Write an essay from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Italian immigrant young women working at a garment factory in New York City in the fall of 1910. You are from a large family with a father, mother, and five children (ages 5, 7, 11, 14, and 16). Your father does not earn nearly enough in wages for the family to afford even the bare necessities of food, shelter, and clothing, so other members of the family must work. Your mother must stay at home to care for the young children, but she earns a small amount of money doing laundry for single Italian immigrant men who live in a nearby boarding house. You and your fourteen-year-old brother must also work to help support the family.
You do not have much education, so you cannot find a better paying job than the one you hold at the garment factory. Because your family is dependent on the wages you earn for survival, it is not possible for you to quit your job and go to school in hopes of obtaining an education and a better job. Even a short period without your wages would leave your family in a desperate situation. Even with an education, job options for women in better paying fields are limited in this era. You must work and you see few paths for better opportunities than at your current job at a garment factory. Italian-American cultural expectations were for children to place familial needs above individual ambitions. Children, particularly daughters, were expected to work and give all of their wages to their parents. Having been raised with these expectations, you would not even consider leaving your family or withholding any of your wages in order to pursue individual goals.
By the fall of 1910 many garment workers in New York City are starting to question their wages and working conditions. Strikes are occurring at many garment factories. There are many articles published in newspapers about the subject and many speakers debating what is called the “overwhelming labor question” (on the labor question, see Give Me Liberty! p. 481).Although you lack much education, you are literate, and you read as much information as possible about this “labor question.” You have also attended several meetings to hear speakers address the subject, including one at which a businessman debated the leader of the United Mine Workers union, John Mitchell (on John Mitchell, see Give Me Liberty! p. 551). At this debate the businessman defended the legal doctrine, “liberty of contract.” John Mitchell offered a different idea about freedom, arguing that what workers really desired was “industrial liberty.”
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