Dark, dank and crowded a small child shares a bed with her 8 siblings. In the morning she will continue her work making fake flowers for hours on end with these same siblings. Making pennies a week, she contributes to large the family’s small home. Like many lower-class families of the 19th and early 20th century, tenement housing was a necessity that sacrificed comfort simply because they had no alternative considering their class, income and in many cases ethnic background. Tenement living in the 19th and 20th century had acute equivalency to that of a death trap. Along with over-crowding, lack of necessary utilities, was the threat of infectious disease and overwhelming structural danger. With the crowding that came with robust immigration, and an industrial upturn was the absence of a planned and moral way in which to house these masses. Eventually recognizing the error in the living conditions of the poor, reform was afoot, but never quite successful as it set out to be.
Will this be an analysis of the failures of tenement reform? what will be your unique angle?
ReplyDeleteexcited!
I really like the vivid description in the beginning. However I think it takes up a very large portion of your introduction and makes your own argument at the end sound like secondary and less important. I think I would try to expand the last sentence more to give it more prominence within the introduction.
ReplyDeleteTenement housing is an interesting topic but one that has been studied A TON. I don't mean to say it's a bad topic to choose, but I think it is very important that you come at it from a new perspective or combine elements of existing study to create something unique that maybe hasn't been thought about before. I enjoy the description that you use, but be careful about using dramatization to make up for unique analysis.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be interesting if you could focus on the different parties involved in reform and what their motives were. Were all reformers really trying to help the poor? Were some concerned more with disguising poverty to beautify the city and forget that the problem existed? Also, why did it fail? And did the problem eventually go away or has it just morphed into something different today?
ReplyDeletei'm also wondering exactly what angle you will take on the tenement reform movement. what is the sole reason why it failed? the immigrants? the people behind the reforms and they're campaigning methods? or was it pretty much inevitable failure? looking forward to seeing your point of view.
ReplyDeletea quite fascinating topic. i really like the mis en scene at the beginning of the paragraph. there is a way to state your arguments by using that narrative without doing the old-hat "my argument is X." i do come away wondering, though, what is your particular angle? is there a way you could compare this tenement reform with the modern day? are there similar issues occurring today?
ReplyDeleteI agree with some of the other topics that you must come up with a unique and interesting angle on tenament living in order to really make this paper work. What's it going to be? From your introduction, the general feeling seems to be that tenament life was a miserable existence. True, but what differentiates this statement from what we're learned in class?
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