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Chart of First Generation Immigrant Women's Occupations, 1900

In 1907, Congress formed the Dillingham Commission to investigate the origins and effects of the massive wave of immigration then underway. The Commission compiled a variety of data about immigrants and their children. This chart shows the percentage of working immigrant women ages 10 and older in different kinds of jobs. Not all immigrant women worked, however. For example, Irish immigrant women were twice as likely to be breadwinners as Italian women. Although the Commission gathered statistics on many ethnic groups, only six are shown here. Sometimes the Commission’s reports included Jews as a separate category, while at other times it grouped Jews with Russians, since most immigrants from Russia during this era were Jewish.


Source | Source: Adapted from Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission with Conclusions and Recommendations and Views of the Minority, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911).
Creator | American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
Rights | Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Item Type | Quantitative Data
Cite This document | American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning , “Chart of First Generation Immigrant Women's Occupations, 1900,” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed March 19, 2024, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1853.

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