buffalo herds that were the material basis of Plains Indians’ traditional way of life. Hunger made the Plains peoples vulnerable to forced relocations on government reservations of the sort that had been pioneered in the 1850s among Pacific Coast tribes (see Map 7.1). Allegedly designed to protect Indians from aggressive white settlers, these reservations instead became what one historian calls “virtual prisons.”4 Unable to support themselves by either farming or hunting, reservation Indians were dependent on food and clothing doled out by federal agents, who often embezzled as much as they dispensed. Instead of their traditional role in gathering and preparing food, Indian women were relegated to standing in long lines, waiting for rations that frequently did not come.

Map 7.1 The Indian Frontier, to 1890

As settlers pushed westward after the Civil War, Native Americans put up bitter resistance, which ultimately failed. Over a period of decades, they ceded most of their lands to the federal government. By 1890, they were confined to reservations where the most they could expect was an impoverished and alien way of life.

Before and after Americanization

These “before-and-after” pictures of Indian children at government-run boarding schools were common in the late nineteenth century and were sometimes sent to philanthropic donors to illustrate the schools’ success in Americanizing Indians. Within a little more than a year, these three girls sat on chairs, not the floor, and had lost their blankets and braids, but they retained their sad faces. The book on the lap of Sarah Walker, the girl on the right in the “after” photograph, was meant to indicate her ability to read English.

On the reservations, Native Americans were subjected to intense pressures to assimilate. White women became central to this effort when the federal United States Indian Service began hiring women as superintendents and teachers and in a wide range of other jobs. Believing that the route to “civilizing” the Indian was through the restructuring of the family, or what scholars call “intimate colonialism” of a conquered people, policy makers thought that white women of exemplary character could teach through moral example. As Helen Hunt Jackson, a noted advocate for reforming federal Indian policy and author of the influential 1881 exposé of government mistreatment of Native peoples, A Century of Dishonor, explained, “[W]omen have more courage and self-denying missionary spirit, sufficient to undertake such a life, and have an invaluable influence outside their school rooms. They go familiarly into the homes, and are really educating the parents as well as the children in a way that is not within the power of any man.”5 In the late nineteenth century, thousands of women, mostly single ones, served in this growing federal bureaucracy. By 1898, they made up 42 percent of the agency’s employees. Many came with a missionary impulse, undoubtedly influenced by the efforts of the religiously based Women’s National Indian Association, a white women’s reform organization founded in 1879 to publicize the plight of Native Americans. Others sought better salaries or the freedom from the restrictive lives many middle-class women led. Despite the emphasis on moral suasion, many felt that they needed to use coercion — such as a threat to send a father to the local jail or remove a child from the home — to receive much cooperation from their clients who resisted the efforts to suppress their culture.

In conjunction with this assimilative process on the reservations, U.S. policy coerced Native children into government-run boarding schools to be forcibly reeducated in the values and ways of dominant American culture. By the 1890s, several thousand children per year were removed from their parents’ control and sent to schools where they were made to stop dressing, speaking, thinking, and believing “like Indians.” Half the students were girls, whose forcible reeducation was regarded as crucial to the cultural transformation of Native people. Too frequently, Native girls’ assimilation into American culture consisted of training in menial occupations and in American standards of domesticity, which they learned as servants in the homes of nearby white families.

The goal of such programs was to save the child by “destroying the Indian,” but the transformations sought were elusive. Evidence of repeated and harsh punishments testifies to the refusal of girls as well as boys to give up their Indian ways. One elderly Indian woman recalled later, “Two of our girls ran away . . . but they got caught. They tied their legs up, tied their hands behind their backs, put them in the middle of the hallway so that if they fell asleep or something, the matron would hear them and she’d get out there and whip them and make them stand up again.”6 Parents and tribal leaders protested the brutality of this coercive Americanization, but they could not stop it.

Despite boarding schools’ coercive practices, many Native American women were able to acquire English literacy and other useful skills in the boarding school system. Their training gave them access to jobs in the Indian Service. In 1899, Native Americans made up 45 percent of those employed in the education division of the agency, mostly in support services, but a significant number were teachers, clerks, or nurses. And while some may have adopted the assumptions of their employer, others used their position primarily to improve their charges’ circumstances and even to oppose the government’s harsh assimilation policy. Because the Indian Service preferred not to place employees with their own people, Native Americans who served outside their own communities may have even encouraged a fledgling sense of intertribal identity.

Native American Nurses (1913)

While many students at Native boarding schools received training for menial work, others were able to develop more professional skills. These Native women (Josie Cayou, Theresa Young, Myrtle Loughrey, Clara Jones, Emily Limon, and Annie Nason) were nurses at the Tulalip Indian Boarding School (1905–1932) in western Washington.

A few graduates of boarding schools who also worked for the federal government in some capacity, such as the Yankton Sioux writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (who wrote popular stories under her Native name, Zitkala-Ša) and the Omaha sisters Susan and Susette La Flesche, became public advocates for their people. Sponsored by the white women of the Woman’s National Indian Association to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Susan La Flesche graduated in 1889 to become the first white-trained Native woman physician. She served her people for many years, both as a doctor and as a political leader. Susette La Flesche was a writer and speaker on behalf of Indian causes. She helped to convert several influential white women to the cause of Indian reform, including Helen Hunt Jackson. Bonnin became a well-known writer and activist for Native American causes. One renowned woman activist, Paiute Sarah Winnemucca, had little formal education and little use for the boarding school approach. In addition to her activities as translator, negotiator, and lecturer, she created a short-lived bilingual school to offer Paiute children an education that would respect their own cultures. (See Primary Sources: “Representing Native American Women in the Late Nineteenth Century,” pp. 390–401.)

Protests against corruption in the reservation system led in 1887 to congressional passage of the Dawes Severalty Act, which divided reservation lands into allotments for individual Native families, the remaining acreage to be sold to non-Indians. Allotment was meant as a reform alternative to demeaning reservation existence, a proposal encouraged by reformers like Jackson, but the way the system played out actually exacerbated Native peoples’ misery. Where land was not very fertile, Native American families could not support themselves on their allotments; and where the land could be productively farmed, whites managed to gain control of those lands. The allotment program also often deepened the dependency of Indian women on their men, following the pattern of white society. In contrast to communal landholding and farming practices, the allotment program meant that women who chose to divorce their husbands risked the loss of economic resources under the control of male heads of household. A group of Hopi women vainly protested to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1894. “The family, the dwelling house and the field are inseparable,” they insisted, “because the woman is the heart of these, and they rest with her.”7 In some areas, however, Native women found other means of contributing to the household economy. As tourism flourished in the West toward the end of the century, the baskets and blankets women produced became desirable commodities. In the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound area, for example, indigenous women from a number of tribes including the Snoqualmie became migrant farm laborers, providing crucial labor as hop-pickers on land that had once belonged to indigenous peoples. These same women further supplemented their income by selling local crafts, including baskets, to white women consumers and tourists or by posing for photographs.

Colonial Settler Families in the West

As Native American control over the West weakened, American colonial settlement across the vast continent continued apace. The passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 granted 160 acres to individuals willing to cultivate and “improve” the land. The railroads, themselves beneficiaries of federal largesse, also sold land to settlers to establish towns along their routes. Through this process, the broad central plains — from Minnesota to Montana to Oklahoma — were settled and Americanized. By the early twentieth century, one-quarter of the U.S. population lived west of the Mississippi.

This population was diverse. After Reconstruction, a small but steady stream of African American families was drawn west by the hope of independent farming. In all-black towns, such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and Langston, Oklahoma, African American women found ways to support their families that were less demeaning than working as domestic servants for white people. In Boley, Oklahoma, Lulu Smith started a dressmaking business; other women ran boardinghouses, catering services, and general stores.8 European immigrants played a large role in western colonial settlement, especially in the northern territories. In the late nineteenth century, in the period of mass immigration, one out of every two western settlers was foreign-born. The Homestead Act allowed land grants to immigrants who intended to become citizens. They, too, formed their own communities where they could live and speak and farm as they had in their home countries.

For a while, in villages throughout New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California, Spanish-speaking women continued to live much as their mothers and grandmothers had. They maintained adobe homes and cultivated small plots, while the men in their families were increasingly drawn away to work in the mines, on the railroads, or on the commercial farms and ranches run by whites (known as Anglos). Ironically, while these Hispanic women were regarded by Anglo society as oppressed, they enjoyed considerable authority in their own communities. Local practices favored female property owning, and when widowed, women in these Hispanic enclaves preferred to head their own households rather than remarry. As the extension of the railroads brought national market pressures and a cash economy closer, however, the need for money became greater. Many of these women lost their distinctive advantages and followed their husbands into paid labor, as domestics in Anglo towns or agricultural wage laborers in Anglo fields.

Despite many differences, all these rural western communities relied on women’s unpaid labor, in striking contrast to the emphasis on middle-class female leisure and working-class female wage labor in the more urbanized parts of American society. Western women cooked, did laundry, and made clothes without benefit of many of the technological improvements — such as running water — available in more industrialized areas. While their husbands cultivated specialized commercial crops, the wives cared for animals and grew food for the family table. One Arizona woman described her morning chores: “[G]et up, turn out my chickens, draw a pail of water, . . . make a fire, put potatoes to cook, then brush and sweep half inch of dust off floor, feed three litters of chickens, then mix biscuits, get breakfast, milk, besides work in the house, and this morning had to go half mile after calves.” She also contributed to her family’s unending need for cash by churning twenty-four pounds of butter in four days. “Quit with a headache,” she wrote in her diary. “Done too much work.”9

Some women were inspired to try homesteading on their own. Perhaps as many as 15 percent of late nineteenth-century American homesteads were at some point controlled by women. Unmarried women who controlled their own homesteads combined two resources irresistible to male settlers, land and female labor, and were besieged by marriage proposals. As one young Oklahoma woman wrote, as soon as she was awarded a claim, men started to court her: “The letters began pouring in — men wanting to marry me, men all the way from twenty-one to seventy-five.”10

Western farm women did their homemaking in an environment where homes had to be built from scratch. On the plains, after spending the first few months living in temporary shelters, settler families would move into huts made of sod, the top layer of soil so dense with the roots of prairie grass that it could be cut into bricks. Women sprinkled their dirt walls and floors with water to keep down the dust, and decorated their unlikely homes as lavishly as they could, eager to banish the discomfort of being surrounded by dirt. Westering was an ongoing process; as families frequently moved and resettled on more promising land, it was left to the women to repeat the work of creating — both physically and emotionally — new home environments.

Of all the burdens for women settlers on the Great Plains, drudgery and loneliness seem to have been the worst, especially in the years when towns were still being established. Unlike their husbands, women rarely left the homestead — slaves, as some put it, to the cookstove and the washtub. Ignored when she complained that she “never got to go nowhere, or see anybody . . . or [do] anything but work,” one Oklahoma woman packed up the children and fled. Overtaken by a wind and ice storm, she almost froze to death and ended up back at the homestead, disabled for life.11

Immigrants in the Great Plains

As with the growth of American industry, the settling of the Great Plains required immigrant labor and determination. Scandinavians were particularly drawn to homesteading. This Norwegian immigrant to Minnesota, Beret Olesdater Hagebak, sits alone in front of a small house made of sod, the most common building material available on the treeless plains. Her picture captures the difficult experience of immigrant farm women, who suffered both the cultural disorientation of immigration and the isolation of Plains farm life.

In 1867, the organization of an agricultural communities’ group, the National Grange (the full title was the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry), helped overcome women’s isolation on the prairies. By the mid-1870s, three-quarters of the farmers of Kansas had joined.12 Based on the premise that farm families had to cooperate to succeed against the corporate power of railroads and other monopolies, the Grange established farmer-run stores and grain elevators and promoted laws against unfair railroad rates. It also sponsored social and cultural events that enriched local community life and were of special importance to women, who played a prominent role in the Grange. Local chapters were required to have nine female members for every thirteen male members, and women served as officers and delegates to the national meetings. The sense of community that the Grange created prepared the way for more overtly political expressions of agricultural discontent, including the Farmers’ Alliance in the late 1880s and the Populist movement of the 1890s (see pp. 376–79).

The “Wild West”

Alongside the families drawn by the promise of land and economic self-sufficiency were other westerners pursuing riskier schemes for getting rich. Both groups Americanized the West, but in different ways. While family settlement imported the American social and cultural values of industriousness and domesticity, these other westerners brought with them capitalism, wage labor, and subordination to growing corporate power. Despite their status as icons of individual freedom, the colorful cowboys of the cattle range and the grizzled miners of the gold and silver mines were wage laborers and suffered from wage dependence as much as industrial workers in New York and Chicago.

The contrasts between the Wild West and the Settler West are particularly clear in terms of the radically different gender practices on which they rested. In the mines and cattle ranges, women wage earners were rare. Annie Oakley’s riding and roping skills made her a featured player in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in the 1890s, but cowgirls were a staple only in the Wild West of popular culture. The rapidly expanding female labor force found elsewhere in America existed in the West only in the largest cities, such as Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle.

There were other sorts of women in the Wild West, however. At first, most were prostitutes. Like the miners and cowboys who were their customers, they were black and white, English- and Spanish-speaking, native- and foreign-born. Initially, many of these women worked for themselves, as what one historian calls “proprietor prostitutes.”13 A few were able to earn or marry their way into respectable society. Others bought or rented brothels, hired other women, and became successful, if disreputable, businesswomen. In 1890, in Helena, Montana, one of the most prosperous real estate entrepreneurs was an Irish-born former prostitute, “Chicago Joe.” But for most, prostitution was a thoroughly losing proposition. Two-thirds of prostitutes died young of sexually transmitted diseases, botched abortions, alcohol or drug abuse, suicide, or homicide. As in other western businesses, the initial period of entrepreneurial exuberance was replaced by consolidated ownership. By the early twentieth century, men — pimps, landlords, and police — enjoyed most of the profits from western prostitution.

More women — some rich, most poor — gradually began to move to western centers of industry. The wives of western mine owners lived in expensive, elegant homes, hired servants, and imported luxuries. The determination of a few to use their husbands’ fortunes on behalf of their own social and philanthropic ambitions was legendary. Phoebe Appleton Hearst, whose husband got rich in the mines of California and Nevada, was a major benefactor of the University of California at Berkeley. Margaret (Molly) Tobin Brown, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, married one of the rare individual prospectors to become wealthy off the mines. She bought and refurnished an elegant Denver mansion, hired tutors to teach her the ways of the upper class, and became a generous civic donor. In 1912, she survived the sinking of the ill-fated Titanic, earning herself the nickname of “Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

At the other end of the class scale, wage-earning miners and cowboys also formed families. The immigrant copper miners of Anaconda, Montana, married the young Irish women who worked as domestic servants for their bosses or as waitresses in the local hotels. Mexican miners in Colorado brought their wives north to live with them and settle permanently in the United States. These working-class wives rarely took jobs outside the home, although they did earn money by feeding and housing single male miners, cowboys, and lumberjacks.

Western housewives lived with the constant fear of losing their husbands to violent death on the range or in the mines. Recognizing that unions would fight to raise wages and make working conditions safer, they were strong supporters of organized labor. They formed union auxiliaries that were very active during the militant strikes that rocked the region. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, miners’ wives were involved in 1893 when the radical Western Federation of Miners won higher wages and in 1904 when the state militia drove union activists out of town. By far the most prominent female labor activist in the region was the legendary Irish-born Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones, who began her career as an organizer for miners’ unions in the late 1890s. Mother Jones focused her attention on the miners — her “boys” — but she also understood the power of miners’ wives and organized them into “mop and broom brigades” that effectively harassed strikebreakers. Referring to one of the family dynasties most identified with corporate greed, Jones declared: “God Almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”14

Jones’s contempt for female gentility notwithstanding, western working-class wives were as careful as women of the leisure classes to maintain a distinction between their own status as respectable women and the status of the disreputable women who had preceded them. Family life was gradually displacing the world of the dance halls and brothels. Respectable women took care not to live in the same areas as “fast” women. “If the world of work was divided into laborers and employers,” writes one historian of the western female experience, “the world of women was divided into good women and bad.”15

LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRATION

While Americans were moving westward in the late nineteenth century, immigrants were pouring into the country, 27 million in the half century after 1880. These numbers dwarfed pre–Civil War immigration. Five million came from Italy and an equal number from Germany, as well as 2 million Eastern European Jews, 1 million Polish Catholics, and 1 million Scandinavians. A small but growing number of Asians and Mexicans also came to the United States in these years. By 1910, Asians constituted 2 percent of all arriving immigrants. Numbers of Mexican immigrants are harder to determine. Until 1924, when the U.S. Border Patrol was established, the Mexican-U.S. border was virtually unregulated, and those crossing back and forth melded into already existing Spanish-speaking communities. This massive immigration turned the United States into a much more ethnically and religiously diverse people, no longer preponderantly English and Protestant but now broadly European, with a growing minority of resident Asians and Mexicans.

The gender patterns of these immigrations were complex. Among Slavic, Greek, and Italian immigrants, more men than women came to the United States. However, many men came as temporary workers and returned eventually to their homelands. As they did, and as more women came to marry those who remained, sex ratios tended to even out. Some groups, notably Eastern European Jews and new Irish immigrants, initially came in more gender-balanced numbers. Eventually, women constituted between 30 and 40 percent of all immigrants (see the Appendix, p. A-21) in these years.

The Decision to Immigrate

Women decided to leave their homelands and come to the United States for many reasons, some of which they shared with men. Faced with poverty, limited opportunity, and rigid class structures at home, families dispatched members to work in the United States and send money back to those who remained. The booming U.S. economy had an insatiable need for workers in its factories, mines, and kitchens, and it lured men and women alike with its promises of high wages and easy prosperity. “This was the time . . . when America was known to foreigners as the land where you’d get rich,” remembered Pauline Newman, who arrived from Lithuania in 1901. “There’s gold on the sidewalk! All you have to do is pick it up.”16 Political persecution also pushed people out of their homelands. Jews began emigrating in large numbers in the 1880s to escape growing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, especially the violent, deadly riots called pogroms. Similarly, the upheavals that culminated in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 drove men and women north.

Women also had their own distinctive reasons for emigrating. Many were drawn by the reputation that the United States was developing as a society that welcomed independence for women. A common story for young women of all groups involved fleeing from an overbearing, patriarchal father and from the threat of an arranged marriage. That was why Emma Goldman fled Russia in 1885. Upon arriving in the United States, she began a life of political activism that eventually made her the most notorious radical in the United States (see Reading into the Past: “Living My Life”).

Other women came to the United States as wives or to become wives, to join husbands who had migrated before them or to complete arranged marriages. The Japanese government encouraged male immigrants to send back to Japan for women to marry. These women in turn sent letters and photographs to their potential husbands. This was a modern version of a traditional Japanese practice, but shaskin kekkon (literally, “photograph marriages”) were regarded by Americans as akin to prostitution and still another indication of the allegedly low morals of Asians. Similar arrangements were common among European immigrants. Rachel Kahn came from Ukraine to North Dakota in 1894 to marry a Russian immigrant farmer with whom she had only exchanged pictures.17

Some women undoubtedly migrated for reasons so personal and painful that they were hidden from public view. Unmarried women who had become pregnant might flee or be sent away so that the scandal could be more easily hidden. The father of Lucja Krajulis’s child would not marry her but sent her instead to the United States, where she was shuttled about among fellow Lithuanians.18 During the 1910 Mexican Revolution, women in the countryside were raped by armed marauders, and crossing the border provided them escape from their shame.

READING INTO THE PAST

EMMA GOLDMAN

Living My Life

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was raised in Russia by an overbearing father and an uninterested stepmother. She was already interested in radical politics before she left in 1885 to follow her sister Helena and to become a garment worker in Rochester, New York. Within a few years, she had become deeply involved with the anarchist movement. Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), is one of the most widely read life stories in American women’s history.

Helena also hated to leave me behind. She knew of the bitter friction that existed between Father and me. She offered to pay my fare, but Father would not consent to my going. I pleaded, begged, wept. Finally I threatened to jump into the Neva [River], whereupon he yielded. Equipped with twenty-five roubles — all that the old man would give me — I left without regrets. Since my earliest recollection, home had been stifling, my father’s presence terrifying. . . . [Father] had tried desperately to marry me off at the age of fifteen. I had protested, begging to be permitted to continue my studies. In his frenzy he threw my French grammar into the fire, shouting: “Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefüllte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.” I would not listen to his schemes; I wanted to study, to know life, to travel. Besides, I never would marry for anything but love, I stoutly maintained. It was really to escape my father’s plans for me that I had insisted on going to America.

SOURCE: Emma Goldman, Living My Life (1931; repr., New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1970), 1:11.

QUESTION FOR ANALYSIS

As an anarchist, Goldman was very critical of U.S. politics and economic organization, yet in this passage she suggests the positive qualities America could represent to a young immigrant woman. What were they?

The Immigrant’s Journey

Having decided to move to the United States, immigrant women had many obstacles to negotiate. Passage in the steerage class of a transoceanic steamship in 1900 cost the modern equivalent of $400. It took ten to twenty days to cross from Italy to New York and twice as long from Japan to San Francisco, during which time passengers slept in cramped, unhealthy conditions below deck. One can only imagine the experience of pregnant women or mothers of infants. Photos of arriving immigrants show dazed women, with babies held tightly in their arms and older children clinging to their skirts.

In 1892, the first federal receiving station for immigrants was established on Ellis Island in New York Harbor. The majority of immigrants were passed through quickly, although individuals judged “unfit” for admission could be isolated, confined, and eventually deported. Asian women were more likely to be kept for long periods at Angel Island, the equivalent site established in San Francisco Bay in 1910. Assumed to be sexually immoral, they were detained until they could establish their respectability by answering endless questions about themselves and the men they planned to marry. “Had I known it was like this,” a thirty-year-old Chinese mother recalled, “I never would have wanted to come.”19

Young European women in transit were regarded as sexually vulnerable rather than sexually immoral. Stories circulated of unaccompanied and disoriented immigrant girls tricked or forced into prostitution. This phenomenon was known at the time as “white slavery,” a term that invoked memories of chattel (black) slavery. Feared as an international conspiracy to waylay and prostitute young women, white slavery was a major focus for anxieties about women and immigration. The actual extent of the practice is difficult to determine.

Many immigrants kept on moving beyond their point of arrival in the United States, following friends or family or rumors of work. By the turn of the century, the populations of large midwestern cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee were preponderantly foreign-born. Numerous mining towns of the West were dense with immigrants as well. Many immigrants, wishing to retain something of their familiar homeland, preferred to live among people from their own village or region, but this could leave them ignorant of much about their new surroundings. Reformer Jane Addams told the poignant story of an Italian woman who had never seen roses in the few blocks of Chicago that she knew, thought they grew only in Italy, and feared that she would never enjoy their beauty again.20

Reception of the Immigrants

The United States’s pride in its status as a nation of immigrants is embodied in New York Harbor’s Statue of Liberty, a giant female figure presented to the United States by the people of France in 1885 to represent the two countries’ common embrace of liberty. The poem inscribed on the statue’s base was written by Emma Lazarus, a descendant of Sephardic Jews who had arrived in the mid-seventeenth century. The words she wrote welcome the world’s oppressed, those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” But Lazarus’s sentiment was not the norm. In the late nineteenth century, many native-born Americans regarded the incoming masses as disturbingly different aliens who could never assimilate.

Anti-immigrant legislation initially targeted Asians. The Page Law of 1875, the very first federal legislation meant to discourage immigration, was directed at Chinese women, on the assumption that most were prostitutes. In 1882, Congress passed a more comprehensive law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned further immigration of Chinese laborers and their families. The few women who could prove that they were the wives or daughters of Chinese merchants already living in the United States were exempted. Once Chinese immigration had virtually ceased, Japanese workers began to come to the United States, but by the 1890s, anti-Asian sentiment on the West Coast had surfaced against them as well. In 1907, in the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement, the U.S. and Japanese governments agreed to restrict further immigration.

A Document of Chinese Immigration

Through diligent research, historian Judy Yung uncovered this sworn testimony given by her great-grandfather of her great-grandmother’s immigration to the United States in 1892. She found that there were several strategic lies embedded within the document. First, his wife Leung Yee had not lived in the United States previously but was immigrating for the first time in 1892. Second, the daughter that she claimed on this document was in fact a young servant of the family. Such deceits were necessary — and common — to circumvent the prohibitions of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Laws against European immigrants, who were far more central to the U.S. economy, were not passed until 1921 and 1924, when highly restrictive national quotas were established, remaining in place until 1965 (see pp. 722–23). Even before these laws, European immigrants were the targets of considerable prejudice and resentment. Degrading ethnic stereotypes were widely circulated as innocently amusing. Southern and Eastern European immigrants were seen as peoples whose strangeness and difference were fundamental, physical, and ineradicable. Religion was a major concern. The hundreds of thousands of Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe after 1880 were the first major group of non-Christians to settle in the United States. Even Catholics were regarded by American Protestants as so emotional and superstitious as barely to be fellow believers in Christ. Their devotion to a foreign pope was the source of much suspicion. Anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic attitudes abounded even among otherwise liberal-minded Americans. Susan B. Anthony could not understand by what logic “these Italians come over with the idea that they must be paid as much as intelligent white men.”21

Americans were especially wary of immigrant gender relations, regarding their own attitudes as modern and those of the newcomers as Old World and patriarchal. They were particularly uneasy with the reproductive behavior of immigrant women. While the birthrates of native-born women had been falling for some time (see the Appendix, p. A-17), immigrant families were large. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt, concerned that immigrants’ higher birthrates were overtaking those of native-born Americans, blamed middle-class women who were working or going to college instead of having babies for what he called “race suicide.” “If the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother,” he declared in the introduction to The Woman Who Toils (see pp. 330–35), “why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.”22 After some time in the United States, however, immigrant women started to want smaller families, too. Margaret Sanger, herself the daughter of Irish immigrants, founded the American birth control movement in the 1910s as a response to immigrant women’s pleas for reliable ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy (see pp. 441–44).

Starting about 1910, settlement houses and other civic institutions initiated deliberate Americanization campaigns to assimilate immigrants into mainstream U.S. culture. While these programs did not regard immigrants as permanently alien to American society, they did look on their languages, religions, and cultural practices as foreign. Women’s household routines were a particular object of reform, as were practices such as arranged marriages that seemed to violate American standards of family life. These Americanization programs became harsher during World War I, when nativism became much stronger and immigrants’ patriotism was questioned.

Immigrant Daughters

Immigrant mothers and daughters confronted America very differently. Low wages made it difficult for immigrant men to meet the American standard of being the sole support of their families. Secondary wage earners were usually teenage children, not wives. Just as their families needed immigrant daughters’ earnings, the expanding labor force needed their labor. Young girls were plunged immediately into the booming American economy, while their mothers remained largely homebound.

Young immigrant women predominated in the two largest categories of female wage labor, domestic labor and factory work. German, Polish, and Mexican girls met late nineteenth-century middle-class families’ demand for servants. By contrast, Italian parents did not want their daughters to work as servants in strange households and preferred that they take jobs where other family members could oversee their activities, such as in seasonal fruit picking.

Young immigrant women were also drawn into factory work, making their greatest contribution to the garment industry. The mass production of clothes in the United States could not have occurred without their labor. By 1890, one out of three garment workers was a woman, and most of these women were immigrants. Some — Russian Jews, Japanese, Italians — had worked in clothing factories in their home countries. New York and Chicago were the centers of the ready-made clothing industry in the United States, but garment factories filled with immigrant women workers could be found throughout the country, from El Paso to San Francisco to Baltimore. Paid by the piece and pushed to work ever more quickly, young women earned low wages and risked occupational injuries. Sexual harassment was an additional problem for young immigrant women factory workers, as it was hard not to yield to the foremen who controlled their jobs.

Most of these young women workers lived with parents or other relatives, and intergenerational relations could be very tense. More than their brothers, girls were expected to turn over most of their wages to their parents. Mothers needed the money for household expenses, but daughters longed to spend some of their earnings on themselves. Disagreements did not end there. Daughters wanted to dress in the modern American style, while mothers wanted them to look and behave like respectable girls in the old country. Battles could be even more intense with fathers. No one resisted Old World patriarchy more intensely than its daughters. The Russian Jewish novelist Anzia Yezierska wrote often of this theme. “Should I let him crush me as he crushed [my sisters]?” a character in her 1925 novel, Bread Givers, said of her father. “No. This is America. Where children are people. . . . It’s a new life now. In America, women don’t need men to boss them.”23

Immigrant Wives and Mothers

While unmarried immigrant women were more likely to be wage earners than native-born women, the opposite was true of their mothers — very few of whom worked outside their homes. This behavior was not simply a carryover of Old World standards; Eastern European Jewish wives, for instance, had traditionally been shopkeepers or market vendors. Given the family wage system in the United States, however, adult immigrant women had difficulty finding paid work. Immigrant wives were nonetheless expected to contribute to the family economy. Because of the numbers of single male immigrants and the preference of many groups for living among people from their own country, boarding was very common among immigrants. Middle-class observers, who regarded familial privacy as sacred, condemned the immigrant practice of boarders living within families. Immigrants recognized the tensions but regarded them more tolerantly, and stories of liaisons between amorous boarders and discontented housewives were a source of much amusement in immigrant culture.

Immigrant women’s housekeeping and childrearing tasks were daunting, both because of poverty and the surrounding alien culture. In densely populated cities, apartments were crowded and residents still relied on backyard wells and outdoor privies, augmented by public baths. Children playing on busy city streets required additional supervision. Women hauled water up flights of stairs, as they did coal and wood purchased for fuel, and fought a constant battle against ash and soot. Photographer Jacob Riis did pioneering work documenting these conditions. (See Primary Sources: “Jacob Riis’s Photographs of Immigrant Girls and Women,” pp. 408–14.) Even so, American observers were frequently astonished at the levels of cleanliness immigrant women were able to maintain. While middle-class women dealt with their domestic obligations by hiring immigrant servants, immigrant women had no choice but to do their own scrubbing and ironing.

Immigrant mothers had the added responsibility of preserving customary ways against the tremendous forces working to Americanize them and their families. They continued to cook traditional foods and observe religious obligations, while their husbands and children entered into the American economic mainstream to make the family’s living. As practices that were ancient and reflexive became deliberate and problematic, it fell to women to defend and perpetuate the old ways, thus laying the basis for what would eventually become American ethnic identity. Such practices constituted implicit resistance to the forces of Americanization and cultural homogenization. For the time being, however, such immigrant mothers were dismissed by their children as old-fashioned and quaint, their skills and knowledge irrelevant to the new world that their daughters mastered with such verve. Once again, Jane Addams subtly captured the emotional tenor of this role reversal in her description of the dilemma of immigrant women in search of runaway children in Chicago: “It is as if they did not know how to search for their children without the assistance of the children themselves.”24

Despite these obstacles, adult immigrant women helped to construct lasting ethnic communities. In the mining town of Anaconda, Montana, Irish women, struggling to meet their family needs, nonetheless raised money to build St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in 1888. This story was repeated in the immigrant neighborhoods within which the American Catholic church developed. Occasionally, immigrant wives’ community activism took a political turn, as in 1902, when New York City Jewish women demonstrated against the rising cost of meat in the city’s kosher markets. Like native-born middle-class women, late nineteenth-­century immigrant women formed and joined associations, but for different reasons. They had been drawn to the United States by the promise of greater freedom, if not for themselves, then for their children. But they were learning that to realize that promise, they had to find ways to work together.

CONCLUSION: Nationhood and Womanhood on the Eve of a New Century

While the end of the Civil War resolved, for the time being at least, the regional and racial divisions that had endangered the United States, the post-Reconstruction years brought new conflicts and dangers to American unity and national tranquility. Even as the American economy revived and geographic expansion reopened, new rifts in the American social fabric occurred over the distribution of these riches and resources. Immigrants were drawn into the booming economy and the growing cities, only to face ethnic discrimination, daunting poverty, and nativist legislation. Western families and ambitious entrepreneurs alike sought the removal of Native peoples to open up new lands for their own purposes.

Women were part and parcel of these two great movements of people — ­immigration and the removal of Native peoples — that did so much to transform the United States in the post–Civil War years. Their labor fueled dynamic new industries and contributed to growing corporate wealth, and their devotion relocated and rebuilt family lives. Native American women found ways to resist, record, or protest the relentless encroachment on their lands and the attacks on their cultures.

These conflicts culminated at century’s end in a decade of political challenge and social turmoil. By the end of the century, the wealth produced by the U.S. economy more than equaled that of England, Germany, and France combined. The settlement of the western half of the continental United States gave a sturdy new physicality to American claims of nationhood. Strong and confident, the United States, once a colony itself, ended the century by acquiring its own colonies. The country was on its way to becoming a world power.

As this new era of national development and prominence dawned, women’s prospects looked especially promising. Many, though not all, American women in 1900 were living more active, more public, more individualized, and more expansive lives than women of prior generations did. These women were prepared to make a major contribution to solving the problems that accompanied America’s new prosperity and place in the world. In the coming era, important groups of women would achieve as much influence as in any period of U.S. history. Already the beneficiaries of American progress, they were about to become the mainstays of the Progressive era, in which America undertook the challenging task of both reforming and modernizing itself.

CHAPTER 7 REVIEW

KEY TERMS AND PEOPLE

Terms

Wounded Knee massacre

Woman’s National Indian Association

Dawes Severalty Act

Homestead Act

National Grange

Ellis Island

Angel Island

Page Law

Chinese Exclusion Act

Populism

settlement house movement

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

People

Helen Hunt Jackson

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša

Sarah Winnemucca

Emma Goldman

Jane Addams

Frances Willard

Mary Elizabeth Lease

Lugenia Burns Hope

Queen Liliuokalani

Angel De Cora

REVIEW QUESTIONS

“Consolidating the West” had vastly different meanings for white women settlers and Native American women. What generalizations can you make about the two disparate groups’ experiences?

How were women’s experiences of immigration and settlement in the United States distinct from those of men? How were they similar?

How would you characterize the differences among women involved in industrial protest, the Populist movement, and the settlement house movement? What similarities do you see in the methods or goals of these movements?

Making Connections The chapter’s introduction (pp. 356–57) states: “In all these developments — western consolidation, mass immigration, the political and economic crises of the 1890s, and the beginnings of American imperialism — women were involved, active, influential, and, as a result, changed.” How might you characterize women’s activity and influence, and how might they have been changed by their participation in these developments?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Representing Native American Women in the Late Nineteenth Century

POPULAR CULTURE IMAGES

Sixteenth-century Europeans were fascinated by the images produced by such artists as Theodor de Bry (see pp. 37 and 40). Yet these renderings were just the start of centuries-long representations of Native peoples in American popular culture. With the exception of the perennial favorite, Pocahontas (see Figure 1.8, p. 43, and Figure 1.9, p. 44), whose appeal to whites stemmed from the belief that she was an example of the triumph of civilization over savagery,43 images of Native American women were less common than those of men. Until the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century subsided, the popular press tended to emphasize male ferociousness and often featured specific leaders from the Plains who were identified by names such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Women were depicted more generically, often without even their tribe identified.

In popular magazines such as Harpers Weekly, one of the most pervasive images featured the Indian woman as “squaw,” a hardworking drudge mistreated by her lazy husband. The stereotype had changed little since the eighteenth century (see p. 229). The engraving in Figure 7.1 used technology that had revolutionized print media, making it cheaper to produce richly illustrated magazines in the post–Civil War era. The text that accompanied this 1875 drawing, “Indian Sledge Journey,” explained the message of the image in clear terms:

The mode of winter travel practiced by the Indians of the Northwest is depicted in our illustration . . . , which represents an Indian family on a journey through a snow-covered forest. On the sledge are packed the lodge, all the belongings of the household, including child and young dogs, and the load is drawn by the squaw, while the husband, carrying only his rifle, brings up the rear. Among the noble red men, in the division of labor all the hard work falls upon the squaws; there is no question as to their mission in life. The frame-work of the sledge is generally made of some flexible, tough wood, over which dry hides are tightly stretched, forming a strong but very light vehicle, which slides easily over the surface of the snow.

Note that the description of the sledge is far more precise than that of the Indian family. Do you think this detail lent a sense of accurate reporting to the image? How do the image and caption reinforce the argument — popular since George Washington’s administration and that would become so popular with white reformers — that the key to “civilizing” Native Americans was through restructuring gender relations?

Figure 7.1 “Indian Sledge Journey,” Harper's Weekly (1875)

Another theme common in late nineteenth-century images focused on assimilation. Photographs such as the ones on p. 361 were used to document the ways in which Native Americans could become assimilated to the American mainstream. This type of representation appeared not just in magazines but also in venues such as the World’s Columbian Exposition (p. 383). But even as white observers were touting the modernization of indigenous peoples, others presented a romantic vision of a dying race. A subset of this nostalgia was the attention given to Native women’s skill at traditional handicrafts such as basket making, rug weaving, and pottery. The interest in women’s preindustrial work may have indicated anxiety about how modern industrial innovations had robbed modern women of traditional skills. It reflected, too, the interest in the “primitive” and “authentic,” evident in the “Orientalism” of the image on page 384. In this narrative of the past, the now pacified Native Americans had become exotic examples of simpler times. The World’s Columbian Exposition featured hundreds of displays of Native women’s crafts and even showcased an actual Navaho woman at her loom. Dioramas (three-dimensional lifelike models) of indigenous women at traditional tasks borrowed from the Smithsonian appeared in an ethnological exhibit titled “Woman’s Work in Savagery,” in which the figures were enclosed in glass cases like zoological exhibits.

Photographs were perhaps the most compelling demonstration of traditional crafts work, and there is a substantial archive of such images, part of an ambitious campaign of photographers to capture traditional cultures while they still existed. Figure 7.2 shows the Arizona Hopi Nampeyo, surrounded by her pottery in 1900. The photographer, A. C. Vroman, often arranged the pottery to suit his vision and in this case included some pots made by another woman. Most pictures of women with their crafts did not identify the women by name. Indeed photographs of weavers usually focused on the rugs or blankets on the loom with the anonymous weaver’s back to the photographer. Nampeyo is unusual in that she was well-known in her lifetime as a superb artist in particular for incorporating prehistoric designs into her ceramics, a technique that drew the attention of American museums and collectors. For her designs, Nampeyo borrowed from the artifacts archeologists had recently uncovered of prehistoric Hopi people. Besides their artistic appeal, what other reasons might have prompted her to draw upon these ancient patterns?

Figure 7.2 Hopi Potter Nampeyo

One outlet for Nampeyo to sell her wares was a local trading post, and these emporiums became an important part of the developing tourist industry of the West, where visitors could buy souvenirs to document their visit and adorn their homes. Postcards, many of them featuring Indian “princesses” or craftswomen like Nampeyo, helped to publicize the new tourist destinations. They suggest that not only had their blankets, pots, and baskets become commodities for white consumption, but so, too, had the women themselves.

Figure 7.3 is a particularly striking example of this phenomenon. Dating from 1902, the brightly colored postcard shows Pueblo women at a railway station offering their pottery to tourists while railroad staff looks on. The postcard was part of a promotional campaign mounted by the Fred Harvey Company, which had a chain of hotels and restaurants. Why might this image have appealed to prospective tourists? Harvey initially hired Pueblo women to stand at train stations but eventually built permanent tourist shops that included “living” exhibitions of Native peoples. Nampeyo worked at Harvey’s Hopi House in 1905, and a promotional brochure included a photograph of the potter and her family, along with the caption “These quaintly-garbed Indians on the housetop hail from Tewa, the home of Nampeyo, the most noted pottery-maker in all Hopiland. Perhaps you [will be] so fortunate as to see Nampeyo herself.” Inviting the tourist to step inside this re-creation of a Hopi dwelling and see the Hopi work at their crafts, it promised that “They are the most primitive Indians in American with ceremonies several centuries old.”44

Figure 7.3 Pueblo Women in a 1902 Postcard

Although few images of Native American women identified them by name, notable exceptions were the photographs of a handful of women writers or activists such as the La Flesche sisters, Sarah Winnemucca, and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, who wrote under the name Zitkala-Ša (see p. 362). Bonnin first gained fame as a writer of autobiographic stories, fiction, and poetry, based on her life among the Yankton Dakotas of South Dakota. Her autobiographical writings began to appear in such prestigious magazines as the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. By the 1910s she had become an outspoken activist for Indian rights. One of her most compelling stories detailed the trauma of the cultural shock she experienced when she first went to a Native American boarding school. That experience notwithstanding, she prized education and went on to study violin at the New England Conservatory of Music. Like many Native American intellectuals, Bonnin often struggled with the dilemma posed by valuing aspects of Euro-American culture, especially education, while hoping to sustain Native American cultures.45

Although Bonnin was often photographed wearing elaborate Indian clothing, other photos of the time offer a more subtle vision of her identity. Figure 7.4, an 1898 portrait by Joseph Keiley, shows Bonnin in a simple dress, probably made of buckskin, holding what seems to be a sheaf of papers. Her beads and the striped blanket signal her native American identity. Keiley was part of a photography movement that promoted photographs as fine art. How does this image of Bonnin reflect his agenda?

Figure 7.4 Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, photographed by Joseph T. Keiley (1898)

Like Bonnin, Angel De Cora, originally named Hinook-Mahiwi-Kilinaka, a Winnebago from Nevada, received her education at a boarding school, Hampton Institute, where she studied for three years beginning in 1883. Eventually she trained as an artist at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She achieved substantial success as a commercial illustrator, contributing illustrations for many works by and about Native Americans in the early twentieth century. In 1901 she illustrated Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends. Even before Zitkala-Ša published her works, De Cora’s writing and illustrations appeared in Harpers’ New Monthly Magazine. In one of her two published stories, “Grey Wolf’s Daughter,” the protagonist reflected on the young women she knew, comparing “one who had been to school, to another who had staid at home and was a thorough Indian, comparing the life of the one with the life of the other.”46 She determined to go to boarding school to learn “the white man’s ways.” The night before her departure, she adorned herself with beads and jewelry and, with village girlfriends, underwent a purification ceremony. Then, she removed all of her items, leaving herself with a simple dress and one ornament. Her father was sad to see her go, but recognized that “she had always had her own way.”

What is most striking about the story are the drawings that accompany it. Figure 7.5 is a stunning image that richly details the skilled beadwork on De Cora’s dress and belt. The painted hides behind her further illuminate a dazzling display of traditional Plains women’s work. While the narrative might suggest a sense of loss as the young woman puts aside her Native adornments, historian Jane Simonsen maintains that the pensive expression and the celebration of the design work emphasize Grey Wolf’s daughter’s choice to establish a new identity in a new environment. “In the same way,” Simonsen argues, “De Cora’s identity as an artist began to take shape as she moved Native designs into the mainstream literary media. She removed her beads, as it were, only to place them in the pages of Harper’s.”47 What do you make of this interpretation?

Figure 7.5 Grey Wolf’s Daughter by Angel De Cora (1899)

THE WORDS OF SARAH WINNEMUCCA, PAIUTE° ACTIVIST

SARAH WINNEMUCCA (1844?–1891), a member of the Nevada Paiutes and daughter of one of the tribe’s headman, led an extraordinary life in which she served as U.S. Army messenger and translator, lectured extensively in western and eastern cities, visited Washington, D.C., at the request of President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, and wrote Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), the first book written by a Native American woman. Winnemucca was a controversial figure. Her relentless condemnation of the reservation system and numerous Indian Service agents she viewed as corrupt and incompetent provoked white hostility. Some newspapers depicted her negatively, drawing upon the squaw stereotype to question her morality. And, in keeping with many white assumptions about Native women’s unrestrained sexuality, one Indian agent sought to undermine her credibility when she went to Washington by claiming that she was a prostitute. And her own people were often suspicious, especially when she failed in her efforts to secure improved conditions and also because she willingly worked with the U.S. Army as a translator. Yet the story that scholars have developed suggest that her most impressive legacy was her critique of white western expansion generally and U.S. Indian policy specifically. She did not look back to some romantic vision of her people returning to the old ways, but hoped for a path leading to Native Americans becoming educated, even “civilized,” without surrendering their culture and their autonomy.

Winnemucca first began giving lectures to white audiences in San Francisco in 1879, primarily to draw attention to the government’s removal of a group of Paiutes from their reservation in Nevada to one in Yakima, Washington, as punishment for their alleged attacks on whites, a claim they and Winnemucca roundly disputed. For her lectures Winnemucca appeared in Native American attire, which was described in detail by the Daily Alta California: “A head-dress of long feathers was fastened to her forehead by a bright red band, her long, jet-black hair falling below her waist. A bright buckskin shirt and cape were trimmed with beads and long buckskin string. A bead necklace shone around her throat and a blue bead bracelet was worn around the right wrist. Bright red hose showed below the short skirt, and it might have been the pair of gaily-embroidered moccasins worn on the feet that attracted the attention of the men in that way.”48 Figure 7.6 is a photograph that shows Winnemucca in similar clothing. Why might she have chosen traditional garb instead of the western dresses she was also accustomed to wearing?

Figure 7.6 Sarah Winnemucca

In 1883, encouraged by the patronage of two Boston sisters, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Mann, Winnemucca (who published under her married name, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins) turned her lectures into a book that told her own story while also explaining Paiute cultural traditions and describing the devastating impact of white conquest of the West and its Native people. In these two extracts from Life Among the Piutes, Winnemucca explains Paiute courtship and marriage. How might we read these passages as a response to white conventional representations of Indian families?

Life Among the Piutes

My people have been so unhappy for a long time they wish now to disincrease, instead of multiply. The mothers are afraid to have more children, for fear they shall have daughters, who are not safe even in their mother’s presence.

Winnemucca then describes the courtship process that begins after a twenty-five day ritual that marks her having “come to womanhood.”

It is thus publicly known that there is another marriageable woman, and any young man interested in her, or wishing to form an alliance, comes forward. But the courting is very different from the courting of the white people. He never speaks to her, or visits the family, but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his horsemanship, etc. As he knows that she sleeps next to her grandmother in the lodge, he enters in full dress after the family has retired for the night, and seats himself at her feet. If she is not awake, the grandmother wakes her. He does not speak to either young woman or grandmother, but when the young woman wishes him to go away, she rises and goes and lies down by the side of her mother. He then leaves as silently as he came in. This goes on sometimes for a year or longer, if the young woman has not made up her mind. She is never forced by her parents to marry against her wishes. When she knows her mind, she makes a confidant of her grandmother, and then the young man is summoned by the father of the girl, who asks him in her presence if he really loves his daughter, and reminds him, if he does, of all the duties of a husband. He then asks the daughter the same question, and sets before her minutely all her duties. And these duties are not slight. She is to dress the game, prepare the food, clean the buckskins, make his moccasins, dress his hair, bring all the wood, — in short, do all the household work. She promises to “be himself,” and she fulfills her promise. Then he is invited to a feast and all his relatives with him. . . .

In an earlier passage Winnemucca expands upon women’s duties and the nature of marriage in a description of tribal decision making.

We have a republic as well as you. The council-tent is our Congress, and anybody can speak who has anything to say, women and all. They are always interested in what their husbands are doing and thinking about. And they take some part even in the wars. They are always near at hand when fighting is going on, ready to snatch their husbands up and carry them off if wounded or killed. One splendid woman that my brother Lee married after his first wife died, went out into the battle-field after her uncle was killed, and went into the front ranks and cheered the men on. Her uncle’s horse was dressed in a splendid robe made of eagles’ feathers and she snatched it off and swung it in the face of the enemy, who always carry off everything they find, as much as to say, “You can’t have that — I have it safe”; and she stayed and took her uncle’s place, as brave as any of the men. It means something when the women promise their fathers to make their husbands themselves. They faithfully keep with them in all the dangers they can share. They not only take care of their children together, but they do everything together; and when they grow blind, which I am sorry to say is very common, for the smoke they live in destroys their eyes at last, they take sweet care of one another. Marriage is a sweet thing when people love each other. If women could go into your Congress I think justice would soon be done to the Indians. I can’t tell about all Indians; but I know my own people are kind to everybody that does not do them harm; but they will not be imposed upon, and when people are too bad they rise up and resist them. This seems to me all right. It is different from being revengeful. There is nothing cruel about our people. They never scalped a human being.

As the beginning passage in the last excerpt suggests, in contrast to the respect Paiute men and women show each other, Winnemucca frequently comments on the sexual violence Indian women repeatedly experience at the hands of white men. In one passage she explains that a three-month war was started when white men raped and imprisoned two Paiute girls who had been out foraging for food. She also detailed her own experience with threatened assault, suggesting the ways in which Paiute women sought to protect themselves from the sexual violence that was a constant threat. She and a woman she described as her sister, although she may have been a cousin or other kin, were traveling alone, heading to Yakima after Winnemucca had been in Washington, D.C. They met up with a cousin who planned to go with them to their next stopping place.

He said there were very bad men there. Sometimes they would throw a rope over our women, and do fearful things to them.

“Oh, my poor cousins,” he said, “my heart aches for you, for I am afraid they will do something fearful to you. They do not care for anything. They do most terrible outrageous things to our women.”

I thought within myself, “If such an outrageous thing is to happen to me, it will not be done by one man or two, while there are two women with knives, for I know what an Indian woman can do. She can never be outraged by one man; but she may by two.”

Although their fears were not realized, later on the journey, after the cousin had left them, they were being chased by three men and again Winnemucca described her plan to resist.

Away we went, and they after us like wild men. We rode on till our horses seemed to drop from under us. At last we stopped, and I told sister what to do if the whole three of them undertook us. We could not do very much, but we must die fighting. If there were only two we were all right, — we would kill them; if only one we would see what he would do. If he lassoed me she was to jump off her horse and cut the rope, and if he lassoed her I was to do the same. If he got off his horse and came at me she was to cut him, and I would do the same for her. Now we were ready for our work. They were a long back yet. We kept looking back to see how far off they were. Every time we would get out of sight, we would rest our horses, and at last, to our great joy, we only saw one coming. He would not dare to do us any harm.

Nothing happened and yet Winnemucca details yet another incident on the same trip when she was accosted at night in her bed by a white cowboy at the home of a white family. She rose up and “gave him a blow right in the face. I said, ‘Go away, or I will cut you to pieces, you mean man!’ ” Here and elsewhere, Winnemucca made it clear that she understood that white male sexual violence “was intertwined with racial and economic oppression.”49

While Winnemucca’s book is a rich resource for uncovering the experiences of Paiute women of her era and particularly revealing about the sexual dimension of the imperialist march across the continent, much of Life Among the Piutes focuses on the grave injustice of federal Indian policy. In the following excerpts, how does she characterize the white conquest of the West? What is the basis of her criticism of Indian agents? How does she attempt to appeal to white readers through a shared language of Christian ideals?

Dear reader, I must tell a little more about my poor people, and what we suffer at the hands of our white brothers. Since the war of 1860 there have been one hundred and three of my people murdered, and our reservations taken from us; and yet we, who are called blood-seeking savages, are keeping our promises to the government. Oh, my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands? Oh, dear friend, you are wrong when you say it will take two or three generations to civilize my people. No! I say it will not take that long if you will only take interest in teaching us; and, on the other hand, we shall never be civilized in the way you wish us to be if you keep on sending us such agents as have been sent to us year after year, who do nothing but fill their pockets, and the pockets of their wives and sisters, who are always put in as teachers, and paid from fifty to sixty dollars per month, and yet they do not teach.

In another passage, Winnemucca details her outrage at the forced removal of a group of Paiutes from Nevada to Yakima, Washington.

Oh, for shame! You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war; the practice of whose progression makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you. Yes, you, who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanted with God to make this land the home of the free and brave. Ah, then you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave; but, oh, my God! leaving its pathway marked by crimson lines of blood; and strewed by the bones of two races, the inheritor and the invader; and I am crying out to you for justice, — yes, pleading for the far-off plains of the West, for the dusky mourner, whose tears of love are pleading for her husband, or for their children, who are sent far away from them.

Once they arrived in Yakima, Winnemucca detailed their reception.

At the end of ten days we were turned over to Father [James H.] Wilbur [an agent who was also a minister] and his civilized Indians, as he called them. Well, as I was saying, we were turned over to him as if we were so many horses or cattle. After he received us he had some of his civilized Indians come with their wagons to take us up to Fort Simcoe. They did not come because they loved us, or because they were Christians. No; they were just like all civilized people; they came to take us up there because they were to be paid for it. They had a kind of shed made to put us in. You know what kind of shed you make for your stock in winter time. It was of that kind. Oh, how we did suffer with cold. There was no wood, and the snow was waist-deep, and many died off just as cattle or horses do after travelling so long in the cold.

Although some of the Paiutes found ways to escape from Yakima, aided by Winnemucca, they were not released until 1884, when a new agent replaced James Wilbur.

Beyond critiquing Indian policy, Winnemucca also challenged the assimilationist vision that shaped it by establishing a short-lived bilingual school at Lovelock, Nevada, in 1885. Although she promoted learning English and other aspects of western culture, in the words of her supporter Elizabeth Peabody, Winnemucca’s school rejected the idea of “passive reception of civilizing influences proffered by white men who look down upon the Indian as a spiritual, moral, and intellectual inferior,” and instead promoted “a spontaneous movement, made by the Indian himself, from himself, in full consciousness of free agency, for the education that is to civilize him.” 50 How do these two passages from newspaper articles convey Winnemucca’s educational goals?

SOURCE: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 36–37, 39–40, 64, 147–49.

From Silver Slate (July 9, 1886)

Education is my “hobby” although I have little myself. It seems strange to me that the Government has not found out years ago that education is the key to the Indian problem. Much money and many precious lives would have been saved if the American people had fought my people with Books instead of Powder and lead. Education civilized your race and there is no reason why it cannot civilize mine. Indian schools are failures at many Agencies, but it is not the fault of the children, but of the teacher and interpreter. . . . The most necessary thing for the success of an Indian school is a good interpreter, a perfect interpreter, a true interpreter, one that can and will do. Many Indians wars would be avoided if interpreters were only true instead of being the tool of the agents.

The same month, the Daily Alta California (July 24, 1886) printed a message from Winnemucca, which was a copy of a letter she sent to Paiute school trustees in Inyo, California.

Brothers and Sisters: Hearing you are about to start a school to educate your children, I want to say a word about it. You all know me; many of you are my aunts or cousins. We are of one race — your blood is my blood, so I speak to you for your good. I can speak five tongues — three Indian tongues, English and Spanish. I can read and write, and am a school teacher. Now I do not say this to boast, but simply to show you what can be done. When I was a little girl there were no Indian schools; I learned under great difficulty. Your children can learn much more than I know, and much easier, and it is your duty to see that they go to school. . . . You are not asked to give money or horses — only to send your children to school. The teacher will do the rest. He or she will fit your little ones for the battle of life, so that they can attend to their own affairs instead of having to call in a white man. A few years ago you owned this great country; today the white man owns it all, and you own nothing. Do you know what did it? Education. You see the miles and miles of railroad, the locomotive, the Mint in Carson, where they make money. Education has done it all. Now what it has done for one many it will do for another. You have brains same as the whites, your children have brains, and it will be your fault if they grow up as you have. I entreat you take hold of this school, and give your support by sending your children, old and young, to it, and when they grow up to manhood and womanhood they will bless you.

SOURCE: The Newspaper Warrior; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891, edited by Cari M. Carpenter and Carolyn Sorisio (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 261–62.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

It is unlikely that Sarah Winnemucca saw the etching in Figure 7.1, but she was undoubtedly familiar with the squaw stereotype. How might she have responded to Harpers Weekly’s conception of a Native woman?

Taking into account the images and Winnemucca’s writing, what conclusions can you draw about the variety of Native women’s experiences in the West? What common themes, if any, do you see?

What were the greatest challenges for Native American women in their interactions with white Americans?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House

JANE ADDAMS (1860–1935) was the leader of the American settlement house movement. After graduating in 1882 from Rockford Seminary in Illinois, she went to Europe in search of a larger purpose for her life. Like other daughters of wealthy families, she was looking for an alternative to the leisured, home-bound life for which her class and gender destined her. Addams and women like her did not require paid labor, but they did need work of large social purpose and a place and community in which to live.

Jane Addams

Visiting London, Addams learned of a “settlement” project of male college graduates who lived among and served the urban poor. She returned to Chicago, determined to establish a similar community of female college graduates dedicated to social service. In 1889, Addams persuaded a wealthy member of the Hull family to donate a mansion, now in the center of a crowded immigrant district, to be the site of her project. Soon many similar “settlement houses” would dot the American urban landscape. Published by Addams in 1910, Twenty Years at Hull House is a dual autobiography, focusing on Addams’s path to social service and on Hull House as an institution.

The leisure-class women who joined Addams as “residents” of Hull House combined a palpable sympathy with the urban poor and a determination to find a nonrevolutionary solution to the era’s class and ethnic conflicts. Their “neighbors” were working-class and poorer immigrant families living around them. Both the leisure-class residents and the working-class neighbors showed considerable organizational ability and political savvy in addressing the difficult daily conditions of these immigrant neighborhoods. Twenty Years at Hull House demonstrates that the public activism of the “Woman’s Era” was not limited to native-born leisure-class women but characterized the immigrant working class as well.

There are many tensions at work in Addams’s efforts to understand her neighbors and assist in their adjustment to American society. Her account of the development of the Labor Museum demonstrates her belief in steady economic progress alongside her realization that the loss of traditional culture — in this case the artisan skills of the older immigrant women — has gone unappreciated. She describes the ignorance that fuels ethnic clashes between different immigrant groups even as she recognizes that America’s own “color problem” may be worse.

Addams’s vignettes follow immigrant women through the many phases and challenges of their lives: Americanizing daughters and Old World mothers; wage earners and prostitutes (whom she euphemistically connects with “professional” or “disreputable” houses); mothers struggling to provide for their children and aged women left without means of support. To one degree or another, all suffer a common economic insecurity, based both on their class status and female dependence. Living among the immigrant poor, Addams recognized that financial security was probably the biggest difference between the classes in turn-of-the-century urban America.

Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House a touch of the artist’s enthusiasm when he translates his inner vision through his chosen material into outward form. Keenly conscious of the social confusion all about us and the hard economic struggle, we at times believed that the very struggle itself might become a source of strength. The devotion of the mothers to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to provide for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the surest protectors of the world. We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life’s very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our neighbors. Even if we had gone to live in the most wretched tenement, there would have always been an essential difference between them and ourselves, for we should have had a sense of security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts more effective through organization and possibly complement them by small efforts of our own? . . .

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind. After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them exclaimed: “Wouldn’t it be fine if we had a boarding club of our own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?” After that events moved quickly. . . . [O]n the first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for the furniture and paid the first month’s rent, but beyond that the members managed the club themselves. . . . At the end of the third year the club occupied all of the six apartments which the original building contained, and numbered fifty members. . . .

I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had “gone astray” — the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and unawakened; one of them whom the police had found in a professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll which she had kept with her during her six months of an “evil life.” Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital, each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they did not want to go home for fear of “being licked.” . . . I well remember our perplexity when we attempted to help two girls straight from a Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued promptly, the stigma remained, and we found it impossible to permit them to join any of the social clubs connected with Hull-House, not so much because there was danger of contamination, as because the parents of the club members would have resented their presence most hotly. . . .

. . . .

That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically clear to us during our first months of residence at Hull-House. . . .

Alley Tenements near Hull House; Illustration by Norah Hamilton, Hull House Resident and Artist

Some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the house of an old German woman, whom two men from the country agent’s office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary. The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to remove her without also taking the piece of furniture. She did not weep nor moan nor indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her door stood aghast at this realization of the black dread which always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age approaches. . . . To take away from an old woman whose life has been spent in household cares all the foolish little belongings to which her affections cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed, is to take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself. To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take them out when she desires occupation, but that their mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce living almost beyond the limit of human endurance. . . .

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their tenement rooms. The first three crippled children we encountered in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers were at work: one had fallen out of a third-story window, another had been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him. . . . During our first summer an increasing number of these poor little mites would wander into the cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept them there and fed them at noon, in return for which we were sometimes offered a hot penny which had been held in a tight little fist “ever since mother left this morning, to buy something to eat with.” Out of kindergarten hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the hospitality of our bedrooms under the so-called care of any resident who volunteered to keep an eye on them, but later they were moved into a neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision.

Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained for sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street and then in a building designed for its use called the Children’s House. . . .

While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women, something was also to be said for some of the husbands, for the sorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the struggle of life. . . . I could but wonder in which particular we are most stupid — to judge a man’s worth so solely by his wage-earning capacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in holding fast to that wretched delusion that a woman can both support and nurture her children.

With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis which this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at eleven o’clock, I met in the corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up to greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at five o’clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to nurse her baby. Her mother’s milk mingled with the very water with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with what remained within her breasts.

. . .

An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents to their own children lay at the base of what has come to be called the Hull-House Labor Museum. This was first suggested to my mind one early spring day when I saw an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. . . . It seemed to me that Hull-House ought to be able to devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridge between European and American experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a sense of relation. . . . Could we not interest the young people working in the neighborhood factories in these older forms of industry, so that, through their own parents and grandparents, they would find a dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their daily occupation. If these young people could actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education which Dr. Dewey defines as “a continuing reconstruction of experience.” . . .

We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of these most primitive methods of spinning and three distinct variations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It was possible to put these seven into historic sequence and order and to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning. The same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday evening a little exhibit was made of these various forms of labor in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a Greek, an Italian, a Russian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we look at history from the industrial standpoint; that industry develops similarly and peacefully year by year among the workers of each nation, heedless of differences in language, religion, and political experiences. . . .

In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops pointed out the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun to develop, of demonstrating that culture is an understanding of the long-established occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts with which they have solaced their toil. A yearning to recover for the household arts something of their early sanctity and meaning arose strongly within me one evening when I was attending a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious significance of the woman’s daily activity was still retained. The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had been prepared according to traditional knowledge and with constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the responsibility to make all ready according to Mosaic instructions. . . .

I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. . . . It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired. . . .

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most foreign-looking immigrants to the children of other people — the Italians whose fruit-carts are upset simply because they are “dagoes,” or the Russian peddlers who are stoned and sometimes badly injured because it has become a code of honor in a gang of boys to thus express their derision. . . . Doubtless these difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we faced our own race problem with courage and intelligence, and these very Mediterranean immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainly they are less conscious than the Anglo-Saxon of color distinctions. . . .

. . . .

It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to forget the foul smells of the stockyards and the garbage dumps, when he is living so far from them that he is only occasionally made conscious of their existence but the residents of a Settlement are perforce constantly surrounded by them. . . . The Hull-House Woman’s Club had been organized the year before by the resident kindergartner who had first inaugurated a mother’s meeting. The new members came together, however, in quite a new way that summer when we discussed with them the high death rate so persistent in our ward. After several club meetings devoted to the subject, despite the fact that the death rate rose highest in the congested foreign colonies and not in the streets in which most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of their number undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully investigate the conditions of the alleys. During August and September the substantiated reports of violations of the law sent in from Hull-House to the health department were one thousand and thirty-seven. For the club woman who had finished a long day’s work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot supper, it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of their garbage boxes. . . . Nevertheless, a certain number of women persisted, as did the residents, and three city inspectors in succession were transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory services. . . .

Many of the foreign-born women of the ward were much shocked by this abrupt departure into the ways of men, and it took a great deal of explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it were a womanly task to go about in tenement houses in order to nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the same district in order to prevent the breeding of so-called “filth diseases.”

SOURCE: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), excerpts from chaps. 7, 8, 11, and 13.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What does Addams mean about her initial naïve attitude (she uses the word “fatuous”) about the “common destiny” she hoped to experience by living in an immigrant neighborhood? What led her to shed this assumption?

In what ways was the assistance that Hull House provided to poor immigrant women and children helpful, and in what ways was it not helpful?

To what degree can you rely on the personal stories Addams provides to understand the actual experiences of the immigrant poor?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Jacob Riis’s Photographs of Immigrant Girls and Women

IN THE DECADE 1880–1890, more than 5 million immigrants came through the port of New York, and many remained in the city, swelling its population by 25 percent. By 1890, nearly half of the city’s dwellings were classified as “tenements,” overcrowded urban slums where vulnerable and desperately poor people were overcharged for filthy, cramped, and unsanitary lodgings.

This rise in immigration coincided with new forms of social documentation. Pioneering social scientists provided statistics on the growing industrial labor force, including the women who were entering the workplace in unprecedented numbers. Local and state health bureaus collected information on the epidemic diseases such as diphtheria, cholera, and tuberculosis that threatened family life in the burgeoning cities. And photographers created searing images of the horrible living and working conditions of newly arrived immigrants. These new methods of documentation, informed by a rising sense of public responsibility for improving social conditions and alleviating poverty, allow us to look back through the perspectives of those who did the documenting, into the lives of late nineteenth-­century immigrant girls and women.

One of the first series of photographs of immigrant women and children in the United States was produced in the 1880s and 1890s by a man who was himself an immigrant. Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York City from Denmark in 1870. After more than a decade struggling to earn a living, he found regular work as a newspaperman. He began as a police reporter, writing in a male-oriented, journalistic genre that sensationalized the seamy side of “downtown” life. Riis’s own impulses, however, were more humanitarian and allied him with urban reformers, many of whom were women. He worked closely with Josephine Shaw Lowell, who founded the Charity Organization Society of New York State in 1882. His particular focus was “the slum,” by which he meant not only the dilapidated tenement homes of the poor but the larger urban environment in which they lived and worked. He was especially concerned with children, and through them the mothers of immigrant families.

Convinced that only photographs could convey the shocking reality of urban poverty, Riis included them in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), a pioneering work of sociology that is still mined by historians and scholars for the insights it provides into urban immigrant life, nineteenth-century attitudes toward poverty and ethnicity, and the visual conventions of early documentary photography. Though the majority of the photographs deal with male subjects — homeless street boys, male vagrants, and gang members — Riis also took pictures of women and girls that give us glimpses of their lives. In its frequent resort to sensational and melodramatic conventions, How the Other Half Lives reflects its author’s roots in mass commercial journalism, but it also skillfully adopts strategies from literary realism and the emerging field of social science to convey a probing portrait of poverty and its consequences.

Consistent with the late nineteenth century’s preoccupation with ethnic and racial characteristics, How the Other Half Lives is organized like a guided tour for the middle-class reader through the ethnic geography of lower New York City. Not surprisingly, it invokes both positive and negative stereotypes in its descriptions and illustrations. Riis, as a northwestern European immigrant, had clear ethnic biases, but his prejudices were tempered by empathy and the recognition that “we are all creatures of the conditions that surround us.”51 His goal was to call attention to the plight of the poor, not to castigate them for their poverty.

Chapter 5 of Riis’s book, “The Italian in New York,” focuses on those who, as recent arrivals, were “at the bottom” of the economic and social hierarchy.52 The frequently reproduced photograph shown in Figure 7.7 depicts the wife and infant child of a “ragpicker” — one who barely made a living by picking through public rubbish cans and dumps for rags to sell — in their subterranean home. Riis developed the innovative technology used to make this photograph, a new chemical process that produced a “flash” bright enough to light up dark and windowless areas.

The pose of the Italian mother and her tightly swaddled child, as well as her mournful, upturned gaze, is reminiscent of religious paintings of the Madonna and Child in which the Virgin Mary’s sad expression foreshadows the suffering that awaits her infant son. In the chapter that includes this photograph, Riis offers an extended report, complete with comparative statistics, on the high mortality rates of infants and children in this Italian neighborhood. What other explanations can be offered for her upward look?

Italian families, no matter how poor, frowned on wives and mothers working outside the home. While the room in Figure 7.7 is sparsely furnished, what do the few items we see and their arrangement tell us about this woman and her daily life? In the text accompanying this photograph, Riis describes the Italian immigrant as “picturesque, if not very tidy.”53 Does his photograph support this characterization? What overall impression does it convey about Italian immigrant mothers? Also in the text relating to this image is Riis’s description of Italian men as “hotheaded . . . and lighthearted” and of Italian women as “faithful wives and devoted mothers.”54 Note the man’s straw hat hanging high on the wall. What are the possible explanations for the man’s absence?

Figure 7.7 In the Home of an Italian Ragpicker: Jersey Street

In Figure 7.8, Riis continues his progression through New York City’s ethnic neighborhoods to “Jewtown,” an area settled by large numbers of Eastern European Jews and marked by exceptional population density and industrial activity. As Riis notes, “Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the cradle.”55 The “sweater” mentioned in the title of the photograph was a subcontractor who supplied garments to a larger manufacturer and hired other immigrants to do the work, often in his own tenement apartment. The ruthless competition to deliver finished goods at the lowest possible price pressured the sweater to offer impossibly low wages and push (or “sweat”) workers to their physical limits during a working day that “lengthened at both ends far into the night.”56 While Riis criticizes the “sweater’s . . . merciless severity”57 in exploiting his fellow Jews, he concedes “he is no worse than the conditions that created him.”58

Unlike the photograph shown in Figure 7.7, this photo was not posed and has no carefully arranged central figure. It catches its subjects off guard, and the blurring of some of their features suggests frantic activity and movement. The sweater is the moving figure with his back to the camera. The teenage girls in this picture are “greenhorns,” newly arrived immigrant workers. One man looks up briefly from his work, but the other seems unwilling to lose a minute’s time despite the photographer’s presence. Piles of boys’ short pants waiting to be finished are heaped on the floor and furniture. What visual clues tell us that this workshop is also a residence? What else goes on in this room? In what ways is it different from the living space of the Italian mother in Figure 7.7?

Figure 7.8 Knee Pants at Forty-Five Cents a Dozen — A Ludlow Street Sweater’s Shop

In contrast to the serious detachment of the adults, the young girl turns to smile directly into the lens and casually touches to her lips the long-bladed scissors she is using to cut the garments. Does this suggest she has not yet been disciplined to keep up with the brutal pace of piecework? Maybe Riis regarded her direct gaze as somewhat immodest, a consequence of work conditions that placed unsupervised young girls amid grown men. Or did she simply find pleasure in having her picture taken? In his second book, The Children of the Poor (1892), Riis noted that in contrast to adults, who resisted and feared being photographed, children loved posing for the camera and had a “determination to be ‘took’ . . . in the most striking pose they could hastily devise.”59 What other possible meanings can be suggested for this unusual and striking image of a young working woman?

Employers justified the low wages paid to female workers, which were inadequate for self-support, as supplements to a family income anchored by an adult male wage. Riis was sharply aware of the special hardships facing the unmarried, poor working women who had to live on their own. In his chapter “The Working Girls of New York,” he describes the exploitation and harsh conditions they endured, sprinkling his narrative with tragic stories of underpaid and exhausted women workers driven to suicide, prostitution, and premature death. Like so many other late nineteenth-century reformers, Riis thought the best solution to working women’s suffering was to get them out of the labor force. If they remained in it, their lives were bound to be intolerable.

When wages were too low or unemployment too high, such poor urban workers found themselves destitute and without shelter. Those who lacked even the pennies charged by commercial lodging houses ended up in overnight shelters in police stations. Of the half-million people seeking shelter in New York City in 1889, almost one-third sought refuge in makeshift facilities in police stations, and half of those were women. Riis knew firsthand about the filthy and dangerous conditions in the police station shelters. Recalling his own experience years before as a homeless vagrant in New York City, he observed that “never was parody upon Christian charity more corrupting to human mind and soul than the frightful abomination of the police lodging-house.”60 He was particularly concerned when homeless women slept in the same room as men.

The photograph in Figure 7.9 was an illustration for an article Riis wrote for the New York Tribune in 1892, condemning the police station shelters. The West Forty-Seventh Street police station was located in the aptly named Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, and there is no doubt that Riis intended to shock readers with a graphic, unstaged photograph of women expelled from the domestic sphere, stripped of their dignity and privacy, eating and sleeping on filthy bare floors like animals. The extent of homelessness among women pointed to the collapse of working-class family life and indicated how deeply the combination of mass immigration, rapid urbanization, and economic collapse had torn the social fabric. Notice the details that reveal how women manage to cooperate and care for their personal needs even under the harshest of circumstances. What do these details, and the facial expressions and postures of the women, reveal about social relations in this police station lodging room?

Figure 7.9 Police Station Lodgers: Women’s Lodging Room in the West 47th Street Station

In The Children of the Poor, published originally as a series of articles in Scribner’s Magazine in 1892, Riis turned his full attention to the group with whom he was most concerned, the children whose futures were being jeopardized by life in the tenements. Figure 7.10 is a rare individual portrait of an orphan, nine-year-old Katie, who attended the Fifty-Second Street Industrial School, a charitable institution for indigent children. Although Katie did not earn wages, she was not spared hard work, for she cooked and cleaned for her three older working siblings. “In her person and work, she answered the question . . . why we hear so much about the boys and so little about the girls,” wrote Riis, “because the home claims their work earlier and to a much greater extent.”61 Consider Katie’s clothing, posture, and expression. What do they suggest about her character and her prospects? In acknowledgment of Katie’s contribution to her family’s survival, Riis called Katie by the nickname often given to immigrant children who cared for younger siblings, “little mother.” What does this tribute say about the economic role that mothers and other adult women played in the lives of poor families?

Figure 7.10 “I Scrubs”: Katie Who Keeps House on West 49th Street

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Riis clearly intended to shock comfortable Americans with his images of the slums. What might contemporaries have found most disturbing about his representations of immigrant women and girls?

Using Riis as an example, how would you evaluate the impact of documentary photography on middle-class America’s reaction to poverty in the late nineteenth century?

Drawing on both Riis and Bessie Van Vorst (see Primary Sources: “The Woman Who Toils,” pp. 330–35) as sources, in what ways did women’s experiences of poverty and underpaid labor in this period differ from those of men?