***Note: The work below is solely that of Elizabeth Jordan. Any attempt to copy it without permission of the author is plagiarism and not worth it since you will be caught.***

Jewish Immigrant Garment Workers and the New Sexual Order
Written for Gender and Sexuality in U.S. History
Sophomore Year - Fall 1998

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, middle-class Americans began to experience the disintegration of the system of "divided passions" and the uprising of a "new sexual order" (D’Emilio 169). This order was characterized by a larger presence of women in the public sphere (Evans 160). Women became more active in different social movements such as temperance, abolition, and the fight for suffrage. Working and middle-class women entered the working force in large numbers and many, primarily middle-class women, began obtaining a college education and choosing careers other than that of wife and mother (D’Emilio 190). Men held a growing fear of the "feminization of American culture" due to the blurring of the lines between the public and private spheres (Kimmel 118). At the same time, America was experiencing a wave of immigration from Europe. These immigrants brought different ideas about the relationship between men and women and the "proper" place in which either sex should exist. In Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (1990), Susan A. Glenn details how East European Jewish immigrants combined different influences to produce a "sexual order" different from both the Old World ideal and the American ideal.

Middle-class Americans during this time period were largely influenced by the previous era of "divided passions" in which women were associated strictly with the private sphere and men strictly with the public sphere (D’Emilio 57). However, Jewish immigrants who began to arrive in America during the late nineteenth century were influenced primarily by their lives in the "Old World" (Glenn 8). As opposed to America where women were assigned to a domestic role, some Jewish women in East Europe played both the role of mother and of breadwinner (Glenn 8). In Eastern Europe Jewish culture, a man was not considered respectable because of the amount of money he earned but because of the amount of knowledge (especially Talmudic knowledge) he possessed (Glenn 10). Therefore, it was perfectly acceptable for a man to stay at home and read the Torah while his wife worked to support the family. "Most [male scholars] looked for a wife who could manage the household and earn enough to free her husband from major economic responsibilities" (Glenn 10). Therefore, often a Jewish wife would end up supporting her husband instead of being supported by him, as was the American ideal.

However, when Jews began emigrating to America, many became "increasingly sensitive to bourgeois notions of respectability" and began to believe "that a wife should devote herself exclusively to her domestic obligations and leave the task of breadwinning to the husband" (Glenn 77). In other words, Jewish immigrants began to adopt the middle-class doctrine of "separate spheres" (Kimmel 52) or at least aspire to it as a social and economic goal. Once Jews emigrated to America, wives took up a domestic role in order to conform to middle-class ideals. However, the economic situation of these immigrants made it impossible to survive on the salary of one working male. Therefore, unmarried daughters entered the work force to supplement their father’s pay (Glenn 79). In other words, the Jewish version of "separate spheres" is more clearly articulated by the idea of wives being assigned to the private sphere and husbands being assigned to the public sphere. The rules were different depending on whether or not a woman was married.

Ironically, at the same time Jewish immigrants were adopting "divided passions" as an economic and social ideal, some middle-class Americans were gradually moving away from it towards what D’Emilio and Freedman call a "new sexual order." Many women were moving out of the domestic sphere into the public. Some women were getting jobs to supplement husbands’ wages. Other, mostly middle-class women, were pursuing a college education and entering the public realm of political activism (D’Emilio 189). The influences of a college education resulted in many women who "never married" or "married. . . later than most women and bore fewer children" (Evans 147). Many members of the scientific community believed that "college education would ruin a woman’s health. . . and especially make her unfit for motherhood" (D’Emilio 190). In reality, college-educated women did not become "unfit for motherhood" so much as disinterested in it and the domestic married life treasured by middle-class women before them. These women instead began developing strong same-sex relationships which ranged from economic mutual support systems to bonds based on either platonic or sexual love (D’Emilio 191). Many of these women developed these partnerships as they increased public activism in movements for temperance, abolition, or suffrage (Evans 148).

Jewish immigrant women, especially in the garment industry, also developed types of same-sex relationships. However, these relationships were definitively different from those developed by middle-class college-educated women (Glenn 156). The same-sex relationships desired by young Jewish garment workers were not formed to separate from the male world as middle-class same-sex relationships often were. In other words, whereas middle-class female same-sex relationships were formed as a homosocial environment separate from the worlds of marriage and domesticity (D’Emilio 191), Jewish female same-sex relationships were formed as a transition to the world of marriage. In fact, the relationships formed by the Jewish women tended to focus on men more than women (Glenn 156). That is to say, the female social group centered often around discussions of "men and the intriguing business of dating and courtship" (Glenn 156). However, it is important to note that Jewish immigrant women in the garment industry did prefer the company of other working-class women as opposed to working-class men. Many of these women felt uncomfortable around male workers because of the tendency for men to physically and verbally harass women by telling "‘dirty’ stories" (Glenn 148) or giving women "unwanted physical attention" (Glenn 147). Thus both women in the middle-class and in the Jewish working-class formed same-sex relationships but for different reasons and in different forms.

Many Jewish daughters entered the garment industry in order to support their families in the absence of the breadwinning role that wives had played in the Old World. The garment industry was a popular workplace for Jewish daughters because of the great demand for labor within it and the ease with which one could learn the skills needed to work there (Glenn 80). Many native-born women were also entering the labor force at this time (Evans 156). However, their experiences differed from those of the Jewish daughters. Native-born single women who entered the labor force found that working gave them greater autonomy from parental supervision and demands. The middle-class woman in the labor force even developed the ideal of the "New Woman" who was "self-supporting and found fulfillment in [her] work" (Evans 158). The Jewish daughters, on the other hand, entered the labor force not out of an attempt to gain autonomy but in an effort to support their family economically (Glenn 83). In other words, the Jewish daughters working in the garment industry found their familial obligations strengthened rather than weakened. Many Jewish families relied primarily on the wages of a working daughter. Most Jewish daughters, however, accepted this obligation and did not feel begrudged to their families. Most understood their wages to "be part of the family fund" and would give their pay envelopes to their "parents without bothering to open it" (Glenn 84).

The labor experiences of native-born women and Jewish women differed also in their duration. Many native-born women in America were working both while they were single and after they married. Some native-born women were choosing to work instead of getting married. Jewish women, on the other hand, saw wage work as a temporary stage in life and many aspired "to marry out of the labor force" and become the domestic Jewish wife, "supported by her husband" (Glenn 123). However, even though Jewish women saw their wage work as temporary many "wanted to make the most of the job she had" (Glenn 124). This led to a climate in which Jewish women workers became more active in the labor movement. Although wage work was temporary for Jewish women, they did recognize it as an important stage in life and were well-aware of the possibility that future women would also participate in the labor force. Therefore, Jewish women entered the labor movement not strictly out of a desire to fix their own situations but "‘for the younger girls’" who would be a part of the labor force at a later date (Glenn 212).

Although both Jewish women and native-born American women experienced an increase in political activism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the focus of their activism was different. Jewish women tended to be active mainly in the fight for labor rights whereas middle-class American women focused primarily on the fight for suffrage. "While many favored woman suffrage, most Jewish immigrant daughters. . . did not join pro-suffrage organizations" (Glenn 207). Middle-class women focused on the right to suffrage because they felt their increasing participation in the public sphere must ultimately culminate in gaining the right to vote. Women had previously been held to a civic duty which revolved around their domestic obligations in the form of "republican motherhood" in which a woman was a part of America because of her ability to influence the values and beliefs of her children (Evans 57). Middle-class women increasingly became involved in civic life through the use of "voluntary associations" formed as movements against prostitution, intemperance or slavery (Evans 67). Finally, during the late nineteenth century, middle-class women began to use the rhetoric of republican motherhood to demand the right to vote claiming that suffrage "would enhance women’s capacity to carry out their traditional roles" (Evans 154) by allowing them to not only influence the values and beliefs of their children but of the whole nation.

Jewish daughters, on the other hand, were more concerned with and involved in the labor movement in the garment industry because of its direct influence on their economic (and sometimes, physical) survival. Also, Jewish women desired to form a working-class community or family between men and women workers. They "saw in the labor movement a vehicle for. . . joining with men in the civic life of their communities" (Glenn 210). Jewish men, like their American counterparts, often saw the presence of women in the public world as a threat to their "masculine dignity" despite the economic necessity of it (Glenn 116). This feeling of emasculation or feminization among Jewish men is due largely to the influence of the American ideal of "breadwinner ethic" in which the husband was supposed to provide for his wife (Glenn 116). American men also experienced this threat to their masculinity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of the increasing presence of women in the workforce and the decline of their importance as the familial breadwinner (Kimmel 87, 118). Thus Jewish women attempted to use the labor movement as a method to overcome the tensions between the male and female workers in order to improve the economic and working conditions of both.

Jewish women were also largely influenced by socialist ideas from the Old World. Socialism became popular among East European Jews through an organization known as The Bund. The appeal of socialism to Jews in the Old World stemmed from the reality of Jewish oppression by European leaders especially in Russia (Glenn 36). In America, Jewish female garment workers, as well as other workers, saw in socialism a "promise of equality" between the working-class and the middle-class, between men and women, and between different nationalities (Glenn 179).

The suffrage movement among the middle-class lacked the idea of community so prevalent in the Jewish labor movement within the garment industry. In fact, the suffrage movement was often characterized not by unity among women but by many schisms between different race and class groups and, after the beginning of World War I, between groups that supported the war effort and groups who did not (Evans 170). This divisive pattern was especially obvious in the South where suffragists such as Belle Kearney declared that women must earn the right to vote to "‘insure immediate and durable white supremacy’" (Evans 155).

The woman’s suffrage movement differed from Jewish female involvement in the labor movement also in the amount of autonomy each group exhibited over their respective movements. The woman’s suffrage movement was notable for its primarily female leadership. Some men did participate in the woman’s suffrage movement, but leadership roles were held mostly by women. The middle-class woman’s suffrage movement was, therefore, characterized primarily by self-advocacy (Evans 153). The involvement of Jewish daughters in the labor movement never fully took the form of self-advocacy. Despite the fact that women often formed a majority of a union membership, they were usually absent in the upper echelons of the union leadership (Glenn 227). Instead, men dominated leadership roles in the unions. Jewish men were able to dominate women in the labor movement because of traditional male/female relationships which placed women in a position subordinate to that of men in religious and political pursuits (Glenn 8). In the absence of male control of the movement, immigrant women often found themselves under the "guidance" of middle-class women who "viewed the plight of working women and children as critical obstacles to a more humane, maternal social order" (Evans 157). However, neither Jewish working-class men nor middle-class women truly understood the "plight of working women" and thus were unable to truly communicate the concerns and desires of a distinctively Jewish, distinctively female, and distinctively working-class group.

While the labor force in America was undergoing stark changes, leisure activities were also expanding in a country increasingly moving towards a "consumer economy" that "fostered an acceptance of pleasure, self-gratification, and personal satisfaction" (D’Emilio 234). Working-class American and immigrant youths were beginning a leisure culture that centered around activities such as dances or movies and other "commercialized amusements" (D’Emilio 195). Young Jewish women were not immune to the attractiveness of the "related world of leisure and consumption" (Glenn 159). Many Jewish women frequented "movies, dances, rides at the amusement park, the Yiddish theater, the ice-cream parlor, the downtown cafes" (Glenn 159) at the close of the work day. In some young working-class communities in America, these mixed-sex leisure activities led to "erotic encounters" or more prevalent premarital sexual experimentation (D’Emilio 196). Glenn offers no evidence that young Jewish women participated to a large extent in the sexual experimentation characterized by the leisure economy. Glenn even states that Jewish women "clearly did not" feel "free to engage in premarital sexual relations" (Glenn 82). However, young Jewish women did experience an increase in relationships with members of the opposite sex due to the influence of the American leisure activities. These opportunities to socialize within a mixed-sex environment led to the practices of courting and dating to find a companionate marriage mate rather than dependence on parental choice to form a viable economic relationship (Glenn 157).

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both middle-class and Jewish immigrant communities in America were undergoing changes in the relationships between men and women and between the public world and private world. Many of these changes were similar in that they were influenced by American ideals. However, the Jewish immigrant population offered a different "new sexual order" (D’Emilio 169) due to its combination of Old World and New World ideas into a distinctly Jewish-American working-class sexual culture.

Works Cited

D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. The University of Chicago Press:          Chicago, 1997.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women In America. Free Press Paperbacks: New York, 1997.

Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Cornell

University Press: Ithaca, 1990.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. The Free Press: New York, 1997.