She was fifteen when they married in 1898. He was almost twice her age. Her father had arranged the marriage, and she agreed to it. No stories of passion are passed down through the generations. Frances and Ladislaus were introduced, they married, and they had their picture taken. Within a year a child was born, and Ladislaus kissed her for the first time, or so the story is told. In the wedding picture, he sits stiffly in a high-back chair. His brow is unlined, his face clean-shaven, the black suit just a little too short in the sleeves, his collar starch-white.
Ladislaus’s family arrived in Hilliards about the time the church trustees were getting arrested for selling beer at the church fair. Frances didn’t get there for another six years, and when she came it was to marry Ladislaus. The oldest child of Krystyna and Pawel, Frances was sickly and weak from having contracted diphtheria as a child. After finishing eight years of schooling in Chicago, at the age of thirteen she entered the Felician convent in Chicago. Like her granddaughter Angel, she lasted about a year in the convent. (I am struck by how fortuitous my existence is as a descendant from this line—my great-grandmother and my mother both made attempts to lead celibate lives.) Her children write that the convent was “harsh”; the Mother Superior “felt that self-denial and poverty” were a necessary part of the training, and “Frances did not think much of this life.”1 Leaving behind this emotionally hostile atmosphere of self-abnegation, she returned to Chicago, lived with her aunts, and worked as a seamstress until her marriage was arranged. Nadine, her granddaughter, in an autobiography written while she herself was a novice in the Felician Order, wonders “how strange it was to be taken from the convent, where she spent a year, and marry a man she never saw before in her life.” And in this situation, she praises her grandmother for being someone “determined to make her marriage successful.”
The choices for a girl like Frances at that time were constrained by her class position. Once she left the convent, she had no education or resources to pursue an independent career. Frances’s decision to leave the convent was almost by default a decision to get married in order to establish her own household. Despite the fact that her father arranged the marriage, the marriage actually afforded her some independence, even if it did mean establishing a dependent relationship with her husband.2 In that new relationship of dependency, however, the matrifocal nature of Polish-American families gave her more power to determine her life in its frills if not its essentials—to decide how to arrange the furniture, what to grow in the garden, which curtains to buy. She became the matriarch of a household while living in a patriarchal family and society. In Frances’s case, she also gained an edge in the marriage because of her nativity as an American, and because her bloodline connected her to landowners in Poland.3 Despite the fact that it was arranged, the arrangement afforded her some power vis-à-vis her husband and her family.
Frances and Ladislaus were married on May 30, 1898, in St. Stanislaus Church in Hilliards.4 In addition to the church, Hilliards had six other buildings: a general store (which is still in operation) that also held the post office (in operation there between 1869 and 1953), a bar, a community hall, a pickle factory, a creamery, and a cheese packaging factory. Poles settled in this region in a four-by-four-mile area that straddled the townships of Dorr and Hopkins, located along 138th Avenue.5 Most of the farms in the two townships were owned by Americans of northern European descent (mostly English and German with a few Irish, Scottish, and Dutch); however, a defined Polish corridor appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, and by 1913 it was densely populated (see map 1).
Only four Polish families are identified on the plat maps of 1873, but by 1895 there were forty-six Polish farmsteads occupying almost 3,500 total acres, and by 1935 Polish immigrants and their children owned more than 8,000 acres on 104 farmsteads.6 Between 1895 and 1935 the number of farmsteads grew more quickly than the number of Polish surnames in the area, signifying that in-migration had slowed down.7 By the twentieth century, growth in the community came from within, through the retention of the second generation.
A few years after they were married, Ladislaus and Frances took over his father’s 120-acre farm.8 Polish farms in that region survived through a combination of subsistence farming, market-oriented farming (grains, milk, and cucumbers for pickling sold locally), and intermittent work in industries (the creameries, breweries, and canneries in the rural towns, and factories in Flint, Lansing, and Grand Rapids). Every farm had a large garden, the women’s domain, that provided fruits and vegetables for the family. They stored potatoes and carrots, canned apples, rhubarb, pears, and strawberries, and slaughtered pigs, chickens, and cows. They also made lard, head cheese,9 and sausage from the pork scrap.
They called themselves dairy farmers because cows provided their most regular source of income, but they had a diversified agricultural economy that was labor intensive.10 Their main cash crop was wheat, but they also grew a variety of other grains, in particular timothy hay, clover, and oats both for feed and the market. The other source of income was the pickle patch, which netted the Fifelskis some two hundred dollars annually by the 1920s, to be spent on school clothes in the fall. Pickling was a practice that Poles brought to Michigan, and growing cucumbers for market continued until the 1940s.11 The farms survived by using family labor, which worked well for a farmer like Ladislaus Fifelski, who had seven sons. Their holdings, however, were never large enough to divide among many sons, so one son inherited the farm and the others bought their own land or found work in factories.12
By midcentury, the main source of family income was no longer the farm but the factory. No sharp line, however, demarcates factory work from farm work. The farms were initially bought with wages earned in the industrial sector, and early farmers also supplemented their farm earnings with wage labor.13 Ladislaus worked in a furniture factory in Chicago before he became a dairy farmer in Hilliards; when his sons were old enough to manage the farm, he once again found work loading freight in Grand Rapids. His seven sons also straddled the shop floor and the barnyard. Some worked full-time in factories and lived in the country, others moved from factory to farm to factory, and still others worked in factories only long enough to raise the money to buy their own farms.14 Most of the farm boys in the second generation started working in nearby cities during World War I. Only one of Ladislaus’s seven sons remained a farmer, and Ladislaus’s own farmland was sold by his youngest son in 1947.15
Map 1. Development of the Polish corridor in Hilliards, Michigan, 1873–1935
. . .
A year and a day from their marriage, Frances delivered her first child, a nine-pound boy, born to this slight seventeen-year-old girl who months before the delivery still naively believed that St. Joseph delivered babies. Ladislaus informed her that the baby would come out the same way it went in.16 Over the next twenty-five years they kept going in and coming out. The second child was born the following May, the third the next year; she had all but one of their thirteen children two years apart.17 She either was pregnant or nursing a newborn for twenty-six years. (Actually, she was too weak to nurse her first child, but she did nurse the next twelve.) All of them were big babies—the smallest was nine pounds, and her last child, delivered when she was forty, was twelve pounds.
Fig. 8. Frances and Ladislaus, c. 1938
Frances had a reputation for being a “tough bird.” She cultivated a large garden, sewed and cooked for her large family, and cared for and cleaned a large house. She worked—even if she received no wages, she worked, and this fact is noted in the public and private memory banks. On the 1910 census—where the occupational category for most women was left blank or listed as “keeping house”—Frances’s occupation
