Autobiography Topics Which Autobiographies Offer Evidence on Each Topic Objective, Verifiable Claims Subjective, Unverifiable Claims Working conditions in 1890s urban United States Immigrant families' reliance on daughters' paid labor Tone of neighbors' interactions with settlement residents Programs at settlement houses Health services in immigrant neighborhoods Opportunities offered to neighbors by settlement houses Hilda Satt Polacheck, Rose Gollup Cohen, and Rosa Cassettari were only three of the 23

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Autobiography Topics Which Autobiographies Offer Evidence on Each Topic Objective, Verifiable Claims Subjective, Unverifiable Claims Working conditions in 1890s urban United States Immigrant families' reliance on daughters' paid labor Tone of neighbors' interactions with settlement residents Programs at settlement houses Health services in immigrant neighborhoods Opportunities offered to neighbors by settlement houses Hilda Satt Polacheck, Rose Gollup Cohen, and Rosa Cassettari were only three of the 23.5 million immigrants who came to the United States in the years between 1880 and 1920, and only three of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in that era whose lives were significantly shaped by contact with a social settlement house in their urban neighborhoods. We know this because we have these women's memoirs, their first-person recollections of their travel to the United States in the 1890s and their families' arduous struggles to survive the harsh conditions that so many immigrants faced at the turn of the twentieth century. Few immigrants from this era, even fewer female immigrants, left memoirs. So while historians have an abundance of materials testifying to the importance of social settlement houses to immigrant neighborhoods, and the importance of the middle-class, American-born women running those settlements, we have just a handful of memoirs that offer the immigrants' view of social settlements. The Polacheck, Cohen, Location 2272 and Cassettari memoirs are notable because they tell us about the challenges female immigrants faced and how women in the settlement houses helped them to meet those challenges. Hilda Satt Polacheck moved with her middle-class family from Poland to Chicago in 1892 when she was ten years old. Rose Gollup left her peasant life in Russia in 1892 at age eleven and became a wage earner in New York City to help her father pay for her family's passage to America. Rosa Cassettari relocated to the Missouri minefields as a teenager in 1884 to join a brutal husband she had already learned to fear back home in Italy. These three women do not, of course, represent all those who emigrated to the United States in these years, but their compelling recollections humanize the staggering rows of immigration statistics from the U.S. census. In the 1880s alone, 5.2 million immigrants arrived in Location 2279 the United States. This was more than the 3.7 million who came during the economic depression of the 1890s, but far less than the 8.8 million who landed between 1900 and 1910. Just the names of these three immigrants — Satt Polacheck, Gollup Cohen, and Cassettari — remind us that the nationalities of immigrants to the United States changed dramatically in these years. Up until 1890, the vast majority of immigrants had come from Germany, Ireland, England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The expanded wave of immigrants who came after 1890, however, were from southern and eastern Europe, from Italy, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and from the territory between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea known as the “Pale of Settlement," where the ruling Russian government confined 5 million Polish and Russian Jews. Changing economic conditions in Europe played a role in altering the composition of the emigrant flow to the United States, as did Russian government attacks on Jews. At Location 2286 the same time, expanding industrialization in the United States increased the demand for workers when northern race prejudice prevented the hiring of southern blacks. So at the very time that southern and eastern Europeans were feeling pushed out of their homes, American labor demand was pulling them across the Atlantic. Certain citizens in the United States feared foreigners, even though their own parents or grandparents had been immigrants. They argued that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were biologically and culturally inferior to the "old" immigrants from northern and western Europe and, therefore, would degrade the U.S. bloodstream and corrupt its democratic system of government. These "nativists” blamed immigrants' poverty on their supposedly innate stupidity and depravity; they dismissed as futile all civic efforts that tried to improve the living and working conditions in Location 2293 that they could be the collective architects of their national fate by passing laws that shaped the human environment. For example, progressives advocated for legal restraints on corporate monopolies; minimum wage laws; regulations on the health conditions in factories; limits on child labor; compulsory education; and rules ensuring clean water, clean milk, clean meat, and uncorrupted medications. Although progressives disagreed among themselves about workers' right to unionize, women's right to vote, restrictions on the volume of immigrants, and blacks' claim to equal status, they shared the basic conviction that activist governments could encourage the everyday living conditions needed for all individuals in the United States to make the most of their lives. Location 2306 the same time, expanding industrialization in the United States increased the demand for workers when northern race prejudice prevented the hiring of southern blacks. So at the very time that southern and eastern Europeans were feeling pushed out of their homes, American labor demand was pulling them across the Atlantic. Certain citizens in the United States feared foreigners, even though their own parents or grandparents had been immigrants. They argued that the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were biologically and culturally inferior to the "old" immigrants from northern and western Europe and, therefore, would degrade the U.S. bloodstream and corrupt its democratic system of government. These "nativists” blamed immigrants' poverty on their supposedly innate stupidity and depravity; they dismissed as futile all civic efforts that tried to improve the living and working conditions in Location 2293 industrial American cities, where “new” immigrants comprised a sizeable share of the population. This laissez faire — leave it be — position served the interests of industrial capitalists who were happy to bring foreigners to the United States to work but did not want to pay the wages or create the working conditions that would enable immigrant families to move out of poverty. For nativists and many employers, immigrant poverty in isolated urban ghettos was just a fact of life; it was not something that called for civic intervention. A number of middle-class and working-class Americans in these years put forth a competing view, which they defined as a “progressive” approach to social, cultural, economic, and political life in a diverse, industrializing democracy. Led by U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives appealed to Americans' belief Location 2299 that they could be the collective architects of their national fate by passing laws that shaped the human environment. For example, progressives advocated for legal restraints on corporate monopolies; minimum wage laws; regulations on the health conditions in factories; limits on child labor; compulsory education; and rules ensuring clean water, clean milk, clean meat, and uncorrupted medications. Although progressives disagreed among themselves about workers' right to unionize, women's right to vote, restrictions on the volume of immigrants, and blacks' claim to equal status, they shared the basic conviction that activist governments could encourage the everyday living conditions needed for all individuals in the United States to make the most of their lives. Location 2306 Figure 4.1. Lower East Side street This photograph of children on the Lower East Side of New York City was taken in 1911, almost twenty years after Rose Cohen was a child laborer in that immigrant neighborhood. Even so, it offers us a lively, candid glimpse of the urban street life that would have been as familiar to Rosa Cassettari and Hilda Polacheck in Chicago as to Rose Cohen in New York. The horse cart in the background is a reminder that automobiles had not yet crowded children off the streets in working-class neighborhoods; with few public playgrounds available to them, such children typically played in the streets. But the spontaneous style of this photo was more common in the 1910s than in the 1890s as technological developments made it easier and cheaper for everyday folks to own cameras and take “snapshots” rather than stilted, posed photographs. American women were more influential in the progressive era than they had been at any time in American political life (or would be again until the 1970s). Here, as with immigration, we find a coincidence of causes: a new population of college-educated women with ambitions beyond private domestic life was coming on the scene just when Location 2313 public debate was turning to the health and welfare of vulnerable immigrant families, especially the women and children in those families. Progressive women were imbued with the “maternalist” belief that every person deserved an opportunity to thrive and that all women shared a special talent for giving the care needed to create that opportunity. Progressive women were also determined to make caregiving a legitimate feature of public policy, and they created unique social programs to achieve their goals. Prominent among their innovations was the “social settlement house." Men like Dr. Graham Taylor of the Chicago Commons Settlement were active in the social settlement movement, but it was female leaders like Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull-House Settlement and Lillian Wald of New York City's Henry Street Settlement who gave the movement its tone, direction, and prominence. Location 2322