The Working Class Family

Paper Summary:

This paper compares the working class family structure of slaves in the South and Italian-American immigrants, along with more contemporary working class families. It focuses on the Slaves in antebellum South and Italian-American immigrants of the 1840s in Buffalo, New York. Secondary sources are discussed and compared. This paper explains how capitalism effects their working class family structure.

From the Paper:

"Working class families in America have struggled for centuries against an economic system (capitalism) that seeks in every way to devalue the worth of workers. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the native-born working class was augmented by a huge influx of immigrants coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. These workers brought with them cultural differences from the native-born Americans (which should be taken to mean native-born but probably also relatively recent immigrant status in family lineage), differences that were then used to discriminate against them and put them at the very end of the employment queue. Also, during this time period, recently freed former slaves were moving from rural farm cities into southern cities and northern industrial centers. There was always a tension in new immigrant and slave communities between cultural values and norms and economic necessity, but while culture may have played a part in how these families were viewed by society, and how they perceived their own methods of organization, it was economic factors that determined working class family and social structures during the late 19th and early 20th centuries for every type of working class family."

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