Domestic Education As a Path to Transethnic American Citizenship, or How East-Central European Rural Women at the Turn of the 20th Century Received a Chance to Become American

The mass wave of transatlantic migration from Europe to the United States in the last decades of the 19^th and at the beginning of the 20^th centuries posed new challenges to the concepts of national identities and citizenship. The fact that most of the migrants were impoverished, uneducated, and rural workers created a sense of panic among the Americans who struggled to understand how the millions of European newcomers were changing the American nation. In response to what contemporaries referred to as “the immigration problem,” white middle class progressives promoted an idea of transethnic citizenship that allowed them to preserve the traditional race- and class-based concept of American identity and at the same time opened membership in the American nation to the large group of recent migrants. This paper examines how this notion of transethnic citizenship applied specifically to East-Central European rural married women. Unlike their male and female unmarried counterparts, they were usually excluded from the labor force and thus largely isolated in predominantly ethnic neighborhoods. White middle class immigration reformers confronted this challenge of isolation by proposing to integrate the women into the American nation through the campaign of “domestic education” that defined the rural East-Central European women through their status of wives and mothers. The immigration reformers found this status to be a solid foundation for transethnic citizenship, which envisioned membership in the American nation as traditionally defined by race, class, and gender while redefining what American meant in ethnic terms.