Poor, Jewish Woman

It’s 1892 and you, Esther Klein, are a 17-year-old textile mill worker in the American northeast. You are new to the country and to industrial work, having worked previously on your parents’ farm in the old country. As much as you longed to come to America, your life as a poor Jewish industrial worker in the United States makes you have second thoughts. And life at the mill—why you and some of the other girls dream of organizing and standing up to the mill owners, but what you’ve seen of other labor organizing worries you! So tell me, Esther, what are the sources of your dissatisfaction as a poor woman, a worker, and a Jewish immigrant? Why have your dreams, of what life in America would be, changed?

I came to America to change my stars. I fled with hopes of seeking a better life than the political and religious persecution I received as a Jewish girl in Europe. America was portrayed to be a land with a boosting economy and industrial revolution, not to mention the freedom to be who you are. It was the land of the free. We were thrilled to come. It didn’t take long for me to see the true colors of America, beneath the natural resources and the boom of transportation, communication through scientific breakthroughs, such as electricity and railroads.
There were many jobs, but with harsh conditions. I experienced my first discrimination working as a girl in the textile mill industry. I was forced to work extreme hours, with less than half the pay of the men workers. I was unskilled, coming from Europe, to do the entrepreneur sorts of jobs that were making America explode. Because I was unskilled, I could be easily replaced. I had to work under my employers conditions, simply because I needed a job. Not to mention, some of the jobs a young woman such as myself were forced to do were monotonous. They were tedious. We had little respect and our employer had no relationship with me.
As a poor, Jewish woman I couldn’t rise to be anything else than the condition of an unskilled worker. I had no advantage. The white supremacy Americans had never seen dark hair and eyed Europeans. They made it a point to separate us, therefore we separated ourselves. I was also thought of as a job stealer. I came to America to seek the prosperity of the west, only to find that it was nearly impossible for me to get out of poverty.
The land I once sought so dear and full of hope, left me, a poor, Jewish woman, hopeless. I once thought of America as the land of the free. I came to witness unequal pay for the same job, a culture that was completely against the individual, completely for the rich. The government feed the rich and deprived the poor. We were forced to stick together in a close-knit community by sticking to the only thing we’ve ever known, our culture, our language, our religion.