What We’re Reading Now: Making Progress

Specially curated by our team, find your next favorite read at the Tenement Museum Shop! From The Scarlet Sisters by Myra Macpherson to Tyler Anbinder’s Irish New York, check out what we’re reading now—highlighting books that celebrate Women’s History and Irish American Heritage Month.

The Scarlet Sisters:
Sex, Suffrage, and Scandal in the Gilded Age
Myra MacPherson

A fresh look at the life and times of Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin, two sisters whose radical views on sex, love, politics, and business threatened the white male power structure of the nineteenth century and shocked the world. Here award-winning author Myra MacPherson deconstructs and lays bare the manners and mores of Victorian America, remarkably illuminating the struggle for equality that women are still fighting today.

Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin-the most fascinating and scandalous sisters in American history-were unequaled for their vastly avant-garde crusade for women’s fiscal, political, and sexual independence. They escaped a tawdry childhood to become rich and famous, achieving a stunning list of firsts.

$29.99

The Irish Bridget:
Irish Women in Domestic Service in America
Margaret Lynch-Brennan

“Bridget” was the Irish immigrant service girl who worked in American homes from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early years of the twentieth. She is widely known as a pop culture cliché: the young girl who wreaks havoc in middle-class American homes. Now, in the first book-length treatment of the topic, Margaret Lynch-Brennan tells the real story of such Irish domestic servants, often in their own words, providing a richly detailed portrait of their lives and experiences.

$24.95

Las Madres
Esmeralda Santiago

From the award-winning, best-selling author of When I Was Puerto Rican, a powerful novel of family, race, faith, sex, and disaster that moves between Puerto Rico and the Bronx, revealing the lives and loves of five women and the secret that binds them together. They refer to themselves as “las Madres,” a close-knit group of women who, with their daughters, have created a family based on friendship and blood ties.

$18.00

Public Faces, Secret Lives:
A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
Wendy L. Rouse

The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement included a variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities.

Public Faces, Secret Lives is the first work to truly recenter queer figures in the women’s suffrage movement, highlighting their immense contributions as well as their numerous sacrifices.

$24.99

Erin’s Daughters in America
Irish Immigrant Women in the 19th Century
Hasia R. Diner

“The most sensitive treatment of Irish culture… [and] the most complete history we have of the Irish female experience.” -Labor History

“A vision of women with their own economic aspirations, actively engaged in the climb towards financial security.” -Women’s Review of Books

$38.00

Expelling the Poor:
Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy
Hidetaka Hirota

Historians have long assumed that immigration to the United States was free from regulation until anti-Asian racism on the West Coast triggered the introduction of federal laws to restrict Chinese immigration in the 1880s. Studies of European immigration and government control on the East Coast have, meanwhile, focused on Ellis Island, which opened in 1892.

By locating the roots of American immigration control in cultural prejudice against the Irish and, more essentially, economic concerns about their poverty in 19th-century New York and Massachusetts, Expelling the Poor fundamentally revises the history of American immigration policy.

$47.99

Factory Girls
Michelle Gallen

It’s the summer of 1994, and all smart-mouthed Maeve Murray wants are good final exam results so she can earn her ticket out of the wee Northern Irish town she has grown up in during the Troubles. She hopes she will soon be in London studying journalism—away from her crowded home, the silence and sadness surrounding her sister’s death, and most of all, away from the violence of her divided community. What seems to be a great opportunity to earn money turns out to be a crucible in which Maeve faces the test of a lifetime. Seeking justice for herself and her fellow workers may just be Maeve’s one-way ticket out of town.

Bitingly hilarious, clear-eyed, and steeped in the vernacular of its time and place, Factory Girls tackles questions of wealth and power, religion and nationalism, and how young women maintain hope for themselves and the future during divided, violent times.

$17.99

Sewing Women:
Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry
Margaret M. Chin

Many Latino and Chinese women who immigrated to New York City over the past several decades found work in the garment industry-an industry well known for both hiring immigrants and its harsh working conditions. In the 1990s, the garment industry was one of the largest immigrant employers in the city and workers in Chinese- and Korean-owned factories produced 70% of all manufactured clothing in New York City. Based on extensive interviews with workers and employers, Margaret Chin offers a detailed and complex portrait of the work lives of these garment workers. Chin, whose mother and aunts worked in Chinatown’s garment industry, also explores how immigration status, family circumstances, ethnic relations, and gender affect the garment industry workplace.

$39.99

Plentiful Country:
The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
Tyler Anbinder

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.

In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and a ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.

$32.50

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902:
Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City
Scott D. Seligman

In the wee hours of May 15, 1902, three thousand Jewish women quietly took up positions on the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Convinced by the latest jump in the price of kosher meat that they were being gouged, they assembled in squads of five, intent on shutting down every kosher butcher shop in New York’s Jewish quarter.
With few resources and little experience but a great deal of steely determination, this group of women organized themselves into a potent fighting force and, in their first foray into the political arena in their adopted country, successfully challenged powerful vested corporate interests and set a pattern for future generations to follow.

$29.99