An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930

3. Sustaining Life and Caring for the Dead

d 3 Sustaining Life and Caring for the Dead W hen William H. Kennedy expanded his livery and stable business into the undertaking trade in the 1860s, the Irishborn undertaker, who later boasted of his longtime association with the Chinese in lower Manhattan, was not alone. Kennedy was part of a larger community of Irish men who had entered the funeral business in the mid-nineteenth century. That men from the British Isles dominated this occupation was no accident; it resulted from a combination of structural and cultural factors that led to a system of exclusion and dependence. As the previous chapter illustrates, economic networks forged among co-ethnics and between ethnic groups facilitated urban commercial relations by supporting local businesses and serving both the people in the surrounding neighborhoods and the growing tourist trade in southern Manhattan. Other services, however, such as birthing babies, caring for the sick, burying the dead, and maintaining a healthy environment, required different sets of skills. In cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago, microcosms of the public health and settlement house movements , a predominantly white cadre of physicians, midwives, nurses, and various tradesmen, served an ethnically diverse working-class urban population. This chapter argues that chain migration patterns, the administration of state occupational laws, and Jim Crow segregationist practices 78 | Chapter 3 adopted in institutions of higher education and professional schools together shaped co-ethnic and interracial/interethnic relations. What resulted were varying relations of dependence between those who dominated certain trades and professions and those who were in need of basic services. As with the commercial trade, interracial/interethnic interactions often occurred out of necessity as much as personal desire, as national, state, and local policies and practices often placed people of European ancestry in positions of power over the lives of poor and working-class women, men, and children. But as much as structural inequality denied them access to many trades and professions, women, the poor, immigrants, and non-whites made the most of the limited choices available to them. Neighborhood residents were not completely at the mercy of licensed health practitioners who worked in their midst; many people carved out their own ways to care for themselves. At the same time, the exclusion of non-whites from many “skilled” trades resulted in a reliance on white tradesmen to maintain and improve their living environments. I begin this discussion with those who tended to the most intimate aspects of the lifecycle. Providing health care to the urban poor and to working-class people was a daunting project and fell to licensed and unlicensed physicians, herbalists and apothecaries, nurses, and midwives. For centuries, the responsibility for caring for the sick, assisting birthing mothers, and preparing the dead for display and burial often fell on the shoulders of women, particularly midwives. Even with the systematic exclusion of women and non-whites from university education and professional schools by the late eighteenth century, women remained central players in the daily work of dispensing health care to their families and communities in both rural and urban areas of the United States. Even in the censuses of the early twentieth century, enumerators recognized midwifery as a women’s occupation. At the same time, the professionalization of nursing was on the rise and, not surprisingly, was dominated by women of European ancestry. Nursing schools followed the lead of the country’s medical schools in their admissions policies and practices. Although they did not exclude on the basis of gender, they maintained the color line and established quotas for the admission of blacks, Jews, and Catholics. In 1900, nurses and midwives facilitated half of urban childbirths. Most of these women were European immigrants. In New York City, the Sustaining Life and Caring for the Dead | 79 number of foreign-born white women who identified their occupations as midwives and nurses outnumbered U.S.-born white nurses and midwives by 3,640 to 2,751 in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. Among the immigrant female population in 1900, Irish and German midwives/nurses significantly outnumbered midwives/nurses from all other immigrant groups.1 It is unclear from the census whether these women had received any formal education. Many likely did not, for as the profession of nursing evolved as a women’s occupation, formal training was reserved mostly for U.S.-born white Protestant women. The public health movement, advancements in the education of white...