American biography in 1900 sweatshops

Amid the fortune making and social swirling of New York&#;s Gilded Age, more than 12 million immigrants came to the United States. Seventy percent of those newcomers took their first steps on American soil via Castle Garden or Ellis Island, Gotham&#;s two immigration processing depots.

In the early s, Sadie Frowne was one of these new arrivals. A few years later, this year-old&#;s story of surviving in New York—&#;The Life Story of a Polish Sweatshop Girl&#;—made it into a fascinating book called The Lives of Undistinguished Americans.

The broad strokes of Sadie&#;s story are not unlike those of other poor immigrants, left to find their way in a chaotic, unwelcoming city desperate for their labor.

What sets her experience apart are the details she reveals: the smell of the steamship across the Atlantic, the budgeting she did on the Lower East Side to save her meager earnings, and the friendships and love she found to replace her family.

Sadie begins her tale in a Polis