The Transplanted: Women and Family in Immigrant America

As any casual reader of John Bodnar’s major new synthesis, The Transplanted (1985), knows, the family is the central analytical concept in this work. Bodnar (1985: xvii) asks us to see immigrants’ adjustment to life in the United States in a new way—taking place at all “the points where immigrant families met the challenges of capitalism and modernity: the homeland, the neighborhood, the school, the workplace, the church, the family and the fraternal hall.” This represents a significant change—I would argue, an advance—over earlier studies which focused on the confrontation of ethnic groups with American society, on the interaction of modern and traditional cultures, or on the peculiarities of American class struggle (Handlin, 1951; Archdeacon, 1983; Cumbler, 1986).By focusing on small family units and a large economic system, Bodnar is able to escape from the confines of the case history, which has dominated immigration history since the late 1960s. Furthermore, he is able to focus quite properly on the considerable fragmentation that characterized most immigrant communities in the United States. Because small groups of immigrants responded to capitalism, they inevitably made differing decisions, both socially and ideologically; they also supported leaders with fundamentally conflicting views of the best interests and futures for immigrant communities. Bodnar’s immigrants, in other words, are human beings who make history, although never under conditions which they themselves determined. Furthermore, they are not isolated economist decision makers.