The emigrant ship ‘Westernland’ on a coloured postcard from 1883.

EMIGRATING WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE LANGUAGE

Stephanie’s start was a difficult one. She arrived at the hopelessly overloaded Castle Garden emigrant landing depot. It was only after a seemingly endless wait that an immigration agent finally ushered her and about a dozen rather unsavoury-looking men out of the building. He led the group at a brisk pace through the dark streets of New York and took them to a ferry across the Hudson River. On board, Stephanie was sent to the ladies-only area, and lost sight of her group. She stood there for a while in the New York night, disoriented, alone and without a word of English. In the end, though, the journey to Ohio went well. Stephanie made it to the small town of Defiance, where an aunt found her a job as a servant girl and nanny for the family of an Obwalden doctor. In Defiance, she experienced a completely different family life; but in her memoires, her observations on the housework emerge as being of particular interest. How, in spring, she used pliers to take up the carpets, lugged them into the garden to beat them, and then hammered them back onto the wooden floor. How the household, including the doctor’s office, had no running water at all. And how the doctor had a parrot which, in his enthusiasm surrounding the presidential elections, he taught to squawk ‘Hooray for Cleveland!’.

Stephanie stayed in the US for five years. Then, her economic prospects darkened dramatically; Stephanie was still unmarried, and she missed her family back home. So she did something that is rarely encountered in the history of Swiss emigration: she went back. In actual fact she only intended to stay for a visit – but fate stepped in and threw her plans into disarray.

Stephanie Cordelier broke free from the stifling confines of her Oberwil childhood, and through her experiences in America became a courageous young woman who went her own, unconventional way. She rebelled against her father and, as a woman from a staunchly Catholic background, finally married a Protestant.

Benedikt Meyer

The dream of a brave new world