“About My Body, Let the World Do What It Will:” Suicide Letters, Immigrant Women, and Structural Violence

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On Sunday March 8, 1914, twenty-six-year-old Rosa Asorowsky, a “Russian Jewess” and sweatshop worker, committed suicide in Chicago.^[1] Next to her body, she left “a remarkable human document – the story of a girl’s life written in a fair small hand on 300 pages of note paper.”^[2] Written in Yiddish, this diary is presumed lost. Spanning seventeen years of Asorowsky’s life, the last pages functioned as a suicide note, explaining the reasoning behind her self-posioning. Clinical and popular periodicals translated those snippets of her diary and published them as evidence in the growing medicalized feminization of suicide.^[3]

On one hand, “nothing is more punitive than giving a disease a meaning,” in part because “that meaning [is] invariably a moralistic one,” Susan Sontag remarked.^[4] On the other hand, the first-person accounts of disabled and mad people are often absent from the historical record, reduced to medical case-files, rendered inaccessible by draconian state laws or lost in institutional caches.^[5] How can feminist historians approach sources like Asorowsky’s diary-cum-suicide-note: a unique autobiographical account an immigrant Jewish woman deliberately left behind as an agential last rite, but whose only record survives in citations produced by journalists and clinicians who aimed to give her death, her suffering, “a moralistic meaning”?

I propose that published suicide letters like Asorowsky’s should be tackled as significant historical documents that show individual unwellness being indivisible from structural violence. Intimate and incomplete, suicide letters shed light on lives led on the margins and thus often underrepresented in academic history. Subject to editorialization, their content is not without opacity. However, as Asorowsky’s case illustrates, editorialization does not erase the fact that suicide notes can function as reclaimed attempts at dignity and self-determination for some working foreign-born women who did not find a place in America’s urban melting pot.

Asorowsky cannot be found in the bureaucratic archive of online census, immigration, or burial records. Spelling variations common to non-Anglophone names may obscure her presence. Or, as many non-Christian, non-western, foreign-born women working blue-collar jobs in US cities in the early twentieth century, she may have lived a purposefully undocumented life.

It is possible that records exist in a physical archive somewhere. However, accessible traces of Asorowsky’s existence currently survive only in the press. In March 1914, two Illinois newspapers reported on her voluntary gas poisoning, as did one paper in Colorado. A month later, The Medical Standard discussed Asorowsky as a clinical case, amplifying the diagnostic resonance of her death. These sources reported that the “young Russian girl” lived alone in “the Chicago Ghetto district […] in a wretched basement room” at “1506 W. Polk street,” where she struggled to make ends meet with a meager “$6 weekly salary.”^[6]

Until the early twentieth century, suicide in the United States was associated with compromised masculinity. From the seventeeth to the nineteenth centuries, notable male suicides included antisocial heretics, imitative readers of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and political revolutionaries.^[7] At the turn of the twentieth century, an essentialist narrative of feminized suicidality gained momentum as immigration and women’s presence in the workforce swelled in the United States.^[8]

Clinicians, legislators, and reporters argued that admittance into American life stressed the bodies and minds of immigrant women ill-suited to assimilate into the national ranks. Within such eugenist framework, suicidality functioned as an innate mechanism of “social selection”: once strained by the demands of US urbanization and industrialization, “feeble” foreign women sunk into “a maelstrom of conflicting emotions” and “death agony,” ultimately self-evicting from reproducing and “polluting” America’s life-force.^[9]

Young white-looking women with antisocial tendencies concerned eugenicists the most since they believed such feminine “defectiveness” would poison the fabric of US civilization through sexual reproduction. As Alabama physician John E. Purdon explained in 1901, “feeble-minded women and girls often become sources of unspeakable debauchery and licentiousness, which pollutes the whole life of young boys and youths of the community.”^[10] Asorowsky – who according to published commentary took her life after “the reckless abandon of the man she loved” out of wedlock – embodied this pathologized view of working-class womanhood that culminated in self-destruction.^[11]

It bears noting that in the early twentieth century, US newspapers worked as much as  instruments of community building as of national storytelling. Reporters aimed to produce coherent narratives out of random lived happenings, and in the 1910s, female suicide proved compelling enough of a regular occurrence to deserve central placement as an alarming “epidemic.” Female suicide happened in the US at all times, though. What changed in the 1910s was the amount of attention newspapers and medical journals placed on this occurrence. They also added a spotlight on the suicides of young, white, unmarried women of working and/or immigrant backgrounds. The published accounts of working-class female suicidality tended to follow a consistent plot of unsupervised mobility, urban defeat, psychological disorder, and sexual transgression, a plot too consistent not to be intentionally prescriptive.

Asorowsky’s life writings offer a lived counterpoint to such third-party reporting. Though subject to truncation and translation from Yiddish to English, quotes from her suicide letter provide first-hand insight into how a young, Jewish, immigrant working woman experienced the highly stratified living conditions of early twentieth-century US. Her published last words are a refusal of American capitalism, transactional optimism, and teleological self-improvement. “Money is the important thing in this world. Everything is for sale for money—love, happiness, everything. Over me money has had no power. I was born feeling that way. It has made me to suffer all my life, and I die taking the feeling to my grave. […] When I loved, I made no measure. There are no results that I can see from my work or my suffering. Good-by, world! Good-by, life itself!”^[12]

Suicide letters like Asorowsky’s complicate histories of US worker/industry interplay, where the goal of paid work is to accumulate financial resources that enable employees to increase material consumption. Asorowsky positioned her suicide as a refusal of such capitalistic ethos governing dominant discourses on American “good life.” In chaffing against normative order, in choosing to opt out instead of carrying on striving for advancement, suicide letters like hers evince how narrow the definition of “well-adjusted citizenry” had become in early twentieth-century US society that access to wellbeing and inclusion had developed into a quantitative zero-sum-game of assimilation or failure. Asorowsky’s writings also do not uphold the narrative of jilted despair newspapers liked to attach to suicidal female immigrants of reproductive age. In the Jewish worker’s own words, her death resulted from systemic structural hurdles baked into US society, not a beau’s abandonment.

Parallel examples of blaming a working woman for seeking self-advancement beyond marriage can be found in the newly established Hollywood film industry. In 1916, “after persistent efforts to make good as a motion picture actress had failed, Thelma Stovall, age 19,” committed suicide. Newspapers blamed Stovall’s delirious pursuit of movie stardom for her voluntary poisoning. The Los Angeles transplant, however, demonstrated sound reasoning by leaving clear instructions on how to dispose of her corpse: “Just toss me on the waves. If the day be cloudy and the sea rough, so much the better.”^[13]

Precarious wage-dependent women saw suicide notes as binding bids for bodily autonomy, wherein such autonomy had lacked in life. Like Stovall, Asorowsky left specific instructions regarding her remains: “about my body, let the world do what it will. Give it to a hospital, or to the worms. They too must live.”^[14] In an earlier passage, she noted that “men think only of a girl’s body. They do not care for her thoughts or her soul.” The same could be said of Hollywood, where failure to succeed was imputed on irrational and unskilled “screen-struck girls,” not on a patriarchal industry built on rarefied connections and means.^[15] Marginalized women, however, seemed to believe that through the social officiation of suicide, female agency denied in life could be reclaimed after death.

Asorowsky’s letter further shows that suicidal working women wielded their final statements as personal indictments against Progressive modernity: its social expectations, moral binaries, regulatory institutions, and capitalistic enterprises. Her writings render legible immigrants’ clashes with inequalities and humiliating capitalistic barters sewed into the fabric of America’s Progressive Era. As the sweatshop worker proudly stated, “If anything lives in me in the grave it will be that feeling. I gave nothing I valued for money.”

Suicide and its literary form, that of the “death note,” ultimately avowed young, literate, waged women a means to express a range of “bad feelings” – antisocial, selfish, self-destructive – that found no other outlet in daily life because these feelings were deemed inadmissible of well-adjusted women. Threading the needle between personal complaint and social commentary, suicide letters are unresolved documents. They are elliptic and confessional, willfully created to act as a full stop on a (life) sentence. As such, they exude a daring sort of power seldom found in female life-writing of the early twentieth century. In them, we find working women of intersectional backgrounds unapologetically speaking up for themselves: this is how I feel, this is what I want, and neither are open for discussion. Press editorialization, truncation, or translation may complicate their scholarly usages but should not diminish the significance published suicide letters hold in supplying insight into diverse lived experiences otherwise lost to feminist history.

Notes

1. “Notes by the Way: Events and Things as Seen by the Editor,” The Medical Standard (Chicago, IL), April 1914, 145. ↑
2. “Deep Despair is Disclosed by a Note of Suicide,” The Cairo Bulletin (Cairo, IL), March 12, 1914, 6. ↑
3. “What Rosa Asorowsky Thought of Life,” Semi-Weekly Herald (Durango, CO), March 23, 1914, 2. ↑
4. Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 58. ↑
5. See Micheal Rembis, Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press 2024). ↑
6. “Notes,” 145; “Young Girl Suicides,” The Day Book (Chicago, IL), March 9, 1914, 3. ↑
7. Richard Bell, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). ↑
8. See Diana W. Anselmo, “The ‘Girl Suicide Epidemic’ of the 1910s: Pain and Prejudice in US Newspapers,” Journal of Women’s History 34.3 (Fall 2022): 34-58. ↑
9. “Notes,” 145; John E. Purdon, “Social Selection: The Extirpation of Criminality and Hereditary Disease,” Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama (1901): 463. ↑
10. Purdon, “Social Selection,” 463. ↑
11. “Notes,” 145. ↑
12. “Notes,” 145. ↑
13. “The Odds Are Big,” The Day Book, August 4, 1916, 23. ↑
14. “Notes,” 145. ↑
15. See Diana W. Anselmo, “Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan,” Cinema Journal 55.1 (Fall 2015): 1-28. ↑

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Featured image caption: “The Dance of Death” by Gordon Ross. Puck Magazine, January 31, 1912. (Public Domain)