My grandmother was born in the 1880s, died in the late 1940s, and lived what I have come to think of as a nineteenth-century life.

As the daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born into a family and culture of working class poverty. She was literate but otherwise poorly educated. She married young, lost one child and raised five others, including my mother, who was her youngest. Grandma helped support her family first by working as a laundress for a wealthy Park Avenue family, and later by running a boardinghouse on the West Side of Manhattan.

My grandmother’s life was very tightly circumscribed – her family, relatives, neighbors, the Catholic Church, and the endless struggle of the poor to stay alive, stay employed, stave off illness, and educate their children in the hope that they would have a safer and better life. Continue reading →