Difference between revisions of "426--Week 13 Questions/Comments--Thursday"
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== Irish American Family == | == Irish American Family == | ||
I thought it was interesting how women waited until they were much older to marry than the other groups we have read about. Were there any other groups who waited as long as the Irish or was it just them? --Ashley Wilkins | I thought it was interesting how women waited until they were much older to marry than the other groups we have read about. Were there any other groups who waited as long as the Irish or was it just them? --Ashley Wilkins | ||
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| + | Diner mentioned other ethnic groups and made it seem like it was only the Irish who waited. I found her discussion of marriage of Irish Americans interesting. Young women were so eager to rush into jobs when they were single, but when they were no longer economic burdens on their families and married, they were eager to stop working and become mothers. I think she painted a pretty bleak picture of their marriages: that at best, the relationships were characterized by irritability and separate spheres.--Amanda | ||
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| + | I find the Irish tradition of late or non marriage impressive. It surprises me that of all traditions that were maintained when coming to America this one stayed. Most women in American were expected to marry young, and the fact that the Irish weren't was very different. While it economically made sense, socially it had to cause problems - Kellye S | ||
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| + | I also thought that it was interesting and somewhat surprising that the Irish men and women married at such a late age or never at all. With the emphasis on having lots of children, I would have expected them to have married sooner. The fact that they were able to maintain this tradition, especially as it was soon new to them, was also surprising. I was impressed that they would with go marriage to provide economic support for their families back in Ireland and in America. --Sarah Gardner | ||
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| + | This article seems odd to me for some reason, maybe because it touches on so many issues but is so short. For example, it states that Irish marriages were characterized by high levels of animosity. Making this kind of statement is really opening a can of worms, but then the article doesn't explore it very much. Compared to our other readings, this one seemed to just skim the surface of Irish immigrant families. -- Rebecca | ||
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| + | I also felt that this article threw out numbers and figures at us but didn't go into much depth with explaining this ethinic tendency. It makes sense that many Irish women felt that they needed to be single in order to raise money for their families in Ireland, but it feels like many ethnic groups would have behaved the same way. Diner explains that the Irish married later in life back home, but I seemed to walk away from this article with more questions then before. What exactly was the reason that the people in Ireland married later and why did it differ so much from other nationalites? Were there more troubled marriages in Ireland? - Celia | ||
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| + | Although this article doesn't go into much detail about the issues it raises, I think it does a good job giving a brief survey of what Irish immigrant life was like for women. After reading this article and the article about the Jewish women, it is interesting to note how much immigrant women do not fit into the cult of true womanhood. Since many families were female-headed households, women had to work longer to make money in order to provide for their family if they ended up being deserted by their husbands. --Kari W. | ||
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| + | I'm rather shocked that young men an women were able to hold off marriage for so long (at the time.) An attempt to assimilate and fit in with their new surroundings, you would think, would have pushed them into looking for spouses at a much younger age so I was rather impressed that they were able to keep this bit of their heritage and tradition for so long. I was even more surprised that American born daughters and sons agreed to uphold that tradition. I assumed that being raised in an Italian immigrant family in America would have made that importance of tradition difficult like we saw with some other immigrant cultures, but the author made it seem almost easy for them. -Kelly W. | ||
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| + | One concern or point of interest that I wish the article explored more was the Irish daughter. What influence did a mother-centered house have on her and her views of marriage? Since the Irish Americans as a whole were not as concerned with marriage what did that mean for courting practices? Was there a courting method or culture for the Irish Americans and if so what would that look like? – Mary Beth | ||
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| + | I think if courting methods were used by Irish Americans as Mary Beth suggests, it must have come from Catholic Church related event. Although one thing that struck as odd about this reading is how much an influence religion had on Irish Americans including women and the lack of marriages within this group of people and the increased desertions. For a people whose lives were largely influenced by Catholicism, why was the family in this reading described as so dysfunctional? -- Joe C | ||
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| + | == Working Class Families == | ||
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| + | I've always thought this was interesting, that even though the family needs the money and needs things to get done, they still have strict gender divisions. As quoted on page 103 of Stephanie Coontz article, "World-class families did accept a clear division of labor on the basis of gender, however, and often formulated it in terms of domesticity." However, I also liked that she included (even if a lot later in the article) that when the housewife was sick, the husband or males or children had to take on the 'women's work' because there were no servants or anyone else to do it. --Ashley Wilkins | ||
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| + | It's interesting how Coontz made parallels between ethnicities and also classes. Still it seems that ethnic divisions were very prominent even during the labor movement. The working class family ties in with our recent discussions of childlessness and the importance of children in families. The working class families knew that child wage earners were critical and they must have circumvented child labor laws. I was also surprised to read about the conditions of the women: that immigrants were still hauling water in many cases.--Amanda | ||
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| + | I found it interesting that though immigrants mostly only made up the working class, they had their own "middle class" and in some rare cases they would occasionally work their way up to be comparable to what Coontz called the native-born middle class. Those immigrants that managed to do this did so thought manipulation. I found it interesting that once these families became middle class they changed to mirror their neighbors. While it does not surprise me that they wanted to fit in, I just found it surprising that while they maintained cultural identity up until this point they quickly dropped it.- Kellye S | ||
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| + | I thought that Coontz's discussion on black family life was very interesting and addresses some of past class discussions on single parenting in black families. That black women found work easier then black men was also interesting and must have been a source of contention. It is sad that racial discrimination lead to the failure of black marriages and divorce. --Sarah Gardner | ||
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| + | I was wondering about the impact of immigration on family and labor history while I was reading this excerpt. Immigration played such a huge factor in the way that families were shaped and how families and people related to each other, as well as how labor laws played out. It really made me think about labor history in other countries where there was, as far as I know, less immigration and how they dealt with the rising need for unskilled factory laborers. Did they have the same difficulties as the US or if not how were they different? I realize that this doesn't fall in the scope of this class but it was something I couldn't | ||
| + | help thinking about. -Lacey | ||
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| + | Something else that really struck me was that in certain places it was the work that they did rather than the ethnicity they were that tied them together in a community. Coontz says that this phenomenon was limited, but I think that it happened at all says something about the relationship between immigration, labor and the control of the higher-ups. -Lacey | ||
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| + | I thought the differences between the middle-class cult of domesticity and the working-class cult of domesticity were interesting. In our previous readings we have read about the middle class imposing its values on other people, but this is an example of how the recipients of this middle class ideal adopted it to some extent, but also changed it to work for them. -- Rebecca | ||
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| + | This article was a little tough to get through. The author made many passing references to things I was unfamiliar with: the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the Great Upheaval of 1886, boosterism, housing stock. There were also things that I was a little familiar with, but still would have liked a more explanation on, like the Gilded Age, Petit-bourgeois, and the Knights of Labor. -- Rebecca | ||
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| + | It always makes me sad that women were hired because they were worth less. We learn about this tidbit all the time but it never ceases to kind of shock me whenever we hear it. Men hated women who went into the workplace because they would do their jobs for less. Now, not only did working class men have to fight with immigrant men and emancipated blacks, but they also had to fight with women who needed to work to survive. But in that environment, it's no wonder men were scared to send their wives out to work regardless of how badly they needed the income. -Kelly W. | ||
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| + | I found the first few pages about movements and the working-class interesting. The diversity among groups including ethnicity, class, race, skilled vs. unskilled, and city vs. small town limited the effectiveness of larger, organized movements. I think as a whole people tend to view immigrants as a class more willing to unite, but these first few pages proved that other factors were stronger than the common experience of immigration. – Mary Beth | ||
