1 Covello, Leonard, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child; A Study of the Southern Italian Family Mores and their Effect on the School Situation in Italy and America (Leiden, Netherlands, 1967), 289.Google Scholar

2 Chudacoff, Howard P., How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Kett, Joseph F., Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977); and see Mirel, Jeffrey E., “Twentieth-Century America, Adolescence in,” Lerner, R. M., Peterson, A. C., and Brooks-Gunn, J., eds., Encyclopedia of Adolescence, vol. II (New York, 1991), 1153–67.Google Scholar

4 A recent edition of a popular college psychology textbook identifies the following stages preceding adulthood: early infancy, later infancy, early and middle childhood, and pre-, early, middle, and late adolescence; Cole, Michael and Cole, Sheila R., The Development of Children, 3rd ed. (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

5 On the increasing popular reliance on the advice of experts, see Baritz, Loren, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American History (Middletown, Conn., 1960); and Stearns, Peter N., American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994). On the triumph of the developmental paradigm, see, e.g., Harris, Dale B., “Problems in Formulating a Scientific Concept of Development,” in Harris, , ed., The Concept of Development: An Issue in the Study of Human Behavior (Minneapolis, 1957), 3–14; Bronfenbrenner, Urie, “Developmental Theory in Transition,” Stevenson, Harold W., ed., Child Psychology, Part I (Chicago, 1963), 517–42. On delinquency see Wirt, Robert D. and Briggs, Peter F., “The Meaning of Delinquency,” in Quay, H. C., ed., Juvenile Delinquency: Research and Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1965); and Cohen, Ronald D., “The Delinquents: Censorship and Youth Culture in Recent U.S. History,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Fall 1997): 251–70.Google Scholar

6 As early as 1870 New Haven's superintendent of schools expressed the ambition to extend a high school education to every child in the city. Thus, for example, in pondering the wisdom of continuing the requirement that grammar school graduates pass an examination to gain admission to the city high school, he argued that the very existence of such a hurdle implied that “the common school education is finished with the Grammar School” and that high school enrollment is the exception rather than a natural continuation of “the public school course…. This impression,” he concluded, “… we desire to remove and substitute in its place the conviction that no parent is justified, except from imperative necessity, in taking away his children from the public schools till the public school course is finished.” New Haven Board of Education, Annual Report, (New Haven, Conn., 1870), 17–18 (hereafter, Annual Report).Google Scholar

7 While Tyack and Hansot state that the term “drop out” began to be used in the first decade of the twentieth century, the New Haven Board of Education's Annual Report first employed the term in 1896; Tyack, David and Hansot, Elisabeth, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New Haven, 1990), 174–77. But see Dorn's history of the “dropout problem,” which emerged as a social problem, he says, not until the 1960s. Dorn states that the “dropout problem appeared despite improvements in the proportion of the population graduating from high school.” I would argue instead that the “dropout problem” appeared because of improvements in high school graduation rates rather than despite them. Dorn himself recognizes this phenomenon, but underestimates its effect as well as the extent to which the goal to make high school graduation universal created the dropout as a social problem from the very outset; Dorn, Sherman, Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure (Westport, Conn., 1996), 3; 15–18. There are three excellent histories of the formative period of the public high school in the United States, each quite different in approach, see Ueda, Reed, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (New York, 1987); Labaree, David F., The Making of an American High School: The Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838–1939 (New Haven, 1988); and Reese, William J., The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar

8 In 1890 the percentage of seventeen-year olds graduating from high school nationally was 3.5; by 1900 this ratio had reached 6.4; U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1951; A Statistical Abstract Supplement (Washington, D.C., 1960), 207. For a sample of the emerging concern among educators towards school-leaving, see Ayers, Leonard P., Laggards in Our Schools: A Study of Retardation and Elimination in the City School Systems (New York, 1909).Google Scholar

9 The complete list included: “Have to go to work to support the family”; “parents won't let me [continue education]”; “would rather go to work than study”; “sick of school”; “don't like school”; “monotony of school life is wearying”; “to be free of school duties so as to enjoy… [myself]”; “grammar school education is sufficient”; “high school is of no benefit if one is not going to college”; “lessons in high school are too hard”; “discouraged by older siblings about the difficulty and disciplinary strictness of high school”; “not practical enough”; “high school too strict”; “afraid [I] will be dropped”; Scudder, M. T., “A Study of High School Pupils,” The School Review 7 (April 1899): 212.Google Scholar

10 Annual Report, 1901–1932.Google Scholar

11 Buckner, Mabel A., “A Study of Pupil Elimination in the New Haven High School,” M.A. thesis, Yale University, 1930, 37, 58–9, table 20.Google Scholar

12 Smith, Timothy L., “Immigrant Social Aspirations and American Education, 1880–1930,” American Quarterly 21 (Fall 1969): 523–43; Thernstrom, Stephan, Poverty and Progress; Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Olneck, Michael R. and Lazerson, Marvin, “The School Achievement of Immigrant Children: 1900–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 14 (Winter 1974): 453–82; Hogan, David, “Education and the Making of the Chicago Working Class, 1880–1930,” History of Education Quarterly 18 (Fall 1978): 227–70; Perlmann, Joel, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (New York, 1988); Cohen, Miriam, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950 (Ithaca, 1992).Google Scholar

13 Olneck, and Lazerson, , “School Achievement”; Hogan, , “Education and the Chicago Working Class”; Perlmann, , Ethnic Differences; Cohen, Miriam, Workshop to Office. Google Scholar

14 See Annual Reports, 1908; 1915–32, for annual enumerations of children in New Haven public schools by ethnicity.Google Scholar

15 Altenbaugh, Richard J., “Families, Children, Schools, and the Workplace,” in Rothstein, Stanley William, ed., Handbook of Schooling in Urban America (Westport, Conn., 1993), 19–42.Google Scholar

16 Levine, David, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (New York, 1987), 203.Google Scholar

17 Covello points out that “Illiteracy statistics for the South pertained almost exclusively to men, since, with the exception of women of the galantuomo class, all southern Italian women were illiterate.” Moreover, he estimates that even these statistics do not indicate the true levels of illiteracy since they are averages based on the larger cities and administrative centers of the South and so do not adequately reflect the extent of illiteracy in the smaller towns and villages which may have been completely illiterate, “as late as 1913”; Covello, , Social Background, 245–47; see also Banfield, Edward C., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill., 1958), 20–22.Google Scholar

18 “Contadino” is an Italian peasant, but often the term is used by historians of immigration to refer specifically to a southern Italian small landholder or tenant farmer. It was from this group that most of Italy's immigrants to the United States came after 1900.Google Scholar

19 Covello, Leonard, Untitled TS, Leonard Covello Collection (hereafter, LCC), Balch Institute, MSS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.; also quoted in Covello, , Social Background, 249. On the resistance of the galantuomo to the idea of schooling contadini children, see ibid., 248–49.Google Scholar

20 Compared with the parents of children of other ethnic groups in New Haven, Italian immigrant parents' attitudes toward the schools were considered “antagonistic.” One investigator of the Italian immigrant school child in New Haven during the mid-1930s characterized a typical set of parents as “feel [ing] they know what is good for [their children and that]… they consider the teacher's suggestions superfluous.” In-depth case studies of pupils' family circumstances in New Haven's poorest and most densely populated Italian sector revealed a general “lack of contact” with the schools on the part of Italian parents in particular. The parents of children of other ethnic groups exhibited a range of contact, but on the whole, much more interaction with the schools; Whitelaw, John B., “The Administration of the Elementary School as the Coordinating Social Factor in the Community,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1935, Appendix C. For more commentary on attitudes toward Italian immigrant children in New Haven schools, see Butts, Carl and Young, Joseph, “Education in Connecticut,” W.P.A. Ethnic Groups Survey, box 37, folder 134:5a, p. 212, Historical Manuscripts and Archives Division, The University of Connecticut Libraries, Storrs, Connecticut; and Cutts, Norma E., “The Extent of Bilingualism and Its Effect on Beginning Reading in a Group of First Year Children Largely of Italian Parentage,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1933.Google Scholar

21 U.S. Congress, Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 30: The Children of Immigrants in Schools, vol. 4; 61st Cong., 2d sess. S. Doc. 5874 (Washington, D.C., 1911). This multi-volume study was known as the “Dillingham Report,” after William Dillingham, the head of the Immigration Commission.Google Scholar

22 The report was unusual in its effort to differentiate between southern and northern Italian immigrant children in every measure of school achievement.Google Scholar

23 Altogether Cutts cited thirty-one studies between 1919 and 1933 comparing Italian immigrant children with the children of other immigrant groups and/or with native-born whites in the United States; Cutts, , “Extent of Bilingualism,” Appendix, Table I; see e.g., Brown, G.L., “Intelligence as Related to Nationality,” Journal of Educational Research 5 (1922):324; Brigham, C.C., A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, 1923); Seago, W. and Kolden, T.S., “Mental Capacity of Sixth-Grade Jewish and Italian Children,” School and Society 22 (1925):564; Mead, M., “Group Intelligence Tests and Linguistic Disability among Italian Children,” School and Society 25 (1927):465–68; Kempf, G.A. and Collins, S.D., “A Study of the Relation between Mental and Physical Status in Two Counties in Illinois,” United States Public Health Reports, 44 (1929): 1743–56; and Brighman, , “Intelligence Tests of Immigrant Groups,” Psychological Review, 37 (1930):158.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 60–61.Google Scholar

25 Annual Report, 1898, 24.Google Scholar

26 This ended in 1932 when, due to a lack of funds, the Board of Education ceased publication of its Annual Report. Google Scholar

27 Perlmann, , Ethnic Differences, 119–21; see also Barton, Josef J., Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).Google Scholar

28 Hogan, , “Education and the Chicago Working Class,” and Lassonde, Stephen, “Learning and Earning: Schooling, Juvenile Employment, and the Early Life Course in Late Nineteenth-Century New Haven,” Journal of Social History 29 (Summer 1996), 839–870.Google Scholar

29 Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (New York, 1932); see also Davis, Kingsley, “The Sociology of Parent-Youth Conflict,” American Sociological Review 5 (August 1940): 523–35; and Parsons, Talcott, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” American Sociological Review 7 (October 1942): 604–17.Google Scholar

30 Covello, , Social Background, 289.Google Scholar

31 Covello, , Untitled TS, LCC, MS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

32 Ibid. Google Scholar

33 Covello, , Social Background, chap. 9, passim. Google Scholar

34 Ibid., 269.Google Scholar

35 Ibid. Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 265.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 266.Google Scholar

38 Covello, Untitled TS, LCC, MS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

39 When southern Italian immigrant women spoke of attending school in Italy, reported Phyllis Williams (a social worker whose subjects were drawn from New Haven's large southern Italian immigrant community during the 1930s), they frequently meant that they had been “enrolled in classes in embroidery in some neighbor's home”; Williams, Phyllis H., South Italian Folkways in Europe and America (New Haven, 1938), 81. Similarly, a woman who had emigrated from Amalfi in 1918 at the age of twenty-one reported that she had been a “teacher” in Italy before deciding like so many other young women in the region to leave to improve her chances of marriage. As it happens, what she meant by “teacher,” however, was that she had taught dressmaking and sewing as a young woman in Amalfi; “Francesca Lucia,” Interview by author, 5 October 1989, New Haven, Conn., tape recording (New Haven: Greater New Haven Labor History Association; hereafter, GNHLHA); also see Williams, , South Italian Folkways, 27–8.Google Scholar

40 Covello, , Social Background, 270.Google Scholar

41 “Frank G.—118th Street,” Personal interview by Covello, 20 October 1939, TS, LCC, MS 40, box 30, folder 16, p. 11; “Even the small amount [of labor] accomplished by quite young children,” observed Williams, “was frequently so necessary an addition to the family's efforts that they were kept from school for these purposes. The authorities of Southern Italy in particular realized that the enforcement of the so-called compulsory school law might mean the difference between existence and starvation.” Williams, , South Italian Folkways, 21.Google Scholar

42 See, e.g., Bell, Rudolph M., Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Change in Rural Italy since 1800 (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar

43 Browne, Henry J., “The ‘Italian Problem’ in the Catholic Church of the United States, 1880–1900,” Historical Records and Studies, 35 (1946):46–72; Vecoli, Rudolph J., “Prelates and Peasants: Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church,” Journal of Social History 2 (Spring 1969): 217–68; and Orsi, Robert Anthony, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, 1985).Google Scholar

44 Covello, , Untitled TS, MS 40, box 66, folder 18, unpag.; also quoted in Social Background, 262–63.Google Scholar

45 Racca, , “Selected Family Histories” (Tranquilli), TS, YRG-37, box 37, folder 288, p. 32.Google Scholar

46 Ibid. Google Scholar

47 Williams, , South Italian Folkways, 126–27; Covello, , Social Backgrounds, 268–70.Google Scholar

48 Early estimates of the city's Italian population can be found in Racca, , “Ethnography: The Italians of New Haven,” W.P.A., Federal Writers' Project, Connecticut Ethnic Survey, University of Connecticut, Storrs, box 67, folder 175:3, p. 1. For later figures see Myers, Jerome K., “The Differential Time Factor in Assimilation,” Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1949, 25–26. The school board's definition of “Italian” was any child whose father had been born in Italy. No significant growth in private/parochial school enrollment occurred at this time so these increases are not offset by gains in nonpublic school enrollments; Annual Reports, 1908–1932.Google Scholar

49 Annual Reports, 1900–1932.Google Scholar

50 See Modell, John, “Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation, and Family Income Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Hareven, Tamara K. and Vinovskis, Maris A., eds., Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1978), 206–40; Bodnar, John, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism,” Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980): 45–65; Hogan, , “Education and the Chicago Working Class;” Clubb, Jerome M., Austin, Erik W., and Kirk, Gordon W. Jr., The Process of Historical Inquiry; Everyday Lives of Working Americans (New York, 1989), chap. 4; and Glenn, Susan A., Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, 1990), 87.Google Scholar

51 Covello, , Social Background, 292. In almost all ethnic groups nationally, girls tended to have somewhat higher high school graduation rates than boys. Perlmann, however, points out that for “Slavic” groups throughout the U.S. (Poles, Liths, and Serbs and Croats) a pattern identical to the Italian bias against girls' schooling emerged, but all of these groups had higher overall rates of high school graduation than the Italians. Czechs were the only group with a high school graduation rate comparable to the Italians (at 15–16 percent in 1915) yet there was no apparent gender bias operating in this group; Perlmann, , Ethnic Differences, 118–21.Google Scholar

52 Covello, , Social Background, 287, 292; see also Perlmann, , Ethnic Differences, 89–90 n. 14 table 3.3; Gabaccia, Donna R., From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, 1984), 111–15; Miriam Cohen has shown how this pattern was altered for the children of second-generation Italian immigrants; see Cohen, , “Changing Educational Strategies among Immigrant Generations: New York's Italians in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Social History 15 (Spring 1982): 443–66.Google Scholar

53 Covello, , Untitled TS, LCC, MS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

54 Covello, , Social Background, 292.Google Scholar

55 Ibid. Google Scholar

56 Covello, , Social Background, 293.Google Scholar

57 Glenn, , Daughters of the Shtetl, 66.Google Scholar

58 Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1977), 182; Covello, , Social Background, 292. This was an ideal to be attained only if circumstances permitted, of course. Francesca Lucia, for instance, complained bitterly that because her husband suffered from asthma and could not hold a steady job she “had to be the man in the family” and work in the neighborhood dress shops while her husband stayed home with their young son. “Francesca Lucia,” Interview by author, 5 October 1989, New Haven, Conn., tape recording (GNHLHA); A U.S. Bureau of Labor study of five U.S. cities in 1907–08 reported that only 17 percent of Italian women worked outside their homes, yet Russian Jewish women did so even less; Glenn, , Daughters of the Shtetl, 68–9.Google Scholar

59 This concern is also addressed by Yans-McLaughlin in her discussion of the southern Italians' reluctance to permit daughters to work as live-in domestics for the same reason; Yans-McLaughlin, , Family and Community, 185.Google Scholar

60 Covello, , Social Background, 263–64.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., 264; and “Jessie Ferrucci Palmieri,” Interview by author, 16 May, 1990, New Haven, Conn., tape recording (GNHLHA).Google Scholar

62 Racca, , “Selected Family Histories” (Tranquilli), TS, YRG-37, box 37, folder 288, p. 29.Google Scholar

63 Still, as Judith Smith has pointed out, even this form of parental control had its limits: if a wage-earning daughter decided that her parents' demands were unreasonable she could resort to withholding all or part of her pay, leaving parents with little choice but to accede to the decision; Smith, Judith E., Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940 (Albany, 1985), 75–6; Child and Williams also discuss these tensions; see Child, Irvin L., “A Psychological Study of Second-Generation Italians,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1939, 135–36; and Williams, , South Italian Folkways, 98.Google Scholar

64 I say “formally” because, in practice, there were of course many ways in which daughters continued to be of assistance to parents after they married into another family. Moreover, immigration itself might physically foreclose any of the kinds of obligations traditionally associated with patrilocality. Smith, in fact, shows how, in Providence, many women's parents lived on the floor above or below them in triple-decker houses, often with a married sister in the other flat.Google Scholar

65 Mrs. Apicello, Personal interview by Covello, Leonard, 10 November, 1930, TS, 116th Street, N.Y.C., LCC, MSS 40, box 30, folder 16, p. 11.Google Scholar

66 Covello, , “Amorality of American School Education,” TS, MS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

67 Child, , “A Psychological Study,” 462.Google Scholar

68 See Covello, , Untitled TS, LCC, MS 40, box 66 folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

69 Covello, , Social Background, 327.Google Scholar

70 “Mria Betteti,” Interview by author, tape recording, 30 May, and 20 June 1990, New Haven, Conn. (GNHLHA).Google Scholar

71 Covello, Untitled TS, LCC, MS 40, box 66, folder 17, unpag.Google Scholar

72 In 1920 about 7 percent of the students in either New Haven (“Hillhouse”) High School or Commercial High School were of Italian descent (as compared with their representation in the population of all New Haven school children in grades 1–8 of 43 percent). By 1930 they comprised 19 and 23 percent respectively of New Haven and Commercial High School student bodies—20 percent overall. Children of Italian descent enrolled in grades 9 through 12 in either of the city's two high schools increased from 295 in 1920 to 1,132 in 1930; Annual Reports, 1920–1930; also see Lassonde, Stephen Arthur, “Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven's Working Class, 1870–1940,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994, Appendix B, Tables 9A-D.Google Scholar

73 See DeVault, Ileen A., Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, 1990); Rury, John L., Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930 (Albany, 1991); and Montgomery, David, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York, 1987), 457–59.Google Scholar

74 Annual Report, 1920–32; Commercial High School, Annual (New Haven, 1940).Google Scholar

75 Altenbaugh, , “Families, Children, Schools,” 29–36.Google Scholar

76 Becker, Gary S., Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (New York, 1975), 206–10, tables 16, 17, and 18. On the increasing importance of the high school diploma during the mid-twentieth century in two local settings, see Noland, E. William and Bakke, E. Wight, Workers Wanted: A Study of Employers' Hiring Policies, Preferences and Practices (New York, 1949), 45, 161.Google Scholar

77 Child, , “Psychological Study,” 385–86; see Supplement, chapter 5, 203, Table II of Child's dissertation for a summary of the disposition of youth's wages among his sample group.Google Scholar

78 Ibid., 386.Google Scholar

79 Ibid., 486.Google Scholar

80 Ibid., 324.Google Scholar

81 State of Connecticut, Youths in Search of Jobs!, Connecticut State Employment Service [Hartford, 1934 (F.E.R.A.Project C.P.S.-F2-87)], 26.Google Scholar

82 Ninth grade student in Fair Haven Junior High School, from Feldman, Estelle E., “The Dull Child and the Junior High Curriculum,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1936, 171.Google Scholar

83 Paula Fass notes the same tendency among college students of the 1920s and explains it as a product of youths' assertion of an autonomous peer culture that existed, indeed, thrived, in opposition to attempts by adults to regulate their behavior and norms; Fass, , The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's (New York, 1977), 172; Modell and Alexander comment on the same phenomenon in Abeline High School during the 1930s, Modell, John and Alexander, J. Trent, “High School in Transition: Community, School, and Peer Group in Abilene, Kansas, 1939,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Spring 1997): 1–24.Google Scholar

84 Nordli, William, “Rewards and Punishments of High School Students.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1942, 71.Google Scholar

85 In 1920 enrollment was at 1,830, by 1930 it had reached 2,583; meanwhile the city's population had decreased for the first time since the city school system was founded during the 1850s.Google Scholar

86 Additionally, four-out-of-ten students in the Boardman Apprentice Shops, the city's secondary level trade school, were of Italian parentage, registration at the school never surpassed 120 pupils; Annual Reports, 1900–1932.Google Scholar