Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [639]
Germans, whose flight was less chaotic, found it easier to reconstruct existing families and create new ones. Though early in the exodus 60 percent of the mostly youthful arrivals were male, by the late 1850s the gender ratio had evened out at fifty-two to forty-eight, and over two-thirds of the community were settled down in families. As a general rule, the higher uptown in Kleindeutschland one went, the more likely one was to find married couples predominating over boardinghouse singles. Yet those who did marry hardly lived middle-class lives. Some skilled craftsmen’s wives could afford to tend to their parlors, but with male incomes low and sporadic, women had to work if their families were to get beyond the basics or, in some cases, even to survive. Taking in boarders was one solution: over half the working women in the Sixth Ward over thirty did so in 1855. Taking in garment piecework was another, and young unmarried German daughters worked alongside their parents in tenement workshops. Even then, poor immigrant wives were, of necessity, out and about the town far more than their middleclass counterparts. And many immigrant women were forced to live and work in other people’s families: servants boarded with employers in sufficient numbers to give the genteel wards a decidedly feminine majority.
Among Irish women, moreover, the ranks of those who could not marry were increasingly bolstered by those who would not, or who delayed doing so as long as possible. Violence, drink, poverty, desertion: all these devalued matrimony for Irish women, continuing a Famine-generated retreat from traditional marriage patterns. Males and females in Ireland increasingly led sex-segregated lives—in the family circle, at church, and in places of recreation—and convents flourished in post-Famine Ireland. They thrived in New York too, because they offered sisters an appealing combination of spiritual fulfillment, power, respect, significant work (most orders being activist, not contemplative), and freedom from subordination to husbands and the dangers of childbirth.
A growing numbers ot jobs—products ot the city’s development as a publishing, communications, manufacturing, and fashion center—provided young and childless women with the wherewithal to survive outside traditional family units. For exploited seamstresses, this autonomy could be a miserable experience. For the old, the frail, and those with children, life without male support could be catastrophic. But others carved out a decent independence by doing “women’s work,” such as hairdressing, photographic tinting, etching, engraving, jewelry making, cameo cutting, enameling, toymaking, and bookselling. In addition, the city’s commitment to public education (and its desire to cut costs) created new opportunities. The ensuing demand for teachers was increasingly met by women, who worked for far less than male counterparts, and soon three-quarters of the thousand public school teachers were women.
Such jobs allowed single young females to live apart from parents. One survey of single working women in 1855 found over half living on their own in boardinghouses or sharing tenement rooms with siblings, cousins, or workmates. Conditions could be spartan, even harsh, with half a dozen factory girls crammed into a single garret. On the other hand, they were no longer obliged to cook, wash, haul water, and carry wood for their parents after they had finished their paid jobs for the day.
Efforts to improve wages and working conditions in female trades continued to go nowhere. Not only did the great labor upheavals of the 1850s almost completely exclude women, but the Industrial Congress adopted rigid positions on “woman’s place” and said female wage work was “incompatible with the true dignity and nature of woman.” The real solution was for men to be paid a “family wage” that would allow them to