| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920. By Suzanne M. Sinke. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. x, 295 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-252-02731-0.)

Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City. By Robert P. Swierenga. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. xx, 908 pp. $49.00, ISBN 0-8028-1311-9.)

"One of the basic laws of immigration," Suzanne M. Sinke writes in Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, "is that it rearranges gender roles" (p. 1). Her book provides ample attestation for that claim, although she also finds that one of the reasons for Dutch emigration late in the nineteenth century was the desire "to replicate a way of life that was under severe stress in the Netherlands" due to industrialization and increases in population (p. 9). Dutch women certainly increased their chances of marriage by emigrating to America, and they found that frontier society in the late nineteenth century was more egalitarian than what they left behind. Sinke notes that whereas in the Netherlands "a woman's dress signified her status in society," immigrant women very quickly turned to new clothing styles, many of them ready-made rather than homemade, as they easily adapted to a market economy (p. 75). Footwear also provided an index of assimilation. The author notes that most medium-sized Dutch settlements in nineteenth-century America had a klompen (wooden shoe) maker, but by the 1920s many had gone out of business.

Dutch women worked hard, both in the Netherlands and in the United States, and in the New World they became indispensable to the functioning of the household and, increasingly, to the work of the church, especially in mission societies. Women also often sought to preserve the Dutch language in an overwhelmingly English-speaking context, through their influence in the home and also with their support of Christian schools, which, at least among the Christian Reformed Church members (as opposed to the Reformed Church), served somewhat to forestall the transition to English. The desire to function effectively in the larger economy, however, militated against the use of Dutch, and the xenophobia surrounding World War I delivered the mortal blow.

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