No more a stranger and alone. Trade union, socialist and feminist activism: A route to becoming American.
Item
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Title
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No more a stranger and alone. Trade union, socialist and feminist activism: A route to becoming American.
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Identifier
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AAI9732909
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identifier
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9732909
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Creator
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Davis-Kram, Harriet.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Irwin Yellowitz
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American Studies | Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations | Women's Studies | Political Science, General
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Abstract
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This is the story of two immigrant Jewish women, Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, who emigrated to the United States during the period of mass emigration--1880 to 1917. Their experiences as wage laborers, political activists and feminists are explored in terms of the effects of each on their own lives, and on other women like them. The particular experiences of adjustment to a modern industrial society, and the tensions and responses engendered thereby, are discussed in the context of the immigrant experience and compared with similar challenges presented to young Jewish women in the world from which they had come.;This study discusses the connection between their sympathy for socialism, the trade union movement and feminist causes with the primary goal, to become American.;The choices made by these women will also be looked at in the context of their experiences in the old world and the new, and their perceptions of women's place in both Jewish and American society.;In both venues, young Jewish women were confronted with economic hardship, political injustice and new movements that promised change. In both settings, they were marginalized--by poverty, racial discrimination and institutionalized gender bias. In both venues, women sought to take advantage of educational opportunities, which they believed were the route out of marginality and were required for positive social change.;Radicals of Schneiderman's and Newman's sort could define and redefine the terms of their radicalism. They could accept the need for economic justice, empowerment for women and men workers, and suffrage for all citizens, and do so within the contours of an America whose promise had become tarnished, but whose possibilities were real. These women could move from the rhetoric of 1909, to the New Deal and to the Civil Rights, anti-war and Women's movements of the 1960s, without betraying their basic mission--to find justice, humanism and an end to marginality.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
