Small Strangers: The Experience of Immigrant Children in America, 1880–1925 (review)

There are probably not enough of books like this: short, readable works that combine important topics over manageable and significant time frames, designed for non-specialists. As part of an important and hopefully growing series, American Childhoods, edited by James Marten, Small Strangers is perhaps more a book about growing up than about the complexities of "New Immigration." While it has an excellent and well organized bibliography and draws on a lot of the significant new scholarship in both immigration and children's history, Melissa Klapper has focused on first hand experience of immigrant children and those who shaped their lives rather than on historiography. The book is also very generously illustrated mostly from the collections of the Library of Congress.

After setting the stage with a balanced review of the contours of immigration from 1880 to 1925 and of general trends shaping childhood (demographic, economic, etc), Klapper presents a straightforward journey of immigrant children from birth, through childhood, and adolesence to marriage and adulthood. This stress on lifestages works not only to highlight changing experiences as children emerge from dependency on parents through school and peer groups and finally to independence in work and marriage, but it allows her to show the variety of those experiences across different immigrant groups. Klapper has gone beyond her interest in European immigrants (noteably in her recent history Jewish-American girlhood) to present some very interesting insights into the experience of Mexican and Asian immigrant children.

As one might expect, she focuses on progressive era debates about immigration and especially the issue of Americanization through schools and social work. But she balances this with a thorough treatment of immigrants' attempts to foster and perpetuate ethnic and religious identity in offspring through language and ethnic culture education as well as ethnic church and holiday activities. She also treats judiciously the familiar topic of assimulation and the ambiguities and conflicts that it engendered among and between children and their parents. So, for example, while parents usually wanted their children to attend schools for the economic opportunity that education brought them, they also often insisted on afterschool language classes and adherence to ethnic child-birthing and family economy practices. Children often resented language schools, but often embraced ethnic holiday and food traditions and, though they might have joined American sport and recreational groups and in school inter-mixed with non-immigrant and other ethnic Americans, they still usually dated and married within their own communities. They coped with discrimination in equally complex ways, alternatively seeking to deny their backgrounds by adopting "American" dress and grooming and finding solace in their ethnicity. The clash between new "American" ideas about childrearing (reduced family size, medicalization of childbirth, greater family democracy etc.) and traditional childrearing is treated with equal sensitivity and balance.

Although it is not central to her purpose, Klapper does show how the immigrant child's experience changed after the restrictions of 1924 and during the depression. Americanization accelerated as it became more difficult for ethnic immigrant organizations to sustain themselves and as education in mixed ethnic schools lengthened when the depression reduced early entry into work. She also offers suggestive insight into how contemporary patterns of immigration compare with those of her period.

This is not a book that claims to bring a dramatic revisionist argument to the table, nor does it try to shed light on some dim corner of the fields of childhood and immigration history. At points, a reader might have liked more thorough treatment of differences among immigrant childhoods. Why, for example, did Jewish children attend school longer than Italian youth? What was the role of culture, family economic strategy, and contrasting constructions of patriarchy? In this comparison (as in others like the differences between Asian and European immigrant childhoods), more could have been developed. At points, more statistical information would have added precision and persuasiveness to the text (magnitudes and changes in immigrant groups and participation in work and school...