American Dreams in the City: Quests for Identity in Elizabeth Stern‘s My Mother and I (1917) and Rose Cohen‘s Out of the Shadow (1918)
American Dreams in the City: Quests for Identity in Elizabeth Stern‘s My Mother and I (1917) and Rose Cohen‘s Out of the Shadow (1918)

Summary/Abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century, American cities functioned as urban spaces of promise for the masses of ―new‖ immigrants (from Eastern-Europe and Russia) seeking economic and social opportunities for upward mobility in the United States. In their autobiographies, immigrant women writers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Elizabeth Stern (My Mother and I) and Rose Cohen (Out of the Shadow) described the struggles and challenges they encountered - as women and as immigrants - in different American urban spaces, fraught with complex social, economic, and cultural issues at that time. This article looks at the ways in which the urban spaces navigated by Rose Cohen and Elizabeth Stern, such as the neighborhoods where they lived, the schools and/or settlement houses they attended, have shaped the narrators‘ gendered choices and impacted their processes of acculturation and/or assimilation into the American mainstream society.

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