New Homes for Old Part 2

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 noticeable among the Mexicans, who spoke with longing of their Mexican dances that lasted two days and were held almost every week-end, and of the band concerts to which they could often go. No matter how poor their furniture, most of them had one or two musical instruments which they played, and usually there was one phonograph for the group. They found these poor subst.i.tutes for group music, where they could have not only the music but the social time.

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 men was evident in the plans of the United States Housing Corporation.[3] These provided for separate lodging houses for men, where each man had a room of his own, with an adequate amount of air s.p.a.ce, and where bathing and toilet facilities were provided. Recreational needs were met by having a smoking room, reading room, and billiard room in each house, and, unless provided elsewhere in the community, bowling alleys in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It has been repeatedly emphasized to us that the men would not be satisfied unless a lodging house for them were run by some one who could speak their language, knew their national tastes, and could understand their problems. The availability of houses of this type to the immigrant men in nonfamily groups would depend to a great extent on their administration, but it is apparent that such a housing plan is not impossible of attainment.

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 not know, whose language she does not understand.[4]

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 circ.u.mscribed, 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 a.s.sistance 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, even though she is charged as much as the man lodger, who usually is exempt from any household responsibility. The inevitable a.s.sumption that any extra tasks of housework or sewing should fall to the women may make for a disproportionately long and tedious day for the woman lodger. The compensation of having the protection and sociability of a family group may thus be outweighed by the burden of overwork. Added to this, the prevalent necessity of overcrowding the households with boarders, puts a hardship upon women that often is not felt by men.

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 Inst.i.tute of the Young Women's Christian a.s.sociation 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 had a matron's office, so placed as to overlook the entrance and access to the sleeping quarters, and there was either a reception parlor or alcove for every twenty women, or a large parlor with furniture arranged for privacy in conversation. An a.s.sembly hall was provided with movable part.i.tions and set stage. Kitchenette, sitting room, and sewing room were provided on at least alternate floors, and the building contained an infirmary and laundry for the use of the girls.[5]

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.[6] In this way the problems and tastes of the different nationality groups are taken into consideration, confidence and co-operation on the part of the girls more easily won, and an independent and ultimately self-directed plan will be realized.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 ended. Many families do not establish a permanent home in the first place in which they settle, but move from place to place, and in each place there is a new set of conditions to which to adjust themselves. Of the ninety families visited in Chicago for this study, information on this point was obtained from only forty-two. Nineteen of these came directly to Chicago, but twenty-three had lived in other places. Five of them had been in the Pennsylvania mining district around Pittsburgh, two had been in North Dakota on a farm, two had been in a New Jersey manufacturing town, and the others had been at widely different places in other cities--New York, Philadelphia, Galveston, Texas, Boston--in small towns in the Middle West, and on plantations in Louisiana.

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 and women she saw on the streets, "having not been accustomed to see them in the old country." She wished to return immediately and did not even want to unpack her belongings. For a whole year she lived amid these squalid surroundings, until her husband got work in another town where conditions seemed a little better.

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 country the family still exercised productive functions as a unit. It had access to tillable land, and was an essential part of an industrial system that is still organically related to the stage of development of the country. It had, therefore, within itself, the sources of self-support and self-determination. The civilization of which it was a part may be a declining civilization; but the conditions of life were those to which the wife and mother were accustomed. She took them for granted, felt at home among them, and was not conscious of being overwhelmed by them.

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.[7]

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 that between June, 1914, and June, 1918, wages had increased 64 per cent.[8] The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics made a study of food. Taking the year 1913 as the base, or 100, wages in 1907 were 92 and the retail prices of food, 82, and in 1918 wages were 130 and food 168. That is, the price of food increased much more rapidly than the average union wage scale between 1907 and 1918.[9]

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 effect on many foreign born.

Many of the leaders in the immigrant groups who came here when they were still children, tell of stopping school and going to work. One Lithuanian woman, who is among the more prosperous of the group in Chicago, said that she stopped school when she was twelve, and went to work in a fruit-packing concern, working ten hours a day and earning five dollars a week, which she gave to her father. Another worked as a cash girl in a downtown store at the age of thirteen. Similarly, in one of the Russian families now living in Chicago, the girls were fourteen and nine when they came to this country and settled in a New Jersey town. The older was sent to work at once, and the younger a year later. Now, after nine years in this country, neither girl can speak English.

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 occupations from which young children are prohibited as wage earners.

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, especially to work in "the yards." Ukrainian and Slovenian women are also said to be working in large numbers, but Croatian women are still said to stay in their homes and contribute to the income by taking lodgers.

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, but his wife has been here only since 1910. For two years after their marriage the wife worked at night, scrubbing from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m., and received twenty-four dollars a month. Then there was an interval while her children were babies, during which she did not work, but the family lived on the earnings of the father. For the last two years, however, his work has been slack, first because of a strike, and later due to an industrial depression in his trade, and the mother is again at work, this time in a tailor shop, earning ten dollars a week.

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,[10] Montclair,[11] and Manchester,[12] in all of which a higher rate of infant mortality was shown for children of mothers gainfully employed.

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. They have pointed out that while the peasant women have been accustomed to work in the fields in the old country, their work did not take them away from their homes as the work in this country does. If they were away there was usually some older woman to take care of the children.

Here the work of the mother frequently results in neglect of the children and the home.

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 const.i.tutes 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 women investigated, and found many children locked in houses for the day, with coffee and bread for lunch. One child, too small to shift for himself, was found with his day's supply of food tied around his neck.

The women decided to open a nursery in charge of a Lithuanian woman who would be able to speak to the children in their own language, as few children below school age spoke English. The original plans were to accommodate ten or twelve children, but as soon as the nursery opened there were so many women wanting to leave their children there that it took as many as thirty children. The nursery was maintained for about eighteen months, and was then closed because of the difficulty of raising the necessary funds.

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 a.s.sumes 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 distinguished from the "familial" group, which is generally found in the old country. The grandmothers and maiden aunts, who were part of the group in the old country, and who shared with the mother all the work of the household, are not with them in this country. The older women are seldom brought on the long journey, and the maiden aunt is either employed in the factory system, or she sets up a house of her own, so that in any event her a.s.sistance in the work of the household can no longer be relied on. It is perhaps the grandmother that is missed the more, because it was to her that the mother of a family was wont to turn for advice as well as a.s.sistance.

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 times daily, and there were only a few variations in kind. Here the family soon demands meat, coffee, and other things that are different from the food she has cooked in the old country.... Occasionally the situation is further complicated by the insistence of dietetic experts that the immigrant mother cannot feed her family intelligently unless she has some knowledge of food values. In other words, the work of the housewife was easy in the old country because it was well done--if it was done in the way her mother did it--and conformed to the standards that she knew. It could thus become a matter of routine that did not involve the expenditure of nervous energy. Here, on the other hand, she must conform to standards that are constantly changing, and must learn to do things in a way her mother never dreamed of doing them.