Where Garments and Americans Are Made.
[Labor]. MacCarthy, Jessie Howell. Where Garments and Americans are Made. Story of the Sicher System of factory education for Americanization of foreigners, conducted in co-operation with the New York Board of Education—a challenge to hyphenatism. New York: Writer’s Publishing Co, (1917).
8vo.; black and white photographs throughout; glue stain to rear pastedown; teal paper-covered boards; blue cloth spine; printed labels affixed to upper panel and spine; light wear to extremities.
First edition of this volume “published in response to a growing demand for information on the subject from educators, manufacturers, social workers, clergymen, and publicists” (half-title). MacCarthy investigates the success of the three-year-old “Sicher system,” a factory school founded by Dudley Sicher that educates immigrant women in order to assimilate them into American society while they earn their living. The stigma of being a “hyphenated American” can be erased through the Sicher process of transforming “illiterate foreigners into literate, intelligent, alert, self-respecting, efficient Americans” (p. 1). After recounting the school’s short history, MacCarthy concludes that the school has thus far been a tremendous success and has “hastened the assimilation necessary to national unity” (p. 2), as well as equipped female immigrants (who are all, according to MacCarthy, “potential Americans” upon their arrival) with the “social knowledge essential for the battle of life” (p. 3). Many of the chapters are devoted to describing the progress of Marja, an immigrant girl who traveled from “King and caste-ridden Europe to America, the land of hope and opportunity,” and is now armed with the education that will enable her to raise her own children to be “Americans in education and ideals of life, government and progress” (p. 56). MacCarthy concludes that with the Sicher system in place, urban areas can eliminate the culture of poverty and ignorance that has plagued the “huddled, hopeless folk of the tenements” for so many years (p. 57).
Jessie Howell MacCarthy does not appear in any of the standard references; nor have we seen any other titles issued under this imprint.
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