| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Diane C. Vecchio. Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America. (Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Series. Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. x, 130. $35.00.
This book examines the working lives of Italian immigrant women who settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in Endicott, New York, in the early twentieth century. Diane C. Vecchio argues that immigrant women, propelled by need, adapted to the economic opportunities that surrounded them. While she does not spell out the process by which single women or families made residential and employment decisions, the contrasts between the Milwaukee and Endicott cases demonstrate that where women lived was as important as their past training and experience in fixing their work lives in America.	1
Women and men, immigrant and native-born, moved to Endicott to work at the Endicott Johnson shoe factory, there being little other employment in the community. Italian women came to town because of family decisions to go to Endicott Johnson or because relatives already living there promised to assist them in finding work in shoemaking. Because of the ready availability of work, a forty-hour work week, and employer accommodation to mothers' life cycles, Italian women often entered Endicott Johnson as single women and worked intermittently after marriage as they bore and raised children.	2
The stories of Italian women at the Endicott Johnson Company send us mixed messages about corporate welfare practices of the early-twentieth century. Company founder George F. Johnson promoted worker loyalty and docility and controlled wages by offering workers maternity leaves, company-funded medical care, and other benefits. Endicott Johnson assisted female heads of household as well as other workers in becoming homeowners, but workers rarely gained notable promotions or wage increases.	. . .

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