Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (review)

Vol. 10, No.3 Spring 1992 141 Jewish values and a strengthening of the feminine values within the tradition itself. The book is well documented with current scholarship, and the notes will provide to informed readers direction for further study of the issues raised here. Betty Jane Lillie Athenaeum of Ohio Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, by Susan A. Glenn. Ithaca,' NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. 312 pp. $29.95. Feminist scholars of United States Jewish women's past have contributed to an understanding of the intersections of gender, family, ethnicity, and class. Recently, special attention has been given to early twentieth century Eastern European immigrants who encountered America with an inflated optimism quickly challenged by circumstance. As gender scholars know, opportunities generally present themselves differently to women and men. To this point, Susan A. Glenn, in her carefully researched book, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation, recounts how both constraining and enabling gender patterns inherited from the Old World shtetl were born anew in America, transformed and cultivated in a different soil, a different cultural context. It is Glenn's contention that Eastern European ethnic patterns influenced the lives of immigrant Jewish women in profound ways; and that the significance of the past lay not only in the apparent truth that it left indelible marks on succeeding generations, but that ethnic patterns distinguished Jewish immigrant daughters significantly from other working class groups. Glenn's argument is with historians who have homogenized immigrant and working class women's lives, especially the particularJewish immigrant daughters she studies, a group which does not fit neatly into "established models of immigration, labor and women's history." By detailing the nuances of ethnicity, gender, and class, and admirably defending her contentions, Glenn fills some gaps in Jewish women's immigrant history, which, without romanticization, also credits Jewish immigrant daughters for their vital role in labor history. Glenn points to cultural patterns in Jewish family life for Jewish 142 SHOFAR women, which distinguished Jewish women garment workers for their vigor, their work and union participation unequalled for the time, and for their enthusiastic quest for self-definition. Central to an appreciation of the working lives of young, Jewish working daughters are certain differences they had with their mothers, whose public work participation was limited by family obligations. Jewish immigrant daughters, ironically, were enabled in their desire to work by their parents' emphasis on work outside the home, and were, because of peculiarities of time, circumstance, and culture, more active than their mothers outside the domestic sphere for a limited period in the new world. Glenn's richly detailed discussion of the breadwinning roles of Eastern European women both -in Europe and in the United States is a wonderful example of how she successfully renders historic patterns to demonstrate how they provide precedents for Jewish women's labor participation in many areas-from domestic work to artisanship, to partnership in business with their husbands, to factory work and union organizing. Jewish women were somewhat less constrained by patriarchal family patterns and more committed to their public roles in the United States than, for instance, their Italian immigrant counterparts in the garment industry. Jewish immigrant daughters, Glenn further claims, combined historic Jewish work patterns with American civic opportunities in the garment factories and union halls, to become, during their teens and twenties, assertive, civic, self-conscious, and at times revolutionary workers while, contradictorily, cherishing the hope of marriage and traditional domestic fulfillment. Another distinction ofJewish daughters is their experiencing work and especially radical union organizing as a partnership with men, rather than as one of tension and separation from men. This partnership with men differentiated their ideas from prevailing views of women held by U.S. middle-class, woman-centered suffragists, whose campaign was informed by a highly idealized notion of woman as a superior moral being bent on reforming American society simply because her "nature" demanded it. Jewish daughters, though sympathetic with women's rights and conscious of gender discrimination against them, had no such moral bias, and numbers of them were furthermore inspired by socialist ideals and materialist analyses, rooted in their radical organizing...