Immigrant Mothers
Subtitle: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890-1925
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: February 9, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780252025341
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers; Women's studies; Social History; Women In The U.S.; Social Science; Sociology; American English; Literary Criticism; USA; Emigration & Immigration; Women's Studies - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / American; United States - General; History; Mothers; Public opinion; United States; Women immigrants; Xenophobia
First sentence: REPRESENTATIONS OF immigrant women were produced, and must be understood, within the context of a general feminization of the alien influx that was accomplished in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when older forms of anti-immigrant feeling shifted to an explicit racialization of the alien along the axis of gender.
Description: "The debate over "new" immigrants - primarily those from southern and eastern Europe - that raged in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century was dominated to a surprising degree by representations of immigrant women. Whether intent on welcoming cultural diversity, Americanizing new arrivals, or stemming the flow of unwanted aliens, participants in the debate drew from the same well of female images to convey their particular versions of the immigrant "problem."".

"Katrina Irving's close reading of novels by Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederic, and Frank Norris discloses the portrayal of immigrant women, especially immigrant mothers, as a reflection of larger cultural anxieties. In the wake of economic retooling and Fordist mechanization, Irving maintains, immigrants became feminized others against which native Anglo-American virility could be aggrandized."--BOOK JACKET.