Diversity

Women in Urban life

• Middle and upper class women did not generally work in the cities historically.

• The term female domesticity developed to portray how women were supposed to stay at home and be responsible for raising children and maintaining the household.

• Rooms in the home were divided by gender, couples could have separate bedrooms, men had their study and women had morning rooms or drawing rooms for entertaining female visitors.

Gendered residential space

• During the progressive era in the 20th century, homes began to be designed with open floor plans, central heating, and electricity sockets.

• Rooms no longer were divided by gender as families sought larger living rooms and indoor bathrooms.

• The introduction of appliances like irons, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners dramatically reduced the amount of time needed for labor in the house.

Housing choices• At first, studies showed that men preferred

living in the suburbs more than women.• It was believed that living in suburban homes

rather than urban areas added the workload on women in the home and also limited their social activity.

• However, today the reverse is true as a majority of middle class women work outside the home, they now prefer the suburbs more so than men.

Workplace changes• Women have been working for centuries to catch up

with men in the workplace. • The gap has closed in recent years but a major

restraint on that progress has been that married women with children generally take more of the responsibility for home and child care than men do.

• Men and women still cluster into different personality characteristics, men tend to place greater emphasis on power and money while being more likely to take risks. Women are more creative and prefer working collaboratively.

White Ethnic Groups

• American immigration was the largest mass migration in the history of the World.

• It is estimated that 45 million immigrants arrived in the U.S. prior to the 1920s when immigration laws became stricter.

• The foreign born population currently living in the U.S. is skyrocketing currently due to both legal and illegal immigration.

First-Wave Immigrants

• Most of the country’s early immigrants in the 1600s and 1700s came from Great Britain.

• British customs and laws became the norm throughout the country and Protestantism became the de facto national religion.

• The founding fathers believed in a open immigration system welcoming both the wealthy and the poor from Europe.

Second-Wave Immigrants• The second wave of ethnic immigration lasted from

roughly 1820 to 1880.• The Irish were the largest and first of these

immigrants followed by the Germans and the Scandinavians from Northern Europe.

• Once the Germans overcame their language barrier, they assimilated quickly into American culture. They were mostly Protestant and became known for their work ethnic.

• The Irish encountered more problems. They tended to be very poor and did not have experience in industrial areas since Ireland was mostly rural at the time.

Third-Wave Immigrants

• The third wave of immigration took place between 1880 and the 1920s.

• These immigrants came mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe.

• This included Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavics, and many Jewish people from an assortment of countries in Europe.

• By this point in history, most of the profitable rural land had been claimed, so immigrants largely stayed in clusters in the cities as the Irish had.

Third-Wave Immigrants

• These immigrants encountered much opposition from native born Americans and WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

• To many Americans, these immigrants represented a threat to American way of life and their presence led to a stigma associated with particular neighborhoods in cities.

• Immigrants had to take factory jobs in the central city and clustered in these areas for economic purposes and to maintain a sense of their traditions and customs.

Racial Inferiority and Immigration

• The term race was used interchangeably with ethnicity in the 1800s so it was common to hear “Italian race” though this would not happen today.

• Many scholars at the time believed that the third wave of immigration was genetically inferior to the old immigrants of Britain and Germany who were physically and mentally superior.

Racial Inferiority and Immigration• Laws were passed in the 1920s to establish quotas

where only a certain number of immigrants were allowed to enter the U.S. each year.

• These quotas were heavily biased towards Western and Northern Europe. Half of the total quota went to England, Germany, and Ireland.

• This heavily reduced immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and quotas were not eliminated until 1968.

• This led to the final fourth wave of immigration, which we will discuss later.

African Americans• The first African Americans in the colonies were

indentured servants who often came to the colonies with families they had worked for in Britain.

• In the South, this system changed quickly to a slavery system that lasted for life rather than a period of five or seven years like indentured servants.

• Many of the founding fathers such as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison owned slaves, while advocating a philosophy of freedom. However, many of their writings indicated that they were not comfortable with slavery privately.

Population Changes

• The proportion of African Americans declined heavily in the 1800s due to mass white immigration from Europe.

• The number of African Americans in the population has consistently increased since the 1700s, but the proportion in the total population has only marginally increased since European immigration slowed in the 1920s.

• After the Civil War, there was a mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

Slavery in Cities

• Plantation owners were strongly opposed to the use of slaves in urban factories, fearing correctly that it would to the decline of the institution.

• Factory owners could not use the iron-fisted methods of the wealthy plantation owners to keep and maintain their slaves.

• A result of this was in the few major cities of the South, slavery actually decreased leading up to the Civil War.

Free Persons of Color

• About one-eighth of African Americans in the South were free prior to the Civil War and in cities like Richmond or in border states that were less plantation dominated, the proportion was much higher.

• It was rare, but some free wealthy African Americans did own slaves of their own.

• The presence of free African Americans and those who owned slaves were a major threat to the system because it showed the illogical argument of racial superiority.

Jim Crow Laws• Segregation of the South was not common

until well after the Civil War. • Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 legalized segregation

which existed in the South until 1954 when Brown v. Board of Ed. ruled it unconstitutional.

• Although African Americans had the right to vote due to the 15th Amendment, many Southern states used literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise African-Americans.

The Great Migration

• World War I was the first time in history where European immigration was cut off.

• Many African-Americans saw the opportunity for jobs in the industrial north that were suddenly open as young white men joined the army.

• Recruiters were used by companies to lure African-Americans north which was met with harsh resistance in the South.

The Great Migration• Cotton production was shifting west and

technological improvements lessened the need for farm hands.

• There were three streams of migration that made up the Great Migration.

• The first was from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida to the major cities along the East Coast like New York. The second was from the deep South in Mississippi and Alabama into the Midwestern cities like St. Louis. The third stream was from Texas and Louisiana to Los Angeles and the West Coast.

Moving South

• Today, African Americans are moving back to the South from the North and the Midwest where they have more economic opportunities.

• African Americans are moving into cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston where housing is more affordable and there are more middle class jobs.

Urban Segregation Patterns• Social and residential segregation decreased as

white ethnic groups prospered and began to move out of the center city into the suburbs.

• In some areas, Hispanics have moved into suburbs at greater rates than African Americans.

• “Color lines” still exist de facto in many cities and are more prominent in northern cities like New York and Boston than southern ones like Richmond and Atlanta.

21st Century Diversity

• The number of middle class and wealthy African Americans has steadily increased since the Civil Rights era, however poor African Americans still face struggles in urban neighborhoods.

• These groups are often looked at separately because they lead such vastly different lives.

• African Americans with college degrees have mostly closed the income gap with whites, but those with less than high school education lag far behind.

21st Century Diversity• There is a major gender gap between African

American women and men, women are far more likely to graduate from college and this trend has shown no signs of stopping.

• In cities more so than suburbs, the African American middle class is considered to face more obstacles than whites of the same income. There tends to be more division in cities than suburbs.

The Disadvantaged

• Poor African Americans have not benefitted from policies of affirmative action the same way that middle class African Americans have.

• Living wage jobs in the cities from those coming off welfare or unemployment have largely been outsourced or disappeared.

• This eliminated a large number of jobs for young African American males without college degrees and took away opportunities to move into the middle class.

The Disadvantaged

• Education levels have not increased for poor African Americans.

• One of the major effects of this has been a major decrease in the lack of marriageable (financially secure) African American men relative to the number of marriageable women. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births skyrocketed from the 1960s to the 1990s although there is evidence that this trend has recently slowed.