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Robinson, S. N. (2004). History of Immigrant Female Students in Chicago Public Schools, 1900-1950. N.Y: Peter Lang.
Pp. ix + 131
$24.95 ISBN 0-8204-6720-0Reviewed by Karen Monkman, DePaul University, and
Angelica Rivera, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignJanuary 2, 2006
Introduction
Stephanie Nicole Robinson’s monograph is an important contribution to scholarship dealing with the history of education, gender and education, and immigration and education. Robinson expands the historical narrative of European-American women in mid-twentieth century Chicago through her analysis of oral history archives which privilege the voices and experiences of Jewish, Italian, Polish and Irish women. Robinson tells stories of schooling and cultural adaptation from 1900 to 1950, and traces some cultural beliefs regarding education to their countries of origin.
Chapter One includes a broad overview of existing historical scholarship related to Irish, Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigration. From this existing literature, the author extracts educational data from those sending countries/regions (e.g., literacy rates, drop-out patterns), and also discusses justifications for educating girls (or not) in particular ways (e.g., family beliefs about traditional gender roles or the lack of need for educating girls). The author also states four points she intends to develop through the presentation and analysis of her data: (1) Americanization experiences were often different for women and men, (2) schools did not adequately address the cultural beliefs and practices of female students, (3) Americanization/assimilation programs were resisted by parents who sought to convey their own cultural systems to their children, and (4) parental beliefs and attitudes are based on gender and rooted in native cultures (p. 13). Following the introductory chapter, the next three chapters present historical data organized around issues of Americanization experiences, school policies and practices related to Americanization, and beliefs and attitudes toward the education of girls.
The second chapter includes a discussion of issues related to Americanization and gender, including women’s enrollment in night classes, factory classes, and mothering classes; experiences of learning English; entering the workforce; and making use of newly available social options such as divorce. The author talks about how immigration laws required women to depend on male sponsors, and how social security laws benefited male workers more than female workers when they retired. These kinds of conditions influenced how women were encouraged to or discouraged from assimilating, and how their assimilation patterns differed from those of men.
Chapter Three focuses on Americanization activities—citizenship and character education—in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Politicians and various interest groups, as they fought for power over school policy, promoted Americanization through education in this period when the numbers of immigrant students and students who spoke languages other than English were increasing rapidly, and when many teachers were Protestants of British descent. This chapter is organized around three objectives related to civic training: (1) learning about American culture, (2) learning “socially desirable habits” (learning how to act American), and (3) learning how to participate in group life (how to become integrated into American society). Tensions arose in some settings due to the strong ethnic (cultural) and religious orientation of many immigrants that made Americanization efforts problematic; these efforts were experienced as a rejection of who they were and where they came from. At the same time, however, there was (seemingly willing) participation in Americanization activities, and evidence that change did occur generationally but with societal barriers to acceptance. For example, the author concludes the chapter by stating that, while Americanized students were “different” from their extended (non-immigrated) families and parents, they were not accepted as Americans by other populations due to xenophobic curricula and beliefs; “they were outsiders in two cultures…” (p. 53). While cultural change (Americanization) did occur, this book’s focus on 1900-1950 limits discussion to only the first two generations, so we do not have a longer-term perspective of how, for example, Irish immigrants became Irish-Americans, and then became un-hyphenated Americans (Lieberson, 1991.n
Chapter Four, entitled “Old World Influences on Attitudes toward Schooling in the New World,” presents data on the four immigrant groups related to (a) attitudes and schooling experiences prior to immigration, and (b) attitudes and schooling experiences in the U.S., primarily in relation to women’s roles and educational attainment. The preference for boys’ education over girls’ was a common thread for all of these groups in their countries of origin as well as in America upon their arrival (p. 55). Robinson also looks at some of the historical and political factors that shaped women’s education in their countries of origin. Jewish women, for example, were not allowed to advance in educational pursuits prior to migrating especially if they came from the working class. In Italy, educational opportunities were more available to and sought out by Northern Italians, who had power in Italian society. After migration, Southern Italians had a harder time “assimilating” because of their darker skin color and lower social class status. This perpetuated negative stereotypes about Italians in the U.S. which were sometimes reinforced by the educational system and its leaders. The author describes how, in the U.S. the roles of immigrant women were challenged by an economy where women’s wages were needed in order to sustain the household. For this reason, many women had to enter the workforce, thus upsetting traditional expectations that women not work outside the home. Compulsory education laws also challenged traditional notions of women’s place in the home by keeping girls in school longer.
The final chapter states that “contrary to past historical scholarship, … immigrant parents were not against education” (p. 92), and that parental beliefs and attitudes were “gender based and culturally rooted in their native homelands” (p. 93). The author argues that immigrant women were able to continue their roles as their children’s first teachers, passing down cultural traditions and practices and thereby promoting cultural continuity. She further distinguishes her study from others by saying that “many of the studies done on immigrant attitudes toward education do not take into consideration the lack of opportunities to receive formal education due to politics, social norms, and financial circumstances…” (p. 93). Robinson suggests that historians should focus more “on the role of women within their families and society” (p. 93) and should delve more deeply into schooling experiences and attitudes toward education of female immigrant students. She also lists other locations from which data could be collected (e.g., Hull House, Catholic school records, ethnic museums), and argues that cultural deficit models should not be the basis of educational policies and that policy makers should strengthen their understanding of the role of gender in educational dynamics. Her list of recommendations also includes a more gendered approach to understanding enculturation and acculturation processes and school experiences.
While her conclusions and recommendations are pertinent, further discussion of and support for each would have been welcomed. The fairly extensive endnotes (17 pages) and references (15 pages) are useful for readers to both better understand the source of some of her statements and to pursue particular issues further, if so inclined. This book raises a variety of issues, relevant in the first half of the 20th century, and still relevant now. Following an overview of immigration in today’s Chicago, we will discuss methodological and theoretical issues in Robinson’s work and in the broader intersections of history of immigration, gender and education..
Recent Trends in Chicago’s Immigration
Immigration to Chicago continues to shape the social fabric, although the sending countries have changed to some degree. Eastern European immigration has continued and many more countries of the former USSR have significant populations in Chicago, although numbers decreased between 1960 and 1980 before increasing again. The Polish-born population in Chicago was about 90,000 in 1960, decreasing thereafter, and then increasing to 137,670 in 2000. Irish and Italian immigration slowed between 1960 and 2000 from 25,795 and 61,930 respectively in 1960, to 10,562 and 25,934 in 2000. Immigration from Mexico has out-paced all other regions, representing over 40% of the foreign-born population in the Chicago area, totaling 582,028 in 2000 (Paral & Norkewicz, 2003). Asian and African populations also increased during the second half of the 20th century, to 320,239 and 23,087 in 2000 respectively. The rise in Latin American immigration to the United States has been spurred by the promise of employment and educational opportunity, in part in relation to political agreements (e.g., NAFTA), and prompted by civil war and poverty (as in the cases of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, for example).
With the gendered nature of immigration (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994), we can also expect a gendered nature in which families interact with schools and engage in educational processes. The ways that American teachers engage in gendered educational processes (cf., Stone, 1994) comprise another aspect that could be analyzed in relation to the gender dynamics involving immigrant families and students.
Like the groups studied by Robinson, Mexican women also enter the workforce in the U.S. in order to contribute to their family income, experience limited opportunity to further their schooling, and encounter Americanization programs at school. Ruiz (1998), for example, whose work focuses on Mexican immigrant women from the 1920s to the 1950s, finds that Mexican women in the southwestern U.S. were also targeted for assimilation programs since they were seen as the transmitters of culture and child rearing. During this point in time Americanization programs were promoted by the Methodist Church and other Christian organizations in order to promote the conversion of Mexican Catholics. It was a different approach to assimilation as religious clergy and staff learned Spanish in order to develop trust and promote conversion. However, Ruiz points out that Mexicans were not passive subjects who simply accepted a new culture; instead they participated in what she has coined “cultural coalescence” (p. 50), meaning that Mexican immigrants choose what they want to borrow, retain what they want to keep, and, at the same time, create new cultural forms. Thus, culture is fluid and not fixed. It varies depending on one’s generation, gender, social class position and/or region. Robinson’s study contributes to scholarship that reveals particular aspects of this diversity.
One difference between the populations discussed by Robinson and more recent immigrant groups from Mexico and Central America relates to the proximity of the U.S. to the sending countries and the political relations between the countries. Unlike the European immigrants in Robinson’s study, deportation of Mexicans to Mexico has been quite prevalent during the mid-twentieth century and continues to this day. Mexican men and women have been defined as “laborers” but not as “citizens,” thus making “Americanization” efforts more problematic. The U.S. educational system attempts to “Americanize” students by assimilating them and avoiding what conservatives such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1991) have coined “The Disuniting of America.” In other words, Mexican students should participate in “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999) not necessarily for the purpose of citizenship, but instead to qualm fears of an increasing Mexican population in the United States. This also raises important contemporary questions about issues like assimilation for immigrants from areas where travel is relatively easy. Additive cultural change (Valenzuela, 1999) and transnational identity (Schiller, Basch & Blanc-Szanton, 1992; Basch, Schiller & Szanton Blanc, 1994) can become priorities over subtractive assimilationist agendas that seek an Anglo-conformity (Gordon, 1964, citing Cole & Cole, 1954) verson of Americanization. Cultural change processes are much more complex than simplistic linear notions of assimilation, particularly for some groups who seek to retain some of their ethnic and cultural heritage, and for those faced with discrimination which limits their ability to assimilate (Gordon, 1964). Robinson reveals the existence f this tension in her study. We need to understand the depth and nuances of this social dynamic more fully, however.
Interdisciplinarity and Theoretical Conceptualizations
In order to gain an in-depth and broad understanding of social phenomena such as immigration, gender and education, it is important to discuss historical data in relation to other types of data, other disciplines and particular theoretical frames. Immigration has been studied by sociologists, economists, policy analysts and anthropologists for many years, yet Robinson mentions primarily the contributions of historians. (This was her intention and, as such, should not be considered a weakness.) In the social sciences a variety of issues have been debated for decades; among them are assimilation, adaptation, acculturation, identity, transnationalism, and factors that influence migration. Embedded in Robinson’s study are various assumptions about assimilation as a goal or outcome of immigration.
Assimilation is a contested issue in sociology and anthropology, as it is argued by some that many immigrants are not interested in, and even reject, an assimilationist agenda. This issue is reflected in Robinson’s data, which illustrates that many women and families strive to maintain their cultural heritage while also seeking to gain the abilities to become more integrated in American society. This tension—cultural continuity vs. cultural change—is all but ignored in many of the early studies of immigration, in which researchers assume that those who immigrate wish to assimilate, and thus abandon their cultural histories. Robinson’s focus on gender enables the reader to gain a glimpse of this struggle to balance the new with the old, as it is often in gender relations where this struggle plays itself out. Readers should be reminded that notions such as assimilation, Americanization, cultural change, and the like, are not simple or benign concepts, but are contested by immigrants in the processes of constructing their lives and by scholars in their academic analyses.
Some of the lack of attention to the ways that these concepts are contested in this monograph is undoubtedly due to the limits of the data in these archives. The act of immigration, for example, seemed to be motivated, in large part, by unquestioned assumptions of economic push and pull factors in Robinson’s book. This is rarely the whole story, however. (See Massey et al.’s Return to Aztlan, or Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Gendered Transitions, for example, for more nuanced discussions of these social processes.) The converse is, of course, that much social science research lacks the historical depth of studies such as Robinson’s.
Historiography: Researching Gender, Immigration & Education
Robinson looked at both primary and secondary sources in order to gain an understanding of the experiences of Jewish, Italian, Polish and Irish immigrant women. Primary sources were used to get a better understanding of the Polish and Italian immigrant experience. The Immigrant Protective League papers at the UIC Special Collections are some key archives that helped to reveal their lived experiences. However, in the case of the Immigrant Protective League papers it was not clear whether archives on all four ethnic groups were available. Secondary sources were used to fill in the gaps for the Irish and Jewish experience. Reports and Proceedings of the Board of Education from the archives were also used to complement the secondary sources. Robinson also examined oral history archives entitled, “Chicago Polonia” located at the Chicago Historical Society, and looked at the “Italian Oral History Project” located at the UIC Special Collections. These archives provide key insights that have not been explored by many other scholars. Robinson provides a brief review of the literature in her introductory chapter regarding European immigrant education in order to explain how her work fills the gap. By using these archives the author privileges the voices of women who have been traditionally excluded in previous literature.
Conclusion
This monograph can inform scholars who are interested in issues related to immigration, gender studies, history of education, comparative education, and educational policy studies. A strength of the book is the comparative approach that was taken regarding understanding the immigrant experiences of Jewish, Polish, Italian and Irish immigrant women, with information about their lives pre- and post-migration. A weakness is that recent oral interviews were not conducted to corroborate the experiences that are salient in the oral history archives. Many people who migrated in the first half of the 20th century are still alive and many undoubtedly live in Chicago. In addition, the book could have been strengthened by a more direct dialog with existing scholarship beyond historical studies of immigration. Overall, however, Robinson’s contributions are useful in enabling us to better see the gendered dynamics in the interface of schooling and immigrant communities. She should be commended.
References
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach.
Garcia, Mario T. 1981. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lieberson, Stanley. 1991. A New Ethnic Group in the United States. Article 23 in Normal R. Yetman (ed.), Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life. 5th edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp 444-56.
Massey, Douglas, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand and Humberto González. 1986. Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paral, Rob, and Michael Norkewicz. 2003. The Metro Chicago Immigration Fact Book. Chicago: Roosevelt University Institute for Metropolitan Affairs.
Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. “From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America.” New York: Oxford University Press.
Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (eds.). 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Vol. 645, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 1991. The Disuniting of America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Stone, Lynda (ed.). 1994. The Education Feminism Reader. New York: Routledge.
Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: US–Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press.
About the Reviewers
Karen Monkman is an Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University, with specializations in sociology and anthropology of education, comparative education, and gender. Her interests relating to education include migration, immigration, and transnationalism; immigration and cultural dynamics; and globalization.
Angelica Rivera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the field of History of Education. Her dissertation topic deals with documenting the educational experiences of Mexican women in 1950s Chicago. Her interests relating to education include immigration, history of education, gender studies, and educational policy.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.
Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman
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