Americanization; Civics; Immigrants -- United States; Naturalization -- United States; Noncitizens -- United States
In districts where politically active social settlements and
similar organizations are influential, and in states which have
had woman suffrage the longest, there is a considerable appearance
of foreign-born women at the polls. But they are relatively few
in numbers, and consist of younger women from the more radical
parties, from those racial groups which display the keenest and most
aggressive social intelligence, such as the Bohemians, and from such
as in their own countries have had some experience with some measure
of woman suffrage, such as the Swedes and Finns. There is quite as
much tendency among foreign-born women as among native-born--perhaps
considerably more--to follow the husband’s lead in politics and to
duplicate his vote. In general, the political organizations have as
yet made little effort to capitalize the “derivative vote.” The mass
of it stays at home.
2. The campaign of the public schools, with or without the
inspiration of the Naturalization Bureau, to induce the foreign-born
woman to avail herself of formal educational work in the schools.
As we have seen, she does not, to any appreciable extent, respond
to this campaign. Social settlements, even attributing great
influence to them--though as a matter of fact few of them exert any
political influence whatever--are relatively few and far between;
churches, as such, and other institutions of the same general kind,
cannot be counted as substantially effective in this direction. The
foreign-born woman goes to church in large numbers, but she does not
get there any great impulse to interest herself in community affairs.
She goes back to her babies and her washtub.
It is in her home, in the intervals between domestic duties and
within arm’s length of the cradle and the kitchen table where she
feeds her children, that she must be reached with this inspiration
and instruction, if in any large measure she is to be reached at all.
This brings us to
3. The Home Teacher. The movement in favor of the creation of a
teaching force, employed by the public and organically a part of
the public-school system, to go into the neighborhoods and into the
homes and carry instruction in English, common-school branches, and
the elements of civics, follows logically from the treatment of the
foreign-born woman citizen as an individual, and from the fact that
she must be dealt with in or close to her home. Classes grouped
within a small section of a neighborhood, intensively instructed
by teachers who realize the difficulties and limitations of their
pupils, take on the aspect of social occasions, help to arouse
a neighborhood spirit, encourage mutual acquaintance, and most
effectively instruct those whom it is desired to reach. A movement
of this kind, spreading over the country and backed by the public as
such, follows the natural line of least resistance and tackles the
problem where it really lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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