How did the Italians that emigrated to America in the early 1900s live?
- Saturday Nov 14,2009 05:39 AM
- By diddy
- In Others
What kind of jobs would they get? Where would they live if they had little money? How did they get their jobs? (Were they self employed, working on the streets?)
Sources please, if you can.
-Edit- Please emphasise HOW the ITALIANS specifically lived, and especially HOW the Italian males would come to get their jobs.
Early 1900s, Italians, Jobs, Money
One Comment
Most immigrants would have worked in factories, or some men might work on the docks or on the railways, or do jobs like garbage collection or street cleaning. Married women often took in washing or sewing, as those were things they could do at home and watch the children at the same time. Boys would go to work as soon as they were old enough, but Italian girls, unlike other immigrants, were often kept at home by their parents. if they did go to work, they would most generally work in factories or sweatshops (sewing clothing) or in domestic service.
Most immigrants lived in tenement blocks, often in small, dark, poky rooms. Even though their apartments were cramped,they often took in boarders to help makes ends meet. Tenement houses generally had five floors, with the cheapest aparment on the top. If the building had a toilet, it would be shared by all the families on one floor. There might be a tap for water, which again would be shared with all the families on the floor. Cleaning was a constant battle, given the city soot and the number of people using every inch of a tenement apartment.
The contrast between life in southern Italy, where everything happened outdoors in the sun, and that in tenement house in a poor urban neighbourhood was hard on the newcomers. In Italy, women washed their clothes with their friends at the river. In italy, whome had done the cooking, sewing, and spinning outside. Their old hosues, with stone floors, had required cleaning only once a month. Now they had wooden floors that looked dirty even after they had been scrubbed. "You have no idea how simple life is over there." one italian woman said.
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