A Study Of Economic Actiyities And Its Influence Or South And East European Immigrant Women In The U.S

During the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the United States experienced a double-transformation, which was from agricultural society to industrial society and from rural society to urban society. Under such background of significant transition, thousands and hundreds immigrants arrived in the United States, and formed a new summit era in American immigration history. From ethnic aspect, the main part of the immigration was people came from eastern and southern Europe. Although female part was definitely the minority, it also reached the summit scale in the same period. In this dissertation, the author takes immigrant women who came from eastern and southern during the late 19th century to the early 20th century as core theme, particularly, focuses on Russian Jewish immigrant women and Italian immigrant women, in order to analyze American eastern and southern European immigrant women history from economic angle. Hopefully, this dissertation would have a deep examination about the slow adaption of eastern and southern immigrate women progress into American economic society. This dissertation is arranged by chronological style with time as longitude and historical events as latitude. The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters in addition to the preface and conclusion.In the first chapter, which based on a large number of first hands material, the author exams the rise of women immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th century by data statistical method, including many charts and tables. To be more specific, this chapter talks about ethnicity origin, characters and flow direction of immigrant women, and also takes the Russian Jewish immigrant women and Italian immigrant women as example to deeply discusses the historical reason of moving to the United States.In the second chapter, primarily analyses the different kinds of economic activities of eastern and southern Europe Immigrant women in American society, including the labor market wage work, inside-home contract industrial work, room or bed renting trade, street retail trade, behaving as home business helper and business women and so on. All above economic activiteis help to demonstrate the hard work and effort of immigrant women, wich also helps us to understand their courage, determination, wisdom in adapting American economic society.The third chapter discusses the function of immigrant women’s economic activates in their own and their family economic survive and improvement. What is more, this chapter talks immigrant women’s affect on keeping solidarity of family member, neighborhood and the close network of the same ethnic group, which helped to form immigrant community. In turn, immigrant community helped also gave their female group much help in economic and other filed.The chapter four mainly argues the attention, attitude and related social reform from American main stream.In addition, this chapter analyses the result of the above reform, and gives the conclusion that, due to the lack of understanding of immigrant women and the racism and class superiority to immigrant group, the reform only made some very limited improvement.The chapter five discusses immigrant women’s new idea and behaviors after their large scale economic activities in American society, including new idea about career, religion, sexual relations, marriage and education, especially their new image and consumption behavior had the tend to follow the American mainstream women. But the new thought and behaviors also incurred the younger and older generation conflict, meanwhile, the young generation faced the rejection about their change from the mainstream, they felt very frustrated and lingered between the traditional European motherland culture and new American culture. After harsh time, immigrant women based on their new condition in the United States and combine their own traditional culture to join and organized their own trade union, which gave more help on their economic independence, also helped to improve their social status. Finally, all these above helped immigrant women to contribute their own identity label, which was both different from traditional European and American mainstream, but only belonged to immigrant women themselves.