Part 2
The material collected is of two kinds. First, there are facts dealing with the different agencies organized to help in solving these problems. This information was gathered largely by correspondence. Questionnaires were sent to case-work agencies dealing with family problems, which are members of the American Association for Social Work with Families and Home Service Bureaus of various Red Cross Chapters, asking their methods for attacking these difficulties and their advice as to the best methods worked out. The supervisors of Home Economics under the Federal Board for Vocational Education were asked to what extent they had included foreign-born housewives in their program and the special plans that had been worked out for them; the International Institutes of the Young Women's Christian Association were asked to describe their work with married women.
The methods of certain agencies in Chicago--the United Charities, the Immigrants' Protective League, some of the settlements--were studied more carefully through interviews with their workers and through a study of individual records. Officers of the national racial organizations were interviewed about their work on family problems. In addition to these a limited number of co-operative stores in Illinois were studied. Mining communities in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were visited, as well as certain of the newer housing projects, such as Yorkship Village in New Jersey, Hilton Village in Virginia, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lowell and North Billerica, Massachusetts and several towns in New Mexico.
The government investigations already referred to had made certain needs of the foreign born very clear. It seemed unnecessary to go over that ground again, but it was necessary to know whether those needs still existed. An attempt was made to learn this through interviews with leaders of various national groups and by obtaining schedules from a limited number of selected families. A word should be said as to the information obtained from these sources. The leaders selected were, in the first instance, men and women whose leadership in their own group had been recognized by election to important offices in their national organizations. These men and women then frequently suggested others whose position was not so well defined to an outsider, but whose opinion was valued by members of the group.
Most of the persons interviewed were able to speak English readily. They were people who were close enough to the great mass of immigrants to be familiar with their problems, their needs, their shortcomings, and their abilities, and at the same time were sufficiently removed from the problems to be able to view them objectively. Some were persons of more educational and cultural background than the majority of immigrants, some of them had been born in this country or had come when they were young children; but there were more who came to this country from the same Old-World conditions as the majority of their countrymen and had worked their way through the same hard conditions. They were probably exceptional in their native ability.
No attempt was made to fill out a questionnaire from these interviews. An outline was prepared of points to be covered, but frequently no attempt was made to adhere to the outline. Rather, these persons were encouraged to talk on the family problems in which they were most interested, and to which they had given most thought--to enable us to see them as they saw them with their knowledge of the Old-World background from which their people had come. They were also asked to suggest possible ways of meeting the more pressing needs of their people.
Adequate expression can never be given to the obligation under which those busy men and women who gave so generously and graciously their time and their thoughts have placed us. Our very great indebtedness to them is acknowledged, as without their aid this study in the present form would have been impossible. The demand made upon them could be justified only by the hope that the contacts thus established may prove in some slight degree profitable to them if only in giving them assurance that there are those to whom their problems are of real interest.
The women from whom family schedules were obtained were slightly different, and the information sought from them was obtained in a different way. They were for the most part women who did not speak English well enough to carry on an extended conversation in it. While they were not very recent immigrants and hence were not going through the first difficulties of adjustment, most of them were women who had not yet worked their way through to the same place reached by the women with whom the more general interviews were had. They were, in general, very simple people, too absorbed with working out their problems to have had much time for reflection. We asked them to tell us of their early experiences and difficulties as they recalled them, and of their present ways of treating some of the problems. This information was taken in schedule form.
Not enough schedules were obtained to be of statistical value--there were only ninety in all--but the families chosen are believed to be more or less typical. They were selected with the advice of leaders of their group or were known to our foreign-speaking investigators, who had a wide acquaintance in several groups. That is, we have tried so far as possible to see the problem with the persons, if not through the eyes of the persons whose fellow countrymen we wished to know.
We do not mean to suggest that other and very important groups might not have been studied, but we tried to learn of others; and sometimes because we could not find the clew, sometimes for lack of time, it proved impossible to go farther. We feel that we have obtained an insight into the situation among the Polish in Chicago and in Rolling Prairie, Indiana; the Lithuanians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Croatians, Slovenians, nonfamily Mexicans, Russians--both family and nonfamily--and Italians in Chicago; Italians in Herrin and Freeman, Illinois, and Canonsburg and Washington, Pennsylvania; and the Ukrainians in Chicago and in Sun, West Virginia.
Besides the large body of evidence with reference to these groups, we have suggestions from many interested and kindly persons of other groups. The Magyars and the Rumanians, particularly, we should have liked to know better, and we have had most suggestive interviews with certain of their leaders. We were not able, however, to follow the leads they gave, and therefore do not claim to speak for them, except to express the feeling of the need for greater understanding and appreciation.
With reference to those groups discussed, it should be noted that some, such as the Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Italian, are among the largest of the great foreign colonies in Chicago, the growth of a long-continued immigration. They live in the different sections of the city, in crowded tenement districts, or in more recently developed neighborhoods for whose growth they are responsible. The Croatian and Ukrainian groups are newer groups, and are therefore poorer. The Croatians are moving into houses which the Bohemians are vacating. In the Russian and Mexican groups we have the current evidence that the old problem of the nonfamily man is still with us.
The Poles in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, are a prosperous farming community living in modern farmhouses with yards and orchards. There are women still alive who can tell of the earlier days, when just after their arrival they lived in one-room houses made of logs and plastered with mud. Then they helped their husbands to fell trees and clear the land. Like other pioneer women, these women have contributed to the "winning of the West." The grandmothers tell of these things. The mothers remember when, during the winter, the children went to school for a few months, they were laughed at because of their meager lunches, their queer homemade clothes, and their foreign speech. The young people now go to school at least as long as the law requires and sometimes through high school.
The mining towns in Illinois and Pennsylvania need not be described. Their general features are familiar. Although extended information with reference to the life of the various groups was not obtained, mention will be made of certain facts that are of importance to this study.
While the numbers are not great, it is hoped that certain methods may be worked out for approach to the problems of the groups studied, that will prove suggestive in attacking the problems of other groups not included here. No two groups are alike; but the experience with one or with several may develop the open-minded, humble, objective attitude of mind and that democratic habit of approach that will unlock the doorway into the life of the others and exhibit both the points at which community action may be desirable and the direction such action should take.
DISSOLVING BARRIERS
The purpose of this book is to help in the adjustment of immigrant family life in this country. The immigrant will feel America to be his own land largely to the extent that he feels his American home to be as much his home as was his native hearth. To define what makes a home is harder even than to achieve one. Perhaps more than any other human institution the home is a development, the result and component of innumerable adjustments. This growth comes about largely spontaneously, without conscious effort on the part of its members, except that of living together as happily as possible.
There is among most housewives, whether native or foreign born, a certain complacency about housekeeping and bringing up children. Housekeeping is supposed to come by nature, and few women of any station in life are trained to be homemakers and mothers. The native born, in part consciously through their own choice and in part blindly moved by forces they do not understand, have been gradually moving away from the old tradition of subordination on the part of the wife and of strict and unquestioning obedience of children. In the general American atmosphere there are suggestions of a different tradition.
In the old country the mother knew what standards she was to maintain and, moreover, had the backing of a homogeneous group to help her. In this country she is a stranger, neither certain of herself nor sure whether to try to maintain the standards of her home or those that seem to prevail here. As a matter of fact, these difficulties are usually surmounted, so that by the time the foreign-born housewife has lived here long enough to raise her family she has learned to care for her home as systematically and intelligently as most of her native-born neighbors, who have not had her difficulties. Sometimes they have learned from the members of the group who have been here longer; and sometimes they have learned by going into the more comfortable American homes as domestic servants.
In the American domestic evolution a scientific and deliberate factor has been introduced. Students of family life have conducted inquiries into domestic practices, needs, and resources, and applied the researches of physiologists, chemists, economists, and architects. The result has been the discovery of certain standards and requirements for wholesome family life. It must be admitted that the attempt at formulation of standards for family life encounters difficulties not found in the field of education or of health, where the presence and service of the expert are fairly widely recognized. For many reasons the subject of the _minima_ of sound family life has been more recently attacked and is, in the nature of things, more difficult of analysis and especially of formal study. The impossibility, for example, of applying to many aspects of the family problem the laboratory methods of study or of examining many of the questions in a dispassionate and objective manner, must retard the scientific treatment of the subject.
There are, however, some aspects of family life with reference to which there may be said to be fairly general agreement in theory if not in practice in the United States. The content of an adequate food allowance is generally agreed upon by the students of nutrition, and the cost and special features of an adequate diet for any group at any time and place can therefore be described and discussed. In the matter of laying the responsibility for support of the family on the husband and father, at least to the extent of enabling the children to enjoy seven years of school life and fourteen years free from wage-paid work and the resulting exploitation, there is wide agreement embodied in legislation.
Such standards are becoming gradually adopted and incorporated into domestic life through the slow processes of suggestion, imitation, and neighborly talks already mentioned. While the slow establishment of social standards is required for a complete and adequate adjustment of family life on the basis of specialists' discoveries, many systematic and formal efforts can be made which will forward and accelerate the process. These efforts can help to remove the feeling of strangeness, perhaps the greatest obstacle in adjusting home life; they should seek to connect with the appreciations and sense of need already felt by the women who are to be influenced.
There is necessity for thorough inquiry into what are the points of contact in these problems for immigrant women; what are their present customs and standards in which the specialists' knowledge can be planted with the prospect of a promising combination of seed and soil. This study indicates how great is the need of search for the possibilities of just such organic connections. Pending such further studies, this report can do two things:
First, it can exhibit, so far as possible, the difficulties encountered by foreign-born families in attaining in their family relationships such satisfaction as would constitute a genuine feeling of hominess, and make the immigrant home an integral part of the domestic development in this country.
Second, the report can suggest the deliberate and systematic methods which can be effective in introducing the immigrant family and specialists' standards to each other. The services of social agencies have been largely in this field, and it is hoped that they may find in this book lines for increased usefulness. Incidentally, evidence will be presented to show that, in allowing many of these difficulties to develop or to remain, the community suffers real loss, and it is hoped that in the following chapters suggestion will be found of ways by which some of these difficulties may be overcome and some of the waste resulting from their continued existence be eliminated.
II
FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
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 wives in a collection of letters in _The Polish Peasant_,[1] especially in the Borkowski series. These are letters written by Teofila Borkowski in Warsaw, to her husband, Wladek Borkowski, in America, between the years 1893 and 1912. During the early years the letters usually thanked him for a gift of money and referred to the time when she should join him in America. "I shall now count the days and weeks. May our Lord God grant it to happen as soon as possible, for I am terribly worried," she wrote in 1894.
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:
For God's sake what does it mean that you don't answer?... For I don't think that you could have forgotten me totally.... Answer me as soon as possible, and send me anything you can. For if I were not in need I should never annoy you, but our Lord God is the best witness how terribly hard it is for me to live. Those few rubles which you sent me a few times are only enough to pay the rent for some months.... As to board, clothes, and shoes, they are earned with such a difficulty that you have surely no idea. And I must eat every day. There are mostly days in my present situation when I have one small roll and a pot of tea for the whole day, and I must live so. And this has lasted almost five years since you left (p. 353).
She is pathetically grateful when money is sent. Thus in 1899 she writes:
I received your letter, with twenty rubles and three photographs, for which I send you a hearty "God reward!" I bear it always in my heart and thought and I always repeat it to everybody that you were good and generous, and you are so up to the present (p. 358).
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:
It is true, dear Wladek, that you have not so much time, but my dear, write me sometimes a few words; you will cause me great comfort. For I read your letter like a prayer, because for me, dear Wladek, our Lord God is the first and you the second. Don't be angry if I bore you with my letters, but it is for me a great comfort to be able to speak with you at least through this paper.
Her financial situation grows steadily worse, and in 1912 she writes that she is "already barefooted and naked." The series closes with a letter from a friend stating that she is ill and in the hospital, "not so dangerously sick, but suffering very much ... and very weak from bad nutrition and continuous sorrows." He closes: "And please write a little more affectionately. Only do it soon, for it will be the best medicine for your wife, at least for her heart" (p. 368).
KEEPING BOARDERS
The life of the man who has come ahead has been made the subject of special study from time to time,[2] especially with regard to the housing conditions in which he lives--as a lodger or a member of a nonfamily group of men. It has been shown in all these studies that whatever the plan worked out, he adapts himself either to a life of intimate familiarity with women and children not his own, or to a life in which children and women have little part.
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, or as a member of a group of men attempting to do their own housekeeping. The Mexicans studied included 207 men, of whom 197, or 95 per cent, are unmarried. The Russians included 112 men, of whom 65, or 58 per cent, had wives in Russia. It is interesting to note that 136 of the 207 Mexican men were boarding, usually with a Mexican family, 37 were lodgers, and 34 were doing co-operative housekeeping. Among the Russians, on the other hand, there were 25 doing co-operative housekeeping, and 85 living with family groups, of whom only a few paid a fixed sum for room and board, while the others paid a fixed rate for lodging and the food bill depended on the food that was consumed.
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 lodger has his own account, the family has its own, and each pays his own.
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.