Review by Choice Review
Friedman-Kasaba attempts to analyze whether immigration created conditions that enabled women to free themselves from Old World social constraints. She compares Russian Jewish and Italian women in subordination, empowerment, and adaptation to their changing environments. Using historical studies, memoirs, letters, unpublished documents, and fiction written by immigrant women or their offspring, she tries to synthesize the perspectives of feminists and "historical structuralists" (who focus on dynamics of labor market forces and relations in the receiving country). She questions the conclusions of "assimilationists," who assume that migration ultimately and inevitably led to greater economic or social self-determination on the part of immigrant women. Instead, the author describes far more complex and paradoxical experiences that vary with ethnicity, marital status, and family interactions, as well as with world economic forces and American reactions. Despite fascinating material in chapters on young single immigrant women and wives and mothers, however, there is far too much repetition of basic premises. The book is also so bogged down in sociological jargon that the scholar and certainly the average student will find it difficult to plow through. L. Mayo County College of Morris
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
