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I N T R O D U C T I O N In 1901, Veronica Loncki and her parents immigrated to the United States, landing first in New York and then moving on to Chicago’s north side, where she lived for the next seven decades. Loncki was fourteen when she left eastern Europe for America, and eventually married John Orkee in 1910, when she was twenty-three. Before her marriage, Loncki spent much of her leisure time at dances, regularly attended picnics, and, with a few of her girl friends, “maybe three or four,” went to the Crown Theater on Milwaukee to see a show. As she reached her late teens, the neighborhood boys increasingly became interested in her, and she reveled in the attention. If “you want to live with somebody,” she declared, “you ain’t gonna go [with] the first one you see.” Yet, while many of the neighborhood boys were eager to please and wed, she “just didn’t care for nobody.” “I wasn’t so anxious to be tied up with somebody I don’t know,” she explained. “I just like to be free.” Loncki insisted that she was “nice” to these men. But she would only “go out once or so” and only “be [a] friend” because she did not want to “make him feel serious or something.”1 Loncki was certainly candid about her relationships with men, and she had apparently spent a considerable amount of time thinking about “boys” and how to handle them. She was careful about not making her dates “feel serious or something,” suggesting that the men she dated were unaccustomed to the idea that female companionship did not imply commitment. And she was concerned about ending up “tied up with somebody I don’t know,” as if she knew several women who had gotten married after a brief acquaintance with their future spouses, even though her own courtship lasted only about two months. Loncki explained that there was no single reason why she married on such short notice. She first met her husband, John Orkee, at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, a clothing manufacturing plant where they both worked, and before long he started showing up unexpectedly at her home for visits. Her parents| 1 | quickly grew fond of Orkee and began pressuring her to marry him. “What you looking for?” Loncki remembered her mother saying. “You can’t get nothing nicer than that.” Her parents were not the only ones insisting on the marriage, however. Loncki recalled that “he [Orkee] just hit the spot [and] he just pushed. He says let’s get married. . . . Got time now.” Hart, Schaffner, and Marx was out on strike when he began “pushing.”2 The strike undoubtedly jeopardized the wherewithal on which they were depending to start their married life. But wage work absorbed so much of their time that they could find time to marry only once they were unemployed. For Loncki, then, her courtship was not just about pleasing a potential spouse. It was about making certain sacrifices and negotiating expectations that reflected the broader social and cultural world in which she lived. In this case, that world was both working class and immigrant. Thus, although Loncki liked to “be free” and had become quite savvy at dissuading any unwanted attention, the autonomy for which she was looking was difficult to find. In other words, although she spent much of her free time with her friends at picnics or at one of the commercial amusements that were becoming increasingly popular by the early twentieth century, her parents were quick to pressure her about getting married , a pressure young women typically faced and one that first-generation parents were particularly notorious for applying, and the workplace posed certain problems. Wage work consumed so much of her time that she felt compelled to marry upon short acquaintance, despite her determination to avoid being “tied up with someone I don’t know.” This book explores the day-to-day lives of men and women like Veronica Loncki and John Orkee, immigrants struggling to negotiate the demands of wage work, to live up to the expectations of family and community, and to establish their own norms of behavior governing intimacy and leisure. In particular, it covers the period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries (the 1890s through the 1930s), when immigration from southern and eastern Europe reached its peak and when commercial leisure became widely popular. As Loncki ’s experience makes...

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