WorkLore: Women Breaking Barriers

Helping Others, Helping Themselves

Some women avoid discrimination in the workplace by creating their own businesses. Often, these build on the skills that women have had to master throughout history, transforming domestic roles into earnings.

Today, women make up half of Brooklyn's workforce, finding jobs in the borough's growing service industries of healthcare, education, government, and sales.


			Sadie Frowne, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, gave the account you are hearing in 1902, when she was 16 years old and working in a garment factory in Brownsville. Most working women were young and single. To listen to the audo, click on the "play" button on the radio to the left. To play the audio you need to have Flash installed in your computer.

'The day after I arrived in Brooklyn from the Soviet Union, I got a job as a manicurist. Later, I began making kalbasi, herring and sausages for others. I built a business that offers home-style cooking for working families. Twenty-seven years later, my store offers three floors of foods: borsht, stuffed cabbage, even special fish that only swim in Russia.'

M & I International Food Store, Brighton Beach
2002
Courtesy of Martha Cooper

Struck Family and Staff of Erie Basin Hotel

'[A typical boarding house] landlady is 50, and has a good natured face and is ruddy from her exercise in the culinary department. She is a widow and cannot afford a servant, but obliges her two younger boys to help her sweep, make the beds, wait on the table and do the errands.'

Struck Family and Staff of Erie Basin Hotel
1897
Collection of The Brooklyn Historical Society,
Gift of Robert G. Geelan, grandson