Women of Courage: Jewish and Italian Immigrant Women in New York (review)

For at least two decades feminist researchers of Jewish and Italian immigrants to America have been documenting women's presence and correcting distorted interpretations of their part in the mass migrations at the turn of the twentieth century. Had it not been for the lengthy illness and eventual death of Rose Laub Coser, which postponed publication, this long-awaited study would have already become a staple of course syllabi and literature reviews. Still today, Women of Courage goes far in filling a remaining gap in the literature on immigrant women's lives and experiences. How Jewish and Italian immigrant women understood their lives from their point of view is the primary objective of the book.

Women of Courage is based on original in-depth interview data collected by a small group of sociologists and historians under the auspices of the World of Our Mothers Project, which began in the early 1980s. Sixty-one Jewish and 39 Italian women, who moved to the United States before 1927 and were at least 13 years old when they immigrated, were interviewed for the project. Although it would have been valuable to provide the actual interview schedule in an appendix to the book as qualitative researchers increasingly do, the authors do supply a key to using the interview transcripts, which are housed at the Radcliffe College's Henry A. Murray Research Center. Data is summarized in a number of small tables in each chapter and framed by interview excerpts and the authors' interpretations.

Part One, written by Rose Coser and edited by Andrew Perrin, discusses the reasons women gave for migrating to America and their initial difficulties with adaptation. Part Two, written by Laura Anker, focuses on immigrant women's work experiences, both in Europe and in New York. How women's understandings and actions were shaped both by their situations at home and at work comprises the central argument of the book. A strength of both sections is the underlying, though unstated, assumption that migration and adaptation are gendered processes.

Differences in ethnicity, culture and class that distinguished women's experiences from one another are, however, taken quite seriously by the authors, despite the absence of a systematic conceptual framework for doing so. For example, interviews revealed that poor East European Jewish immigrant women received significantly more assistance from relatives and voluntary service organizations than did southern Italian women (chapters three and four). According to the authors, this was a consequence of differential desires to adapt to the new culture and distinct family types which then had the effect of accelerating Jewish women's assimilation into mainstream society.

For both Italian and Jewish immigrant women, interconnected economic and family factors shaped every aspect of their migration and adaptation experience. The majority of respondents in the study worked for wages for significant periods throughout their lives either inside or outside the home. In this sense, respondents confirmed the findings of previous scholars: immigrants adapted by transforming the family into a "working economic unit" (p. 106). Their different work choices reflected "time of migration, stage in life cycle, male income, past work experiences, available wage-earning opportunities, employer practices, cultural traditions and the existence of familial or ethnic ties to specific jobs" (p. 74). In turn, their family relationships were reshaped, and they experienced new forms of oppression and freedom.

One important contribution the authors do make to existing literature on Jewish and Italian immigrant women is to document how work, family, and community activism were not clearly demarcated stages in a woman's life. In part, because women valued the social relationships with other women they developed on the job and because work was important to women's self-worth, many of the women interviewed for the study moved in and out of the work force through...