The World of Our Fathers and the World of Our Mothers

"The immigrant mother . . . has left no word to posterity, certainly none in her own voice . . . .Talk was a luxury that her labor would enable her sons to taste."

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers

When Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers was published in 1976 it provided a catalyst for change in my thinking, teaching, and writing about history. Although only a few years out of graduate school, I had already begun to reject the dominance of political history that formed the gist of my graduate education at Columbia University in the 1960s. But I was unsure how to replace it. As an undergraduate, I had opted for a history major after reading Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted and becoming convinced that history could be the story of ordinary people rather than that of the movers and shakers alone. But I had lost sight of this truth in graduate school. ¹

At Columbia in the early 1960s immigration history was taught from the few basic texts that were then available. While these works focused attention on a heretofore neglected aspect of the American experience, the immigrants themselves seemed to merge into a faceless mass notable for their group mentality; they came in great numbers for a few well-defined reasons and settled in what seemed like pre-ordained places. Each group made some contribution to America; the kindergarten of the Germans and the Jews' respect for education come to mind. The rest of the story traced the path of acculturation and eventual, inevitable assimilation to American ways. The subtle interaction between ethnic culture and American mores that John Bodnar later described in his reinterpretation of the European immigrant experience, aptly titled The Transplanted, was mostly absent from the books I read at that time. ²

In the early 1970s, encouraged by a position in a new experimental college that permitted me to teach whatever courses I developed, I started to explore social history. In the wake of the tumultuous 1960s, my student had little interest in most traditional history, which they considered boring or deceptive. To enable the students in one course to experience history in a way only partially mediated by a textbook I taught them how to do oral history and required them to create narratives based on oral histories of immigrants of their choice. The results made it obvious that they saw themselves and their families as part of a history that included them as political history did not. The students were so enthusiastic about what they had discovered that they wanted to share their stories with one another and so selected several of the essays to bind into a book.

Stimulated by their excitement, I began for the first time to think seriously about my own immigrant heritage. My maternal great-grandparents had immigrated from Russia around 1880. I knew something about their background from my grandmother, but she had died in 1969 and my mother could add nothing more. My paternal grandparents had come from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the first decade of the twentieth century. But they were also gone, and my father knew relatively little about their early lives, which they, like many immigrants, preferred not to discuss. My interest was further aroused by the publication of a major work in social history-Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, which I read before I encountered Howe's book. ³ Gutman's analysis of the "inarticulate" ordinary people reinforced my belief that the lives of immigrants like my forbears were worth investigating.

Perhaps because my feminist consciousness had already been raised, I also became aware that my students' oral histories of women often seemed especially dramatic, with their accounts of babies dying of hunger, of the sound of a dead baby's bones cracking as it was stuffed into a coffin that was too small, or of a mother's...