| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Suzanne Sinke. Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920. (Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 295. $39.95.
"The history of immigrant women was a stepchild of both immigration history and women's history for many years" (p. 221). In her study of Dutch immigrant women, Suzanne Sinke makes this observation and, more importantly, contributes to changing that scholarly situation. This book both expands our knowledge about a particular group of women and enhances our ability to think well about the interaction of ethnicity and race, class, age, and religion in the experience of female immigrants. Drawing on an array of sources that includes published materials, collections of personal letters, and interviews recorded in the 1960s, Sinke describes her subjects' lives in a series of concentric circles beginning with family ties. In each arena of life, her portrayal is shaped by her conceptualization of the women's activities as social reproduction.	1
As Sinke employs this sociological term, it combines "kinship work, housework, status enhancement, and the work of caring and integration" (p. 3). In short, social reproduction is the work that produces and sustains social life from the family, to the neighborhood, to the congregation, and beyond. The radical physical and cultural disruptions of immigration rendered social reproduction an urgent task. Those doing the work had both to determine what to do and to do it in new circumstances, in which traditional patterns were not embedded and familiar resources, especially those of extended family, were not available. Although men were not excluded from this work, in the period under study and among the Dutch and Dutch Americans, women had greater responsibility for "making a home."	. . .

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