Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900-1950 / Edition 1

by Miriam Cohen

Overview

In turn-of-the-century New York, Italian immigrant daughters spent their youth in factories while their mothers did irregular wage labor as well as domestic work at home. By the I940s, Italian-American girls were in school, socializing and preparing for white-collar jobs that would not begin until they were eighteen. Drawing on a range of sources from censuses to high school yearbooks, Miriam Cohen examines shifting patterns in the family roles, work lives, and schooling of two generations of Italian-American women. Paying particular attention to the importance of these women's pragmatic daily choices, she documents how major social and political changes helped create new opportunities and constraints for the second generation.

While financial need was a powerful factor in determining the behavior of the first generation women, Cohen shows, they and their daughters succeeded in adapting family survival strategies to new work patterns. Once the second generation was married, their careers mirrored those of the first in many ways: they raised children, cared for the home, and took on paid employment when necessary. Unlike their mothers, however, these Italian-American wives could also participate in the growing consumerism surrounding home and childcare. Throughout, Cohen compares the changing Italian-American experience with that of Jewish women, discovering significant similarities in these experiences by 1950.

As well as presenting a nuanced portrait of one group of ethnic working-class women, Workshop to Office demonstrates the impact of political developments on individual lives. It will spark lively debates among students and scholars of social history, immigration history, labor history, women's history, and the history of education in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801480058
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/22/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

What People are Saying About This

Alice Kessler-Harris

A significant contribution to the literature on immigration, women and work. Cohen takes on a major controversy—whether the immigrant experience in America was framed by the terms of modernization—and moves beyond these arguments to explore the role of experience in the lives of ltalian immigrants. She suggests that pragmatic, day-to-day decisions made in the context of changing socio-economic conditions, not the effort to either preserve or negate patriarchal values, dominated their lives. Cohen's position is unique and important, and the strength of her argument derives from an impressive data base drawn from two generations.

Editorial Reviews

Cohen joins scholars who seek to understand the role of gender in historical processes of group change....Through the lens of gender, she reveals important questions about the meaning of mobility in migration processes and the transformation of immigrant cultures.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Claire B. Potter

Cohen has written a book that will be debated for years. Workshop to Office makes a valuable contribution to the growing study of Italian immigration and women's history.

--Gary R. Mormino "Journal of American History"

Cohen joins scholars who seek to understand the role of gender in historical processes of group change....Through the lens of gender, she reveals important questions about the meaning of mobility in migration processes and the transformation of immigrant cultures.

--Claire B. Potter "Journal of Interdisciplinary History"

From the Publisher

Cohen has written a book that will be debated for years. Workshop to Office makes a valuable contribution to the growing study of Italian immigration and women's history.

Journal of American History - Gary R. Mormino