Sexes: Adapting to a Different Role

On the Lower East Side of New York City, the subway still stops at Delancey Street. The name conjures history, evoking the early decades of the century, when waves of women arrived from Lithuania, Italy, Ireland, Poland, Russia. For them, the New World turned out to be the cold-water tenements, sweatshops and street stalls near the station. The photographs of those women -- staggering under bundles of piecework balanced on their heads, bent over sewing machines, huddled with their children in the dank rooms where entire families worked, slept, ate and died -- have become images for the way many Americans...