American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume II, Chapter 4 (1992). Places the experiences of immigrant women into a larger social and political context.

Betts, Lillian, Leaven in a Great City (New York, 1902). A study of the immigrant neighborhoods served by settlement houses.

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Focuses on the enduring yet modified traditions of immigrant families which helped them cope with industrial America.

Buhle, Mary Jo, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (1981). A useful background source for understanding the political and social context of the “Uprising of the 20,000.”

Campbell, Helen S., Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-earners, Their Trades and Their Lives (New York, 1890). An emotional study of women garment workers at various levels of employment.

Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement

Movement, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).

Cooke, Blanche Wiesen, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” Chrysalis 3 (Autumn 1977): 48. Examines the relationships and support systems for these four activists, and how their personal lives shaped their intellectual and political careers.

Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Beginning in the nineteenth century, this study examines the various voluntary organizations in which women gained valuable political skills, including the Women's Trade Union League.

Davis, Allan Freeman, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

_______________, “The Women's Trade Union League: Origins and Organization,” Labor History 5 (Winter 1964).

Dye, Nancy Schrom, “Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Women's Trade Union League, 1903-1914,” Feminist Studies 2 (Fall 1975), 111-25.

_____________, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Movement, and the Women's Trade Union League of New York (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1980).

Ewen, Elizabeth, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (1985). Italian and Jewish women's lives and experiences of acculturation.

Freedman, Estelle, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512-29.

Gabaccia, Donna, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social ChangeAmong Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany: State University Press, 1984). Studies how the move to tenement life in New York profoundly changed how Italian migrants performed work and play, and how women adapted traditional values of community networks to survive.

Glenn, Susan A., Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. The story of Jewish immigrant women from Eastern Europe who migrated between 1880-1914 and became garment workers and trade union activists.

Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976). Examines how working immigrants and their descendants confronted and shaped American industrial society. They formed partnerships which extended across ethnic lines while maintaining many of the customs and values of their homelands.

Hamilton, Alice. Exploring the Dangerous Trades (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943).

Howe, Irving, The World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).

Jensen, Joan M. and Sue Davidson, A Needle, A Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America (Philadelphia, 1984). A collection of essays in the history of garment workers.

Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978). Examines Coney Island as a symbol of the changes that took place in American culture and leisure.

Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Examines how women have struggled to reconcile their domestic roles with wage work, including protective labor legislation, suffrage activism, and their experiences with various types of unions.

Kessner, Thomas, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Examines immigrants' wage labor in New York City, including home work

Moquin, Wayne and Charles Van Doren, eds., A Documentary History of the Italian Americans (New York, 1974), p. 126, Adriana Spadoni, “The Italian Working Americans of New York,” from Colliers, March 23, 1912.

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Chronicles how cheap public amusements (which brought together white immigrant groups but excluded African Americans in many ways) flourished with the rise of American cities between 1870 and 1920, but declined thereafter.

Orleck, Annelise. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Orleck details the public and private lives of four Jewish immgrant activists: Fannia Cohn, Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, and Clara Lemlich Shavelson, including their roles in the 1909 shirtwaist strike.

Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986). Working women's experiences in nickelodeons, dance halls and amusement parks.

Polacheck, Hilda Satt, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl, edited by Dana J. Polacheck Epstein (Urbana, 1989). Personal memoir of an immigrant woman's experiences at Jane Addams' Hull House.

Rischin, Moses, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Analyzes the efforts of Worcester's workers to gain more control over their recreation, and conflicts over issues such as temperance and the use of parks.

Schneiderman, Rose and Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (New York: Paul Erikson, 1967).

Seller, Maxine Schwartz, ed. Immigrant Women (Philadelphia, 1981). A collection of stories/essays by and about immigrant women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985).

Stein, Leon, The Triangle Fire (1962). A very readable, dramatic account of the famous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Tax, Meredith, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (1980). Examines links between feminism, trade unionism and socialism.

Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (Toronto, 1989). Chapter 4 includes a historical and artistic analysis of Lewis Hine's photography.

Wald, Lillian,The House on Henry Street. (New York: Henry Holt, 1915). A memoir by the founder of the pioneering New York settlement.

Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York, 1977). See chapters 15 and 16 for a history of the Women's Trade Union League and a look at the shirtwaist strike through documents and personal reminiscences.

Yezierska, Anzia, The Breadgivers (1925). Autobiographical story of a young Jewish women's life on the Lower East Side.

Annotated Literature Bibliography:

Gold, Michael, Jews Without Money, a novel about growing up on New York's Lower East Side at the turn-of-the-century.

Malkiel, Theresa S., The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (New York, 1910). The diary is fictional, though written by an eyewitness to the actual shirtwaist strike at turn of the century in New York City.

Richardson, Dorothy, “The Longest Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl” (1905) in Women at Work, ed. by William O'Neill (1972). A fictionalized expose of conditions facing single, young working women in New York.

Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1971, orig. 1890). A landmark examination of the poor tenement districts of the Lower East Side.

Tax, Meredith, Rivington Street (New York, 1982). A citional treatment of immigrant Jewish women's lives on the Lower East Side of New York City.

Yezierska, Anzia. America & I (Boston, 1990). A collection of short stories, Yezierska presents a first-person account as a Russian Jewish girl who immigrates to America; her first American work experience.

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