The Heaven... materials tell the story of two immigrant teenagers, Jewish-American Ida Zinsher and Italian-American Angelica Covello, who struggle to define their lives in a diverse and changing modern city. Ida and Angelica are composite characters, based on letters, diaries, and oral history interviews. Heaven... explores their work, family, and leisure lives, and in so doing seeks to illuminate the ways they navigated the cross-currents of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and culture. The “Heaven...” video culminates with Ida and Angelica's experience in the "Uprising Of The 20,000," a 1909 garment workers' strike that laid the foundation for the subsequent unionization of the garment industry.

Used with or without the video, this web site can help students explore a set of issues and perspectives important to the study of the American experience:

Immigration History: the immigration of millions of eastern and southern Europeans to urban centers in the U.S. at the turn-of-the-century.

Women's History: the work, play, family, and social lives of thousands of teenage immigrant Jewish and Italian women who toiled in garment sweatshops on New York's Lower East Side.

Urban History & Cultural History: the development of an urban commercial culture of amusements and fashions that challenged the more traditional immigrant and family cultures for the allegiance of young immigrant women.

Labor History: the "Uprising of the 20,000," a strike that mobilized young Jewish and Italian immigrant women -- and a range of allies from wealthy socialites to socialists -- against the garment shop owners.

History of the Progressive Reform Movement: the role of labor, particularly immigrant women, in the Progressive reform movement.

The Heaven... materials are based on a considerable body of scholarship in each of these areas. One important source, Elizabeth Ewen's Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars represents mutually reinforcing trends in women's history and immigration history; the effort to integrate women's experience into the study of immigration; and the corresponding effort to broaden women's history in terms of class, race & ethnicity. The experience of young immigrant women highlights issues of work and family, as well as questions of inter-ethnic relationships in early twentieth century urban centers.

Another key source for these materials was Kathy Piess' Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, which traces women's roles in the evolution of a youth-dominated commercial culture. Piess' groundbreaking study linked women's history and cultural history, exploring ways that young urban working women, including immigrants, experienced and helped to shape the rise of a “hetero-social” youth culture that included dance halls, amusement parks, and nickelodeons. Further scholarship in this area has debated the impact of these developments on the evolution of sexuality and gender relations.

In the same way, Heaven... draws on a large body of scholarship in labor history. Since the 1960s, a large group of scholars from Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery to Elizabeth Cohen, have broadened labor history from the study of formal trade unions to include the work and family lives of working people of all sorts—women as well as men, immigrants and African-Americans as well as native-born, unskilled workers as well as skilled crafts people, unorganized as well as organized workers. The “Uprising of the 20,000” represented a breakthrough in the history of the labor movement, demonstrating to the established labor leadership that young immigrant women, previously thought to be “unorganizable,” could in fact spark a vital and energetic organizing campaign.

Finally, Heaven... is linked to current scholarship on Progressive era reformers, which has stressed that Progressivism was not a unified movement but rather a diverse and sometimes contradictory set of responses to industrialization and urbanization. Exploring the experiences and actions of shirtwaist workers sets the stage for an examination of the tragic 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co., which sparked a successful campaign for workplace safety laws by a diverse cross-class and multiethnic coalition. In addition to highlighting the role of working women and men in reform coalitions, Heaven... can also point towards discussion of the Socialist Party, a vital but often overlooked force in the reform movements of this era.

The narrative, images, and documents presented on this site and in the Heaven... video are by no means the final word on any of these topics; rather, they are designed to be used with other sources, and to raise questions and stimulate students to engage in broader exploration.

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