It is impossible to discuss the problems of adjustment of the family life of the immigrant to life in this country without taking notice of several factors that complicate the problem. There is first the disorganization in family life that is incident to the migration itself. The members of most of the families that come to this country are peasants who are almost forced to emigrate by the fact that the land they own will not support the entire family as the children grow up and establish families of their own. There was, for example, among the families visited for this study, a family from the Russian Ukraine. The man's father was a peasant farmer with six acres of land and a large family of children. The income from this small property was supplemented by hiring out as laborers on the large estates near by. As the boys grew up they left home. Two had already come to America when the father of this family left in 1910. At the time he left there were thirteen people trying to get their living from six acres of land. Another family from the same country were trying to live on the income from the farm of the man's father, who had four acres of land and five sons. SEPARATED FAMILIES In such families, and even in less extreme cases, it is evident that the cash needed for the emigration of the whole family is difficult to secure. It often happens, therefore, that the family does not emigrate as a group, but one member—usually the man—goes ahead, and sends for the rest as soon as he has earned enough to pay their passage. It is then some time, usually from two to four years and occasionally longer, before he is able to send for his family. One Ukrainian man interviewed in this study came in 1906, leaving his wife and four children in the old country. He had difficulty in finding work he could do, wandered from place to place, never staying long in one place, and it was eight years before he had saved enough to send for his family. Another man, a Slovenian, came in 1904, and was here seven years before he sent his wife money enough so she could follow him. Separations of this kind are often destructive of the old family relationships. What they mean in suffering to the wife left behind has been revealed by some of the letters of husbands and As time goes on the intervals between the gifts grew longer, and she writes imploring him to send money if he is able, as she is in desperate need of it. In 1896 she had been ill and in the hospital. "When I left the hospital I did not know what to do with myself, without money and almost without roof ... so I begged her and promised I would pay her when you send some money" (p. 353). And in 1897 she wrote:
She is pathetically grateful when money is sent. Thus in 1899 she writes:
Her sufferings are not confined to financial worries and lack of a place to eat and sleep. There is apparently a loss of social prestige and a falling off of friends. The letters also show what was evidently a real affection for her husband, and that at times his silence was even worse than his failure to send money. Thus in 1905, when the money and the letters were very irregular, she writes a letter (p. 362) in which no reference is made to her economic situation. After asking if he received her last letter, she continues:
Her financial situation grows steadily worse, and in 1912 she writes that she is "already barefooted KEEPING BOARDERS The life of the man who has come ahead has been made the subject of special study from time to time, In connection with the present study, the living conditions of some of the Mexicans and Russians in Chicago were studied. As in the past, the men were found living in one of the following ways: as a lodger in the family group, as a boarder paying a fixed sum for room and board, Four variations were found in the method of paying for food: (1) The landlady buys all the food for the group and her family on one account. The total bill is divided by the number of boarders plus the head of the family, the wife and children getting their food as partial compensation for her services. (2) Each lodger has his own account book, in which is entered only the meat purchased for him. He pays this account himself. The other food purchased is entered in the landlady's book, and divided in the same manner as before. (3) Each lodger has his own account and buys what he wants. Instead of paying for what he has bought, he pays his share of the total food bought during the week. (4) Each Whatever expedient is adopted as a substitute for normal family life, the result is unsatisfactory. The men studied almost without exception preferred living as boarders with a family group, if possible. This preference is easily understood, as it meant less work for the men, who, in co-operative groups, had to do women's work as well as their own, and it also seemed a closer approximation to normal living. For the sake of these advantages they were willing to put up with housing conditions that were worse than those of the men who tried co-operative housekeeping. Thus 56 per cent of the Russian men in co-operative groups had the four hundred cubic feet of air per man that is required by law, and only 35 per cent of those living with family groups had this requirement. The presence of a lodger in the family, moreover, is attended with great discomfort to the family. He is given the best accommodations the house affords and the family crowds into what is left. Thus, in the family groups with whom the Russians were living, only 18 per cent of the adult members of the family had the four hundred cubic feet of air required by the city ordinance for a person over twelve, as compared with 35 per cent of the boarders or lodgers, and forty of the fifty-three children in the groups The people with whom we have conferred in this study have said again and again that the lodger in a family meant restriction and deprivation for the family, and especially for the children. One Lithuanian woman who came to this country when she was two years old, says she well remembers the "utter misery" of her childhood, due to the lodgers. They were given all the beds and any other sleeping arrangements that could be contrived, and the children slept on the floor in any corner. Their sleep was often disturbed by people moving about. Sometimes they were wakened and sent to the saloon to get beer for a group of lodgers who sat up late playing cards and drinking. She remembers, too, the constant quarreling over the food bill, and thinks that is very common. The complicated system by which the accounts are kept, to which attention has already been called, makes suspicion on the part of the lodger only too easy. Several people have spoken of the unsteady character of the lodger and the practice of staying up late, drinking. One of the women interviewed said that the family life was much easier, now that it was no longer necessary to keep lodgers, for when there were lodgers in the house they always had beer, and her husband would drink with them. Other people have THE MAN WITHOUT A FAMILY Life in a men's co-operative housekeeping establishment is usually more difficult, for upon them falls the burden of maintaining cleanliness in the household, and in many cases preparing their own meals. Some of the Mexican men visited at nine o'clock in the evening were preparing food for the next day's lunch. An important consideration here is the high cost of living under such conditions. The immigrant woman may not be a skillful buyer, but the immigrant man is evidently a most extravagant one. Among the Mexicans, for example, it was found that the men living in co-operative groups paid practically as much for the food which they themselves prepared as the men living in boarding houses paid for board and room. Their food cost seven to eight dollars per man per week. These studies showed the same lack of opportunities for wholesome recreation and for meeting nice girls, as well as the same restlessness of the men as did earlier studies. This was especially In brief, these studies of nonfamily men in 1919 show that the problem of adequate housing and some form of normal social life for the men who come ahead of their families is a recurring one. The nationality of the group changes as one immigration wave succeeds another. With the change in nationality come minor changes in the needs and desires of the group, but the main problem remains the same. It should never be forgotten that the impressions these men receive during their early life in the United States form the basis of their judgment concerning American life. Moreover, the life they lead during this period of separation from their families must inevitably affect their family relationships when family life is re-established, whether it be in this country or in the country from which they come. The first national recognition of the needs of THE SINGLE WOMAN It is not always the man who comes alone to this country. Often the girl comes in advance of the others and sends money back to bring over her parents and younger brothers and sisters. Attention has been called again and again to the hazards for the girl thrown on her own resources in a strange country among people she does She has, in fact, the same problem to solve as the man who has come alone, but she is further hampered both by economic and social handicaps. She is probably from a country where the life of a woman has been protected and circumscribed, and to find herself in a country where the conditions and status of women are freer, makes both for confusion and complications. A false step is of more serious consequence to her than to a man, and without guidance and assistance she may sometimes take this in ignorance or thoughtlessness. Equally changed are her living conditions here. She has the same ways of living open to her that are open to the man—boarding or lodging with a family group or setting up a co-operative household with a group of girls. The girl living in the latter way does not have as many difficulties as the man in the same situation, for women are used to doing housework. Yet if men find it too difficult to be both wage earners and housekeepers, it is surely too hard for girls. If, on the other hand, the girl finds lodging with a family group, life is not much easier, for she is expected to help with the household tasks, The need of providing adequate and safe lodging for the girl away from home has been felt in many places and by numerous organizations. Too often facilities have appealed only to the native born or thoroughly initiated immigrant girl. The International Institute of the Young Women's Christian Association has helped immigrants to find suitable homes. This has local branches in more than thirty cities, many of which are helping to meet the housing problems of the immigrant girls. The government, in its housing projects, provided accommodations for the single girls similar to those provided for single men. They built boarding houses for from seventy-five to a hundred and fifty girls, with separate rooms and adequate toilet and bathing facilities. Each floor Information is not at hand as to whether any of these houses were used by groups of immigrant girls. Similar houses could, however, easily be made useful for them if care were taken to put them in charge of some one who understood the problems of the foreign-born girl. More desirable still are projects undertaken by groups of foreign-born women themselves. ALMOST AT THE END OF THE JOURNEY b ALMOST AT THE END OF THE JOURNEY THE MIGRANT FAMILY Even when all the family has reached this country the problems of migration have not always Some had moved several times. A Polish family, for example, had lived first in Boston, then in New York City, then somewhere in Canada, before they finally settled in Chicago. Another Ukrainian family, from Galicia, lived first in one mining town in Pennsylvania, then in another in the same state, and later moved to Chicago. The mother, who is a very intelligent woman, described her first impression of America when she, with her four children, arrived in the little mining town. She said that immigrants were living there, everything was dirty and ugly, and she was shocked by the number of drunken men Sometimes these changes mean family separations, as the man again goes ahead, as he did in coming to this country. The experience of a Polish family is typical. When the family first came to this country they went to Iron Mountain, Michigan, where the father worked in the ore mines until he lost his health. Then a sister of his wife, who was living in South Chicago, invited him to visit her family, and offered to get work for him in the steel mills. He came, living with his sister-in-law, and after a few months obtained work in the mills. Then the mother and children followed him. FROM FARMING TO INDUSTRY Another fact to which attention should be called is the adjustment in family life required by contact with the modern industrial system. Some of the immigrant groups come from countries more developed in an industrial way than others, but none of the newer groups come from any country in which the factory system has become so prevalent as in the United States. In the old In the modern American industrial community, however, the family as a whole is generally divorced from land. It is not a unit in relation to the industrial organization, but in its productive function is usually broken up by it. For the family must live, and yet its income is dependent, not upon its size nor the volume of its needs, but upon the wage-earning capacity of the man under the prevailing system of bargaining. That the resulting income has often been wholly inadequate, even according to the modest standards set by dietetic experts and by social investigators, is testified to by an enormous body of data gathered during the decade preceding the Great War. It is unnecessary to review these studies in detail, but attention may be called to the findings of the Immigration Commission. Of the foreign-born male heads of households studied, 4,506, or 34.1 per cent, earned less than four hundred dollars a year at a time when dietetic experts agreed that five hundred dollars was a minimum below which it was dangerous for families to fall. Seventy per cent earned less than six hundred dollars. These figures may be said to come from "far away and long ago," but while there has not been time for widespread inquiry, there is a considerable body of evidence indicating that the same condition prevails to-day. Wages have increased greatly during the war, but with the increase in prices there is doubt as to whether real wages have increased or decreased. Certainly the increase has been irregular and uneven, affecting the workers in some industries much more than in others. The New York State Industrial Commission made a study of the average weekly earnings of labor in the factories of the state. They found As a result of these low earnings, the wife and children in many immigrant families have been forced into the industrial field and even then the resulting incomes have often been inadequate. The Immigration Commission found that almost one third of the foreign-born families studied had a total family income of under five hundred dollars, and almost two thirds had incomes less than seven hundred and fifty dollars. Not only is the family income often inadequate and composite, but precarious and uncertain. The need for food is a regularly recurring need; the demand for labor may be seasonal, periodically interrupted, and in time of crisis wholly uncertain. Although child labor laws have been enacted in many states and by the United States Congress, they are comparatively recent. Their absence in earlier years has had its inevitable The present laws are not always efficiently enforced, and the child of the foreign born suffers especially from such failure to enforce the law. In one of the mining communities of Illinois, visited in the spring of 1919, Italian boys as young as twelve were found working in the mines. In New Mexico, children of twelve and ten, and even younger, were taken out of school each year in the spring to go with their fathers to work on other men's farms or to herd sheep. Our investigator was impressed, in Rolling Prairie, with the need of including agriculture among the THE WAGE-EARNING MOTHER Of the mother's work, notice must be taken. People interviewed in this study were almost unanimously of the opinion that immigrant women were adding to the family income in many cases. If the children are too young to be left alone, the father's inadequate income is supplemented by taking lodgers. Too often, however, the mother works outside the home for wages. Indeed, a number of people were of the opinion that the employment of women has increased during the war. Among the more recently arrived Bohemians, for example, it was said that mothers of small children were going to work as never before, because taking lodgers was not possible, as single men have not been coming in such large numbers since the war. The older settlers felt that they must take advantage of the relatively high wages offered women to make payments on property. Lithuanian observers say that partly because of prejudice against it, Lithuanian married women have not gone out of their homes to work until recently. With the war, the increased cost of living, the higher wages offered to women, and the appeal that was made to their patriotism, many women had gone into industry, In addition to this testimony, which was obtained from leaders of the national groups, there is also the information obtained from individual families. Of the ninety women from whom information was obtained in Chicago, twenty were working outside their homes and twenty-four had lodgers at the time of the study. When it is remembered that these families were those who have worked their way through the first difficulties, these figures become doubly significant. There is, for example, a Ukrainian family from the Russian Ukraine. It consists of the parents and four children between the ages of three and fifteen. Ever since the family came to the United States they have had one or more lodgers to help them pay the rent. At present they have three men paying four dollars a month each; and as the father, who had been working in the stockyards for nineteen dollars a week, was discharged two months ago, the wife has been working in a spring factory to support the family. Then there is a Polish family, composed of the parents and four children under fourteen, two of them children of the man by a former wife. The father has been in this country since 1894, The effect of the mother's work in decreasing the child's chances for life has been made clear by the studies of the Children's Bureau in Johnstown, The effect of the mother's work on the family relationship and the home life of the family group is, of course, not measurable in absolute terms. The leaders of the various national groups, however, have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the absence of the women from the home has created entirely new problems in the family life. In recognition of this fact attempts have been made to solve the problem. Among Slovenians it was customary, before the war made it impossible, to send the children back to the old country to their grandmothers to be cared for. One priest said he had seen women taking as many as twelve children to a single village. The Ukrainians in Chicago have talked of establishing a day nursery to look after their children, but the people are poor, and it has not been possible to raise the money. In the meantime children are not sent to the day nurseries already established, but are commonly taken to neighbors, some of whom are paid for taking care of ten or twelve children. This arrangement constitutes a violation of the city ordinance requiring day nurseries to be licensed, but is evidently a violation quite unconsciously committed by both parties to the transaction. A group of nonworking Lithuanian women heard that neglected children were reported to the settlement in the neighborhood. One of the Some such plan must be developed that takes care of the foreign-born mother's work if she is forced to supplement the family's income outside of the home. The organization of family life that has grown up parallel with the industrial system assumes her presence in the home. When misfortune makes this impossible some provision for caring for the children must be found. CHANGED DUTIES OF A MOTHER Another changed condition in the life in this country is that the family group is usually what the sociologist calls the "marriage" group, as This decrease in the number of people in the household is not compensated for by the diminution in the amount of work, which is another fact of changed conditions. For in this country the housewife no longer spins and weaves, or even, as a rule, makes the cloth into clothing. She does not work in the fields, or care for the garden or the farm animals, all of which she was expected to do in the old country. The loss of the older women in the group, however, means that what tasks are left must all be done by her. The duties of the housewife may not be as many, but the work they involve may be more. This is true, for example, in the matter of feeding the family. In Lithuania soup was the fare three In spite of all that has been taken out of the home the duties of the housewife remain manifold and various. She is responsible for the care of the house, for the selection and preparation of food, for spending the part of the income devoted to present needs, and for planning and sharing in the sacrifices thought necessary to provide against future needs. She must both bear and rear her children. The responsibilities and satisfactions The enumeration of the tasks of any wife and mother throws into relief the difficulties of the foreign-born mother. The all too frequent cases where homes are deprived of her presence emphasize how indispensable she is. All case-work agencies have had to grapple with the problem of families suffering this deprivation. It is these motherless families that make us realize how many tasks and responsibilities fall to the lot of the mother. There was a motherless Russian family, consisting of the father and six children, the oldest a girl of thirteen and the youngest a five-month-old boy. For a time the family tried to get along without asking advice of an outside agency. The baby was placed with friends, and the thirteen-year-old girl stopped school to care for the five-room flat and the other four children. In a short time the family with whom the baby was placed wanted to adopt him, and refused to keep him longer on any other condition. At this time the Immigrant's Protective League was appealed to for help in placing the baby where he would not have to be given for adoption. They found the father making a pathetic attempt to keep the PATERNAL AUTHORITY PASSING A third change should be taken into account. There is a marked difference between the general position of women and children in relation to the authority of the husband and father in this country and that in the old country. It is indicated in both general opinion and express statutory amendment in this country, although not in the so-called common law. The latter, in common with practice in the native lands of immigrants, provided that marriage gave the husband the right to determine where the domicile should be, the right "reasonably to discipline" wife and children, the right to claim her services and to appropriate her earnings and those of the children, the right to take any personal property (except "paraphernalia" and "pin money") she might have in full ownership, the right to manage any land she might become entitled to, and the right to enjoy the custody of the children, There existed no adequate provision for enforcing the father's performance of either conjugal or parental obligations, and the result has been the development of two bodies of legislative change. One of these has granted to the wife certain rights as against the husband, on the theory that the wife retains her separate existence after marriage and should retain rights of individual action. The other body of statutes imposes on the man the duty of support, making abandonment or refusal to support punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both. The theory of this legislation is that the support of wife and children is to be a legally enforceable duty, which may rightly be laid upon the man because of his special interest and special ability. Moreover, through the establishment of the juvenile court, the community has undertaken, not only to say that support must be given, but to set a standard of "proper parental care" below which family groups are not to be allowed to sink and still remain independent and intact. By creating the juvenile probation staff, an official assistant parent is provided. In the same way, by authorizing commitment of children to institutions, the dissolution of the The common law, as accepted in the various states, was not entirely uniform, but it was substantially the universal family law; now the states differ widely in the body of statutory enactments developed in this field. All have some laws recognizing the claims of children to have their home conditions scrutinized—though they may have no express juvenile-court law, all recognize to some extent the separate existence of the married women—though only twenty-one have given the mother substantial rights as against the father over their children, and they all recognize the parent's duty to secure the child's attendance at school, and have imposed some limitation on the parent's right to set his young child to work. In other words, in all the states the idea of the separate existence of the wife and of the interest of the community in the kind of care given the child has been embodied in legislation. These statutes have been enacted by legislatures composed largely, if not exclusively, of men, and register the general change in the community attitude toward the family group. An unlimited autocracy is gradually becoming what might now be termed a constitutional democracy. But the law of the jurisdictions from which most of the immigrant groups come, undoubtedly Immigrant groups evidence their realization of the changed conditions in different ways. Among the Ukrainians in Chicago, for example, it is said that, whereas in the old country the men kept complete control of the little money that came in, here they very generally turn it all over to their wives. Some of them have laughed, and said that America was the "women's country." Among other groups, notably the Jugo-Slav and the Italian, there is said to be a general attempt to keep the women repressed and in much the same position they held in the old country. Sometimes the woman perceives the difference in the situation more quickly than her husband. Then if he attempts to retain the old authorities in form and in spirit, she may submit or else she may gradually lead him to an understanding. But she may not understand and yet may rebel and carry her difficulty to the case-work agency. One of the settlements in Chicago is said to have become very unpopular with the men in its neighborhood, as it has the reputation of The Immigrant's Protective League in Chicago receives many complaints from women who have learned that their husbands have not the right to beat them or their children. One Lithuanian woman, who had been in this country six years, came to the league with the statement that her husband often threw her and their eight-year-old son out of the house in the middle of the night. Another Lithuanian woman living in one of the suburbs took her three children and came to Chicago to her sisters, because her husband abused her, called her vile names, and beat her. When the husband was interviewed he agreed not to do so again, and his family returned to him. Of course, the theory underlying even the feminist "married woman's property laws" included not only her enjoyment of rights, but her exercise of legal responsibility; but the restrained exercise of newly acquired freedom is evidence of high social and personal development. And the women in the foreign-born groups come from the country, the village, the small town. They have had little education, their days have been filled with work, so that there has been little time for reflection, they come from a simple situation in which there was little temptation to do wrong. Attention has already been called to the confusion created by the lodger in the home and the special temptation to the woman to desert her husband for the lodger. The relative scarcity of women in the group, the presence of large numbers of men who cannot enter a legal marriage relationship because they have wives in the old country, the spiritual separation that often results from physical separation caused by the man's coming ahead to prepare a place—all these are undoubtedly factors that enter in to make difficult the wise use of her freedom. Native endowment, moral as well as physical and mental, varies among these women as among other women. Confronted with this confused and difficult situation, the change from the old sanctions, the old safeguards, even the old legal obligations, is difficult. It is inevitable that a few will find themselves unequal to the task of readjusting their lives. The father of one family came to the Immigrant's Protective League in Chicago, asking help because his wife had turned him out of his home. He said that she drank and was immoral. Instead of caring for the home and the two-year-old child, she spent her time behind the bar in her brother's saloon, having "a good time" with the The women who assert themselves in their new rights are in a small minority. A young Polish woman complains that the women of her group are too submissive even in this country, and "bear beatings just as their mothers did in the old country." In the great majority of foreign-born families, as in all families, the question of the legal rights of the woman is never raised. The habits and attitudes formed under the old system of law and customs are carried over into the life in the new country, and are changed so gradually and imperceptibly that no apparent friction is caused in the family group. Moreover, in many cases where the woman perceives her changed position she is able to make her husband see it too, and she herself is able to work her way through to a new understanding. It is interesting to note that the women of the foreign-born groups who have worked their way through are now bending their energies toward helping the women who have not yet started. |