Sherilyn Decter's Blog

I should tell you about the artichokes, because otherwise you’ll think I made them up.

In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia showed up at the Bronx Terminal Market at dawn — with a fanfare of trumpets — and announced that the sale of artichokes was hereby banned in the City of New York. Photographers captured the scene: the Little Flower himself, standing among crates of vegetables at five in the morning, looking genuinely delighted to be declaring war on a thistle.

The ban lasted three days. Just long enough to arrest the men running the racket.

The man La Guardia was targeting was Ciro Terranova — known to the press, and to anyone who bought vegetables in an Italian neighborhood, as the Artichoke King.

The Family on 116th Street

The Morello-Terranova organization was one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in early twentieth-century New York. Founded by Giuseppe Morello and his half-brothers — including Ciro Terranova — in the 1890s, the family operated out of the blocks around 116th Street in East Harlem. Their business was extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, and the systematic control of legitimate commerce in immigrant neighborhoods.

Ciro Terranova’s particular genius was the artichoke. He cornered the market on the small, thorny variety beloved by Italian families — buying from California suppliers, controlling the distribution through the city’s wholesale markets, and reselling at markups that made the vegetable a luxury in the neighborhoods where it should have been a staple. Vendors who tried to source artichokes outside his network discovered that their carts had been overturned, their stock destroyed, their willingness to negotiate suddenly sharpened.

The artichoke racket sounds almost comic — and La Guardia, a showman who understood the value of a good headline, played it for maximum theater. But the underlying system was anything but funny. The street tax, the protection money, the daily shakedowns of pushcart vendors and shopkeepers — these were facts of life in East Harlem. Every transaction carried an invisible surcharge, paid to men whose authority derived not from law but from the neighborhood’s understanding of what happened to people who didn’t pay.

Where the Racket Meets the Kitchen Table

In 1919, when The Promise Trilogy takes place, the Terranovas were consolidating power after years of violent conflict with rival Camorra gangs from Brooklyn. The artichoke stand in the novel — the toppled pyramids, the beaten vendor — is fiction, but the world it describes is documented. La Guardia’s intervention was still sixteen years away. In 1919, there was no one coming to fix it.

What interested me as a novelist wasn’t the crime family at the top. It was the families at the bottom — the ones buying artichokes at inflated prices, paying the street tax folded into every purchase, navigating a neighborhood where the line between legitimate commerce and criminal enterprise was drawn in pencil and erased whenever it suited the men holding the pencil.

For the Santoro family, the racket is atmospheric — it’s the air they breathe, the cost they’ve absorbed so thoroughly they barely notice it. Until a basket of apples arrives at the house with a single artichoke perched on top like a crown. A gift that is also a claim. An offering that is also a reminder of who owns what — and who owes whom.

The artichoke isn’t about artichokes. It’s about the cost of becoming someone in a neighborhood where power operates through the same channels as groceries.

The Invisible Tax

What the artichoke racket reveals — and what I wanted the novel to make visible — is how organized crime embedded itself in the daily economy of immigrant neighborhoods. It wasn’t a separate world that respectable families could avoid. It was the price of bread, the cost of a pushcart license, the fee for doing business on a particular block. It was the man who loaned you money when the bank wouldn’t and collected interest in ways the bank never could. It was the cousin who got your son a job and expected silence in return.

Italian immigrants in East Harlem didn’t choose the racket. They inherited it — brought from the old country in some cases, grown in the new one in others, fed by the same conditions that fed everything else: poverty, exclusion from legitimate institutions, a justified distrust of the police, and the knowledge that the law protected some people and extracted from others.

The women of the neighborhood understood this calculus with particular clarity. They were the ones who handed over the street tax at the market. They were the ones who noticed when the price of artichokes went up and the quality went down. They were the ones who kept the household books and knew exactly what the invisible tax cost their families — in dollars, in dignity, in the slow erosion of the belief that things could work differently.

La Guardia’s Trumpet

Fiorello La Guardia’s artichoke ban was a stunt, and he knew it. Three days of theater didn’t dismantle the Terranova organization — the family’s power eventually declined through a combination of federal prosecution, internal rivalries, and the neighborhood’s own slow transformation as Italian families moved to Brooklyn, Queens, and the suburbs.

But the stunt mattered because it named the thing. It said, publicly and loudly, that the artichoke racket was real, that it cost real people real money, and that the men running it were criminals, not businessmen. In a neighborhood where the racket had been as invisible as the air — because naming it was dangerous — La Guardia’s trumpets at dawn did something the law alone couldn’t: they made the invisible visible.

That’s what novels can do too. Not solve the problem, but name it clearly enough that the reader sees what the characters have been living inside all along.

In the world of The Promise Trilogy, the artichoke on top of the apple basket is the racket made visible — small, specific, sitting in a family’s kitchen where it can’t be ignored. The rest of the story unfolds from there.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026.

The post The Artichoke King: When Organized Crime Came to the Produce Market appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

There’s a scene I keep coming back to in the third book of The Promise Trilogy — the moment when Lucie goes to Sister Agnes for advice and realizes her mentor is exhausted, overwhelmed, and paying a price Lucie never fully understood.

Sister Agnes has been coordinating sick visits during a flu outbreak. She’s operating on three hours of sleep. The rectory is filled with lists of families needing food, blankets, care. And Lucie walks in worried about her own problems — about teaching, about Carlo, about whether she’s making the right choices.

And Sister Agnes, exhausted as she is, still shows up for her.

“Do you think I’m free?” Sister Agnes asks.

It’s a devastating question. Not because of anger — there’s no anger in it. Because of clarity. Sister Agnes has never pretended that her vocation came without cost. But this is the first time Lucie hears the cost named aloud, and it changes everything she thought she understood about the woman who taught her to want more.

When I was researching the world Sister Agnes inhabits — Catholic parish life in immigrant neighborhoods around 1919 — I expected to find stories of devotion. I did. What I didn’t expect was how precisely the system was designed to make women essential while keeping them powerless.

In neighborhoods like East Harlem’s Little Italy, the parish wasn’t just a church. It was the organizing center of community life — school, social services, moral authority, cultural identity, all housed under one institutional roof. And the pastor held final authority over all of it. Curriculum. Sacramental preparation. Finances. Every formal activity conducted under the parish’s name ran through him.

This wasn’t arbitrary cruelty. The hierarchy was designed to maintain unity of doctrine, protect the parish from controversy, and reassure immigrant families — many of them deeply anxious about what America might do to their children’s faith — that their daughters and sons were being educated within accepted moral and religious bounds. It was a structure built for order. And like most structures built for order, it worked best for the people at the top.

The women religious — the nuns — were the ones who made the whole thing function.

By the early 1900s, Catholic parochial education in the United States was expanding at a staggering pace. By 1920, more than six thousand Catholic elementary schools served nearly two million students, and the vast majority of their teachers were sisters. These women managed classrooms of forty to sixty children. They taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and catechism. They maintained discipline and provided moral instruction. In immigrant neighborhoods wracked by poverty, labor unrest, and waves of disease, they were often the most consistent, stable adult presence in a child’s daily life.

And they did all of it under obedience.

Curriculum decisions required clerical approval. Textbook choices were not theirs to make. Subject matter — particularly anything touching on science, hygiene, or the female body — had to pass through the pastor before it reached the classroom. A sister might have decades of experience, might know her students’ needs better than anyone in the parish, but her authority was considered delegated, not autonomous. She taught at the pleasure of the priest who supervised her.

This tension was especially sharp in the 1910s, when public health knowledge was advancing rapidly. Germ theory, basic sanitation, nutrition, women’s health — these subjects were increasingly relevant to the daily lives of immigrant families. But in a parish school, teaching them required navigating a minefield of clerical gatekeeping. What counted as “appropriate” for girls depended not on the sister’s professional judgment, but on the pastor’s comfort level. And comfort levels, as Sister Agnes could tell you, were not always calibrated to what the girls actually needed to know.

The Language of Correction

Here’s what fascinated me most in the research — and what I tried to get right in the novel. When a teaching sister overstepped, the correction almost never looked like punishment. It looked like concern.

“Not appropriate for young women.”“Beyond the scope of our mission.”“Parents might misunderstand.”“We must be careful.”

She wasn’t accused of wrongdoing. She was accused of poor judgment. And then the consequences arrived wearing the mask of practicality. Her lesson plans now required weekly submission for “review.” A book disappeared from her classroom shelf. She was reassigned from older girls to younger ones — a demotion presented as a better fit. Or she was moved to “service work” under the guise of parish need, her classroom handed to someone who understood the boundaries more intuitively.

The punishment was framed as protection. As care for her wellbeing. As wisdom she hadn’t yet acquired.

But every woman who witnessed it understood exactly what had happened. And every woman who witnessed it recalculated what she could say, what she could teach, and how much of herself she could bring into her own classroom.

This is the world Sister Agnes navigates every day. And when she tells Lucie, “I’ve had to fight for every book in my classroom, for every minute of science instruction” — she isn’t speaking in metaphor. She’s describing the daily negotiation between conscience, obedience, and the knowledge that the girls who sit in her classroom need things she isn’t always permitted to give them.

Essential, Invisible, Indispensable

The flu scene in the novel draws on something real. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, Catholic sisters across the United States stepped into roles that went far beyond teaching. In Philadelphia alone, over two thousand nuns — roughly two-thirds of the noncloistered sisters in the archdiocese — took on nursing duties during the crisis. Most of them were teachers, not nurses. They had no medical training. They went into homes where entire families lay sick in bed with no one to care for them. They bathed the ill, cleaned houses, prepared food and medicine. They worked twelve-hour shifts in makeshift hospitals set up in parish halls and gymnasiums. Twenty-three sisters in Philadelphia died of the flu they contracted while caring for others.

And when it was over, many of those same sisters asked the archdiocesan newspaper not to publish their names.

That detail stopped me cold when I found it. Not the heroism — I expected the heroism. The instinct to remain invisible even while doing extraordinary work. That was the part that made me understand Sister Agnes at a level I hadn’t before.

She doesn’t want recognition. She doesn’t need Lucie to see her sacrifice and validate it. What she needs is for Lucie to understand that constraint and purpose can exist in the same life — that choosing a path doesn’t mean you love every step of it, and that peace isn’t the same thing as contentment.

“I’m at peace with what it costs me,” Sister Agnes says.

That line is the heart of her character. And it’s the lesson Lucie carries forward when she has to make her own impossible choices — not because Sister Agnes told her what to choose, but because Sister Agnes showed her what it looks like to choose with your eyes open. To know the price and pay it anyway. Not because it’s just. But because the vocation — the calling, the work, the children who depend on you — still aligns with who you are.

Why Women Learned to Speak Carefully

By 1919, many women within the Church understood — often painfully — that speaking openly carried risks. Disagreement wasn’t framed as dissent. It was framed as a failure of humility, of prudence, of tone. A sister who pushed too hard didn’t become a rebel. She became a problem — a woman whose judgment couldn’t be trusted, whose influence on young minds required closer supervision.

This didn’t mean women lacked conviction or courage. It meant they learned to navigate authority with precision, choosing when to speak and when silence preserved their ability to serve. They became experts in the indirect, the oblique, the carefully timed question that planted a seed without triggering a review. They learned which battles to fight in the open and which to wage so quietly that no one noticed until the ground had already shifted.

Sister Agnes is that kind of woman. She’s not a revolutionary. She’s not trying to tear down the Church or escape her vows. She’s a teacher who believes in what she does, who loves her students, and who has made her peace — imperfect, costly, real — with the institution that both sustains and constrains her.

When she tells Lucie, “There’s a difference between constraint you choose and constraint imposed on you,” she’s speaking from the deepest part of her experience. She chose the constraint of religious life. She did not choose the specific indignities that come with it — the reviewed lesson plans, the disappeared books, the quiet reassignments. But she’s found a way to live inside both truths at once, and she’s trying to give Lucie the tools to do the same.

Not the same answers. The same courage.

I think about the real women behind Sister Agnes often. The teaching sisters who staffed parish schools across immigrant America, who shaped generations of children, who carried immense responsibility inside a system that needed them but wouldn’t trust them with authority. Who showed up during epidemics and emergencies and ordinary Tuesdays alike, and who did their work so well and so quietly that history barely recorded their names.

They were not free. They knew it. And they showed up anyway — for the children, for the work, for the version of service that still, despite everything, felt like theirs.

That tension — between the calling and the cost, between what women remaking their lives could choose and what was chosen for them — runs through all three books of The Promise Trilogy. Sister Agnes is one voice in that conversation. But she might be the one that stays with you longest.

The Promise Trilogy launches in August 2026. It follows Lucie Santoro from her graduation day in 1919 East Harlem through the impossible choices that will define her life — and the women who teach her, by example, what it means to want something the world hasn’t offered you yet.

The post The Price of Showing Up: Teaching Sisters, Parish Authority, and the Women Who Held Everything Together appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

 

He spent hours on the engraving. A tortoiseshell fountain pen, and on the band, her name: Lucia Santoro. He carved each letter himself, in the back of his father’s jewelry shop, after the customers had gone and the display cases were locked. It was a graduation gift — something personal, something that said he saw who she was. A girl who loved words. A girl worth the careful work of his hands.

His mother, standing behind them at the ceremony, looked at the pen and sighed. “It’s a waste if it can’t be undone. She won’t be a Santoro for much longer.”

That moment — the gift meant to honor a girl’s name, immediately reframed as a name about to be erased — is one of the quietest and most devastating in The Promise. And it captures something real about how marriage worked in the Italian immigrant communities of early twentieth-century New York. Love was present, often genuinely. But it operated inside a structure that had very little to do with love, and everything to do with contracts, alliances, and the careful management of a family’s place in the world.

In southern Italian tradition, marriage was negotiated between fathers. The process had roots going back generations and followed a pattern as precise as a liturgy. A young man’s family would identify a suitable match — or more accurately, the mothers would identify her first, comparing notes at church, at the market, at the endless social gatherings that served as the community’s clearinghouse for information. The girl’s family would be approached. The fathers would meet. Terms would be discussed: the groom’s prospects, the bride’s corredo, the financial arrangements that would bind the two families together.

If the families agreed, the courtship could begin — but courtship, in this context, was closer to a supervised audition than a romance. Visits were chaperoned. Conversations happened in the family parlor, under the mother’s eye. The young man might be invited to Sunday dinner, where his table manners, his respect for the patriarch, and his appetite for the mother’s cooking would all be noted and evaluated. The young woman, meanwhile, was expected to demonstrate domesticity, modesty, and the kind of quiet competence that promised she would keep a good home.

By 1919, these old-world mechanics were blurring at the edges. American-born children of immigrants experienced courtship differently than their parents had — more freedom, more contact, more of the romantic expectation that American culture was busy manufacturing through novels, films, and popular songs. A young man might ask a girl’s father for permission to call on her, as Carlo does in The Promise, and the gesture could feel both traditional and genuinely affectionate. The line between an arranged marriage and a conventional courtship was no longer sharp. But the bones of the old system were still very much in place.

What made the Italian immigrant marriage arrangement so binding wasn’t just the families’ wishes. It was the architecture around it. Once the understanding was in place, it became a social fact — discussed among neighbors, blessed by the parish priest, woven into the community’s expectations. The reading of the banns at Sunday Mass made it a matter of public record. Breaking an engagement wasn’t just a private heartbreak. It was a breach of contract with consequences that rippled outward: shame for the girl’s family, insult to the boy’s family, damage to the marriage prospects of younger siblings on both sides. A broken engagement could follow a family for years.

The bride’s corredo — the trousseau of hand-embroidered linens assembled over years by the women of the family — was part of this binding machinery. Every pillowcase stitched was a stitch toward this specific future. The groom’s family offered stability, a home, a trade. The bride’s family offered proof of proper upbringing, material investment, and a daughter raised to serve. The exchange was understood by everyone involved, spoken about openly, and enforced by the same community surveillance that governed every other aspect of life in Italian Harlem.

And yet — within this system, real tenderness existed. That’s the part of the history that I didn’t want to flatten in the novel.

Carlo Colucci is not a villain. He is a young man who has been told since boyhood that Lucie Santoro will be his wife, and who has done everything his world asked of him — learned his father’s trade, presented himself to her family with respect, waited patiently through four years of high school that his own parents considered unnecessary for a girl. He brings her a pen with her name on it. He carries his grandfather’s watch, polished and restored, a symbol of the legacy he intends to build for their family. When she talks about her dreams, he listens. He doesn’t always understand, but he tries.

The tragedy of Carlo isn’t cruelty. It’s the limits of his imagination. He can see Lucie clearly — her intelligence, her restlessness, her hunger for something more — but he can only offer her what his world has taught him to offer: steadiness, security, a comfortable home, and a name that will replace her own. He is generous within the boundaries of a system he has never thought to question. And that generosity, precisely because it is real, makes Lucie’s position more agonizing, not less. How do you refuse a good man’s love when refusing it means refusing the only future your community will accept?

The other man in Lucie’s story is a different kind of trap entirely. Where Carlo offers safety, Dante Mazzarone offers electricity — the sharp, dangerous thrill of being seen by someone who operates outside the rules. He doesn’t court her through family channels. He arrives in a Packard Twin Six, smelling of Bay Rum cologne and carrying the easy confidence of a man whose power doesn’t come from parish approval. He calls her bella and means it in a way that makes her pulse race.

But I didn’t write Dante as a rescue. He is not the answer to Lucie’s question. He’s another version of it. The world he moves in — the world of the speakeasy and the back room, of men like the Artichoke King and the Morello-Terranova network — offered immigrant women a different kind of visibility, but not a different kind of freedom. In that world, a woman was still defined by her relationship to the man beside her. Still watched. Still assessed. Still, ultimately, disposable when the situation required it.

The real question Lucie faces isn’t which man. It’s whether any version of her future that runs through a man’s life can actually be hers.

That question didn’t originate with me. It belonged to thousands of real young women in 1919 — daughters of immigrants who could feel the world changing around them. Women had just won the right to vote in New York State. The war had opened doors that were supposed to be temporary but couldn’t quite be closed again. Teaching positions, office work, even factory management were becoming possibilities that a generation earlier would have been unthinkable. And yet, in the intimate world of the neighborhood — where the mothers controlled the social calendar and the fathers signed the contracts and the priest blessed whatever they decided — those possibilities could feel as distant as the villages their parents had left behind.

The marriage contract was the mechanism by which families managed this tension. If a daughter could be settled — quickly, respectably, with a good family — then the danger of her ambition could be contained. A married woman had a role, a home, a defined place in the community’s order. An unmarried woman with ideas was a loose thread, a liability, a problem that reflected poorly on everyone who had raised her.

For the mothers who pushed these arrangements forward, the urgency was often genuine. They had seen what happened to women without protection — the ones who ended up alone, or exploited, or trapped in situations far worse than a marriage to a kind man from a good family. In their calculus, an arranged marriage wasn’t a punishment. It was a rescue. The fact that their daughters experienced it as a cage was, to them, beside the point. Or perhaps it was exactly the point — the cage was the rescue. You couldn’t have one without the other.

That tension — between the mother who loves you enough to lock the door and the daughter who loves herself enough to want the key — is at the heart of every story I’ve written about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. It’s not a tension that resolves cleanly. It wasn’t clean in 1919, and it isn’t clean now.

In The Promise, Lucie stands between two men, two futures, two versions of what her life could be. But the choice that matters most isn’t the one everyone thinks she’s making. It’s the one nobody has offered her — the one she’ll have to build for herself, if she can find the courage, and pay the price.

Book One of The Promise Trilogy, releases August 2026. Set in 1919 East Harlem, it’s the story of a young woman caught between the life her family has chosen for her and the one she’s beginning to imagine — and the impossible cost of wanting both.

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

If you’re interested in this idea, here are a few other blog posts that you might enjoy reading:

The Wedding DayCampanilismoThe Weight of the Rosary about the corredo as part of the marriage machinery

 

The post Two Men, Two Futures: What Marriage Meant in East Harlem appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

Mrs. Benedetto didn’t sleep well. That was the thing about her — she was always on her stoop at odd hours, sweeping or sitting or simply watching the street with the quiet patience of someone who had nothing better to do and nowhere else to be. She saw who came home late. She saw who left early. She saw the cab that pulled up at three in the morning, and the girl who stepped out of it in a torn dress with a man’s jacket around her shoulders.

Mrs. Benedetto is a fictional character. But the woman she’s drawn from — the neighborhood sentinel, the stoop-sitter, the eyes that never closed — was as real as the brownstones she watched from. In the Italian immigrant neighborhoods of early twentieth-century New York, there was always a Mrs. Benedetto. Usually several. And they were the living architecture of something the Italians called campanilismo.

The word comes from campanile — bell tower. In the villages of southern Italy, your identity was defined by which bell tower you could hear. If you lived within the sound of the bells, you belonged. You were known. You were watched over — and watched. Campanilismo was loyalty to that circle, fierce and total, and it traveled with the immigrants who crossed the Atlantic in the decades around the turn of the century. They didn’t leave it behind with the olive groves and the stone churches. They rebuilt it, block by block, in tenement neighborhoods where the new bell tower was Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street.

That church was no abstraction. The Italian immigrant community of East Harlem built it with their own hands — men who had already worked a full day in construction or at the docks coming together each evening to lay bricks and carve stone for a place of worship that would be theirs. The cornerstone was laid in September 1884. The church opened in 1887. And from that moment, the twin towers of Mount Carmel became the campanile of Italian Harlem — the center around which an entire community organized its spiritual, social, and moral life.

By 1919, when The Promise opens, the community within earshot of those bells was dense, intimate, and self-policing in ways that are difficult for modern readers to fully grasp. Southern Italians and Sicilians had clustered by village of origin — families from the same town in the province of Potenza or Salerno settling on the same block, sometimes in the same building. They spoke the same dialect. They attended the same Mass. They knew each other’s business with a thoroughness that was both comforting and claustrophobic.

This is the world Lucie Santoro is born into. On her graduation day in the novel’s opening chapter, she can hear women calling to each other in Italian from their fire escapes. She watches the familiar faces in the gymnasium — the families from church, the Daughters of Isabella, the neighbors who have tracked her progress from first communion to final exams. When her friend Ines gives her a dollar as a graduation gift, Lucie tucks it away quickly, knowing the amount is too generous, knowing it will start tongues wagging, knowing that by Sunday Mrs. Esposito will have an opinion about girls who don’t know their place.

That scene captures what campanilismo actually felt like from the inside: not a single dramatic moment of surveillance, but a constant low hum of awareness. Everyone noting. Everyone filing away. Everyone ready to report.

The system ran on women. The men went to work — the tailor shops, the construction sites, the docks — and the women governed the social order. They managed the household economies, raised the children, maintained the religious obligations, and — critically — enforced the community’s moral code. A woman’s reputation was the family’s reputation, and the family’s reputation was its currency. Buon nome — good name — wasn’t a nice thing to have. It was survival. A family with a damaged name saw their daughters’ marriage prospects shrink, their sons’ business relationships sour, their place in the parish hierarchy slip.

[image error]The enforcement was subtle and relentless. A woman sweeping her stoop at dawn would note who was already out and who wasn’t. Conversations at the market carried information as efficiently as a telegraph. Sunday Mass was as much a social audit as a spiritual practice — who was present, who was absent, who looked well, who looked troubled, whose daughter was wearing something new, whose son had been seen in the wrong company. The Questua — the collection of alms for the annual Festa del Giglio — doubled as a census of devotion. How much you gave, and how publicly, positioned your family in the community’s invisible ledger.

For the women who operated within this system, campanilismo offered something real and valuable: protection. In a city that was frequently hostile to Italian immigrants — where the Irish-dominated police force could be openly contemptuous, where labor exploitation was rampant, where the broader American culture regarded southern Italians with suspicion — the neighborhood was a fortress. It took care of its own. It fed families when the men were out of work. It celebrated births and mourned deaths with a warmth that was genuine and sustaining. The festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel, held every July, drew tens of thousands of people by the late 1910s. It was the community’s declaration of permanence: We are here. We belong. We are not going anywhere.

But the same walls that kept danger out kept the women in.

For a young woman like Lucie — intelligent, ambitious, hungry for something beyond the kitchen and the church — campanilismo was a cage built from love. Every neighbor who smiled at her on the street was also a potential informant. Every kind word from a church elder came with an expectation attached. The community that had protected her family since they arrived from Castelmezzano was also the community that would decide, without consulting her, whom she would marry and when, what she was permitted to want, and how far she was allowed to reach.

This is the paradox I kept turning over as I wrote The Promise: how do you rebel against people who genuinely love you? How do you reject a system that has genuine value — that feeds your family, that buries your dead, that gives your life structure and meaning — because it also happens to be crushing you? The cost of staying is your autonomy. The cost of leaving is everything else.

I’ve heard from readers of my earlier series who recognized this dynamic immediately — not because they grew up in Italian Harlem, but because versions of campanilismo exist in close-knit communities everywhere. The church congregation that rallies around you and also gossips about you. The small town where everyone knows your car and notices when it’s parked somewhere unexpected. The immigrant family that sacrificed everything to give you opportunities and then cannot understand why those opportunities are pulling you away from them.

The Italian word gives it a name. The bell tower gives it a shape. But the experience — the tangle of belonging and surveillance, love and control, that shaped women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America — is older and wider than any single community.

In the novel, the bells of Mount Carmel ring through almost every chapter. They call Lucie to Mass. They mark her graduation. They toll over the moments of crisis that reshape her life. Early in the story, they sound like home. By the end, they sound like something else — an accusation, a summons, a question she doesn’t know how to answer.

I didn’t plan that motif when I started writing. The bells just kept appearing, the way they would have appeared in Lucie’s daily life — constant, rhythmic, inescapable. It was only later, rereading the manuscript, that I realized the bells were doing the same work campanilismo does in real life. Marking the boundaries. Calling everyone home. Reminding you, with every toll, exactly where you belong.

And for a girl who was beginning to suspect she belonged somewhere else entirely — that sound was the most complicated thing in her world.

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

The Promise, Book One of The Promise Trilogy, releases August 2026. Step inside Lucie Santoro’s East Harlem — where the neighborhood sees everything, forgives nothing, and loves you whether you want it to or not.

 

The post Campanilismo: The Neighborhood That Saw Everything appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

The beads were smooth from use. Three sets of hands had worn the finish off them — a grandmother’s, a mother’s, a daughter’s — each woman’s fingers finding the same grooves in prayer, wearing the wood down the way water wears stone. Slowly. Over years. Until the rosary held the shape of every woman who had ever held it.

I didn’t set out to write a novel about objects. But when I began researching the world Lucie Santoro would inhabit in The Promise — East Harlem, 1919, the Italian immigrant community at its most tightly knit and fiercely guarded — I kept coming back to the things women carried. Not metaphorically. Literally. The physical objects they packed into trunks and clutched on steamships and unpacked into tenement rooms that smelled nothing like home. Those objects did work that language couldn’t always do. They held identity when identity was under siege.

Consider what it meant to leave southern Italy at the turn of the century. You were leaving a village where your family had lived for generations, where the church bells marked your days and everyone knew your name. You were boarding a ship in steerage — weeks of seasickness, salt water for washing, strangers pressed against you in the dark — with no guarantee you’d ever come back. And you could bring almost nothing.

What you chose to carry said everything about who you were and who you intended to remain.

For the women, the choices were specific and deliberate. A rosary, blessed and familiar, small enough to tuck into a pocket or press against your chest during the crossing. A saint’s medal, perhaps — a tiny silver Christopher for protection on the journey, or a Madonna for the children. And then the corredo.

The corredo — the bridal trousseau — was the largest, most labor-intensive thing a woman brought to her new life, whether that new life was a marriage or a new country. In southern Italian tradition, a girl began assembling her corredo in adolescence, sometimes earlier. Her mother, her grandmother, her aunts — every woman in the family contributed. They embroidered bed sheets and pillowcases, hemmed table linens, stitched nightgowns and dish towels. Even the humblest families were expected to produce a minimum collection: dozens of sheets, pillowcases by the score, towels, tablecloths for everyday and tablecloths for occasions that hadn’t happened yet.

The corredo wasn’t just practical. It was proof. Proof that a family had raised their daughter properly. Proof that she could maintain a household. Proof of status, of care, of generations of women’s hands working together toward a future they were building stitch by stitch. In Sicily, the trousseau was displayed publicly the day before the wedding, laid out for neighbors and extended family to inspect and evaluate. A professional appraiser sometimes assigned values to each piece. The competitive pressure was real — an elaborate corredo signaled a family’s standing as surely as the church pew they occupied on Sunday.

When these families crossed the Atlantic, the corredo came with them. Five-foot wooden trunks packed with hand-embroidered linen, carried through Ellis Island alongside crying children and crumpled immigration papers. Some of those trunks survive to this day in the attics and basements of Italian American families — the fabric yellowed, the embroidery still precise, the monograms still legible. Evidence of a world that traveled inside a box.

But here’s what struck me most deeply in the research, and what found its way into The Promise: these objects didn’t just preserve tradition. They enforced it.

The corredo was assembled for a daughter, but it was also assembled around her. Every stitch was a stitch toward marriage. Every pillowcase was a promise that she would become a wife, a mother, a keeper of the home her linens would fill. A girl who rejected marriage was rejecting the years of work her family had invested — not just emotionally, but materially. The corredo made duty tangible. You could hold it in your hands. You could feel its weight.

The rosary worked the same way. In the Italian immigrant neighborhoods of East Harlem, faith wasn’t private. It was communal, visible, and monitored. Your rosary marked you as belonging — to the parish, to the neighborhood, to the generations of women who had prayed those same prayers before you. To carry your mother’s rosary was to carry her expectations. To lose it, or to bring it somewhere it didn’t belong, was to sever something that couldn’t easily be repaired.

In Mamma Santoro’s East Harlem, the neighborhood operated under campanilismo — loyalty to everyone within earshot of the bell tower. The bell tower of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street, built with labor donated by the immigrant community itself, was the spiritual and social center of Italian Harlem. The community saw everything. Noted everything. Remembered everything. Your possessions — what you wore, what you carried, what you displayed in your home — were read as text. A crucifix above the bed. A saint’s card in the kitchen. The good china on the right shelf. Every object was a sentence in the story the neighborhood was always telling about you.

For a young woman like Lucie, growing up inside that world, objects carried a double weight. They were comfort — the familiar feel of her mother’s rosary beads, the kitchen that smelled of garlic and candle wax, the household rhythms that connected her to something ancient and sure. And they were constraint — the corredo being stitched for a marriage she hadn’t chosen, the ring that would replace her name, the church bells that told her when to wake and when to pray and when to come home.

What happens when a woman outgrows the objects that defined her? When the rosary that once meant safety starts to feel like a leash? When the hope chest full of hand-embroidered linens starts to look less like a gift and more like a sentence?

That tension — between what we inherit and what we choose, between the objects that hold us together and the ones that hold us back — runs through all of my fiction about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. It’s the tension at the heart of The Promise, where Lucie must decide what to keep and what to let go — and discover that some things, once released, can never be recovered.

I think about the real women who made those crossings. Who packed their trunks with linens their mothers had embroidered and rosaries their grandmothers had prayed. Who carried the old world into the new one, object by object, and then watched their daughters reach for something different. Something lighter. Something their own.

The objects stayed. Tucked into drawers, hung on walls, pressed between the pages of prayer books. Silent witnesses to everything that changed and everything that held.

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

Book One of The Promise Trilogy, releases August 2026. Set in 1919 East Harlem, it follows Lucie Santoro as she navigates the impossible space between the life her family has planned for her and the one she’s beginning to imagine for herself.

The post The Weight of the Rosary: What Women Carried in 1919 appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

 

On a warm Saturday afternoon in late March, a young reporter named William Gunn Shepherd was walking through Washington Square when he saw smoke rising from the upper floors of the Asch Building. He found a telephone across the street and began dictating what he saw to his editor at the New York World. He would keep talking for the next half hour, his voice steady even as the scene in front of him became almost impossible to describe.

Girls were standing in the windows on the ninth floor. They were screaming, waving their arms. The crowd on the sidewalk screamed back — don’t jump, the firemen are coming — and then watched as the fire ladders swung into place and reached only to the sixth floor.

The girls jumped anyway. They had no choice.

[image error]It was March 25, 1911. The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors of the building — a garment factory employing roughly five hundred workers, most of them young immigrant women, Italian and Jewish, from the tenements of the Lower East Side. They worked nine-hour days on weekdays and seven hours on Saturdays, earning between seven and twelve dollars a week. Their sewing machines were packed so tightly together there was barely room to walk between them. Fabric scraps and paper cuttings littered the floors. And the doors to the stairwells had been locked by management — to prevent theft, the owners later testified.

When the fire broke out in a scrap bin on the eighth floor, it moved through cotton waste and hanging shirtwaists in minutes. The single fire escape collapsed under the weight of the workers trying to reach the street. One hundred and forty-six people died in eighteen minutes. Some burned. Some were crushed in the stairwells. Sixty-two jumped.

“These Dead Bodies Were the Answer”

Shepherd’s account, published in papers across the country, did not spare his readers. He described watching a young man help three women, one by one, to the window ledge and let them drop — a gesture he called “a terrible chivalry.” He watched a woman put her arms around the same young man and kiss him before he held her out into the air and then followed her down. And then he wrote the line that would follow him for the rest of his life: he looked at the heap of bodies on the sidewalk and remembered that these were the shirtwaist makers — the same women who had gone on strike the year before, demanding safer conditions and better pay. The strike had been broken. The bodies were, as he put it, the answer.

The fire was not an anomaly. It was the logical conclusion of a system that treated workers — and particularly women workers — as expendable. In 1911, an estimated one hundred workers died on the job every day across the United States. Garment factories were crowded, unventilated, and almost entirely unregulated. The women who worked in them had few options and almost no recourse. Many spoke little English. Most were the primary wage earners for their families. The Triangle factory had been cited by the Fire Department as unsafe. Nothing had been done.

What made the Triangle fire different was not the dying. It was the watching.

Thousands of people stood in the streets below and saw it happen. Frances Perkins, a thirty-one-year-old social worker who would later become the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, was visiting a friend near Washington Square when she heard the screams and the fire engines. She ran to the scene and watched as workers stood in the windowsills, crowded by the people behind them, the fire pressing closer. She later described the collective horror in terms that still cut: a stricken public conscience, a sense that everyone had been complicit, that this building and these conditions had been accepted, and that the acceptance itself was the crime.

A Woman Who Already Knew

Lillian Wald knew these workers. Many of them were her neighbors on the Lower East Side, the daughters and sisters of families her nurses visited every day through the Henry Street Settlement. She had spent nearly two decades watching young immigrant women walk into factories like the Triangle and come home exhausted, injured, or not at all.

By 1911, Wald had already built one of the most remarkable institutions in American life. The Henry Street Settlement offered English classes, job training, a savings bank, a library, and one of the city’s first public playgrounds. Her visiting nurses carried black leather bags through tenement hallways, caring for people who couldn’t afford a doctor and wouldn’t have been seen by one anyway. She had co-founded the NAACP, helped establish the Women’s Trade Union League, and coined the term “public health nurse.” She had been fighting for child labor laws and workplace protections for years.

The fire didn’t radicalize Lillian Wald. She was already there. But it confirmed what she and her allies had been saying — in testimony, in print, in exhausting rounds of meetings with legislators who nodded sympathetically and then changed nothing — about what happened to women who worked in buildings where profit mattered more than people.

The Settlement’s own facilities became gathering places in the aftermath. Union meetings were held in Wald’s parlors. Nurses who had been tending to flu cases and difficult pregnancies were now identifying bodies. The fire landed in the middle of a community that was already stretched thin, already grieving other losses, and it demanded something more than grief.

The Reckoning

Eight days after the fire, a memorial meeting was held at the Metropolitan Opera House. The audience was split — affluent reformers in the orchestra seats, working-class women packed into the balconies. Several speakers offered careful, measured calls for a bureau of fire prevention. The crowd grew restless. The two halves of the room had different ideas about what the fire meant and what should come next.

Then Rose Schneiderman, a Polish-born former garment worker and union organizer who barely reached five feet tall, walked to the stage. She spoke barely above a whisper, but the Opera House went silent. She told the audience she would be betraying the dead if she stood before them and talked about fellowship and goodwill. She told them that the working conditions that killed those women were not new, that workers died every week in the city’s factories, and that every time workers tried to protest, they were beaten back by the law. She was not interested in charity. She was interested in power — the kind that comes from workers organizing to save themselves, because no one else was going to do it.

The room that had been on the verge of breaking apart held together. The anger in Schneiderman’s words gave the grief a direction.

What followed was one of the most concentrated periods of labor reform in American history. New York’s governor established the Factory Investigating Commission, which spent years documenting conditions in factories across the state — the overcrowding, the locked exits, the absent fire escapes, the child laborers. Frances Perkins served as an investigator, leading legislators on tours of the workplaces they had never bothered to visit. Between 1911 and 1914, more than thirty new labor laws were passed in New York, covering fire safety, factory ventilation, sanitation, machine guarding, and limits on the hours women and children could work. Perkins would later say that the New Deal — Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the forty-hour work week — began on March 25, 1911, the day the Triangle factory burned.

In the Bones of the Story

I mention all of this in the Author’s Note for Book Two of The Promise Trilogy, because the Triangle fire lives in the bones of the story even though it doesn’t appear directly on the page. The novel opens in August 1919, eight years after the fire, and by then the most dramatic reforms had been passed. But the world Lucie walks into — the citizenship classrooms at Henry Street Settlement, the factories where her students work, the construction sites where a safety complaint can get a man fired — exists in the long shadow of that afternoon.

When Viktor worries about speaking up, when Pavel files a report that goes nowhere, they are living in the gap between what the Triangle fire exposed and what 1919 had not yet fixed. The laws were on the books, but enforcement was uneven, inspectors were spread thin, and the immigrants who worked the most dangerous jobs were the least likely to complain — because complaining meant attention, and attention, in an era of surveillance and deportation threats, was its own kind of danger.

Lillian Wald understood this. She had watched the system fail the women of the Triangle factory, and she spent the rest of her career trying to build something that would hold — not just laws, but institutions, not just protections on paper, but nurses in the hallways and teachers in the classrooms and a Settlement House with its doors open. In the novel, Lucie walks into that world, and it changes everything about what she believes is possible.

The Triangle fire is often told as a story about a terrible day and the reforms that followed. And it was that. But it was also a story about what happens when a society looks at its most vulnerable workers — young, female, foreign-born, barely paid — and decides they are worth protecting. That decision didn’t come easily. It came because 146 people died in eighteen minutes, and because the women who survived — and the women who had been fighting alongside them for years — refused to let the city look away.

That fight, as Lucie will discover, was far from over. It continues in Book Three.

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

For readers interested in the history behind this post, David Von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire That Changed America (2003) tells the story with extraordinary detail and compassion. The Kheel Center at Cornell University maintains an invaluable digital archive of primary documents, including survivor testimonies and William Shepherd’s eyewitness account. And Lillian Wald’s own The House on Henry Street (1915) remains one of the most vivid accounts of settlement house life ever written.

The post EIGHTEEN MINUTES: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the Women Who Refused to Look Away appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

Marching into History: What the Fight for the Vote Cost the Women of East Harlem

In the fall of 1917, an Italian immigrant mother in East Harlem walked into a polling station for the first time in her life. She had never imagined this moment — not when she left Naples, not when she learned to navigate the crowded streets of upper Manhattan, not when she bargained with vendors in a language she was still learning. The ballot in her hand was lighter than a grocery list, and heavier than anything she had ever carried.

New York had just become one of the first states east of the Mississippi to grant women the right to vote. For the suffrage leaders who had organized parades down Fifth Avenue and lobbied lawmakers in Albany, this was a hard-won victory — the culmination of decades of marches, petitions, and arrests. For the women of East Harlem’s Italian immigrant neighborhoods, it was something more complicated. A door had opened that many of them hadn’t asked to walk through.

That tension — between a right being won and a community deciding what to do with it — is the part of the suffrage story that rarely makes the history books.

The Neighborhood View

The great suffrage parades that filled the newspapers were spectacles of determination and courage. In 1915, more than 25,000 women marched up Fifth Avenue demanding the vote. When the referendum failed that year, they regrouped and fought harder. By 1917, they had won New York.

But the experience of suffrage looked very different depending on which block you lived on. For the working-class immigrant families in East Harlem — Italian, Irish, Jewish, Eastern European — the vote arrived wrapped in complications that the society women leading the marches didn’t always see.

Many immigrant women couldn’t vote even after the law changed, because they weren’t citizens. Their husbands might be eligible, but citizenship required navigating a bureaucracy conducted entirely in English — a barrier that kept countless families on the outside of the rights technically available to them. For women who had crossed an ocean and built new lives in tenement kitchens, the ballot box felt like it belonged to a different country within the country they already lived in.

And then there was the question of whether voting was something a respectable woman did at all. In the campanilismo of southern Italian culture — that deep loyalty to your own village, your own block, your own people — a woman’s world was the family. Politics was men’s business. A daughter who marched with a sign wasn’t just exercising a new right; she was drawing attention to herself and her family in a community where reputation was survival. The cost of becoming a political person was paid partly in the currency of belonging.

Where the Arguments Met

If suffrage felt distant to many immigrant women, it was the settlement houses that brought it close.

Places like the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side — founded by the nurse and reformer Lillian Wald in 1893 — were already the place where immigrant women came for English classes, health care, and vocational training. Wald was a fierce suffrage advocate who understood that the cause had to meet women where they lived, not just where it was convenient to march. She campaigned for the vote while simultaneously fighting the anti-immigrant attitudes that some suffrage leaders used to argue their case. When the 1915 referendum failed, a prominent suffrage leader blamed immigrant voters for the defeat. Wald pushed back, insisting that immigrants — far from being obstacles to democracy — were often the people most eager to exercise the political rights they had been denied in the countries they’d left behind.

The Woman Suffrage Party, recognizing that the movement couldn’t win New York without working-class support, began printing their literature in Italian, Yiddish, and Chinese. After the 1917 victory, they formed an Americanization Committee that visited tenements, taught English, and helped women navigate the path to citizenship. These weren’t abstract gestures. They were women knocking on doors in neighborhoods where a pamphlet in Italian could mean the difference between a right that existed on paper and a right that existed in someone’s life.

For a young woman like Lucie Santoro — the daughter of Italian immigrants, coming of age in 1919 East Harlem — the settlement house was the place where the old world and the new world collided most directly. It was where you might hear a suffrage argument between an English lesson and a childcare class. It was where the idea that you could have a voice beyond your family’s kitchen first became thinkable. And it was where the cost of wanting something your mother never imagined became painfully real.

Labor and the Ballot

The suffrage movement and the labor movement were never separate struggles for working-class women. The same factories that locked their doors during shifts — the same conditions that killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 — were the conditions that radicalized a generation of women who might never have picked up a suffrage banner otherwise.

At a suffrage parade in 1912, just a year after the Triangle fire, working women from the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League marched carrying signs that read “We Want the Vote for Fire Protection.” The connection was blunt and devastating: if women could vote, they could elect officials who would enforce safety laws. If they couldn’t, they could only watch while the men who let their sisters burn faced no consequences.

Rose Schneiderman — the garment worker and labor organizer who had risen to prominence after the Triangle fire — became one of the suffrage movement’s most powerful voices precisely because she refused to separate the vote from wages, from safety, from the daily indignities of factory life. For women like her, suffrage wasn’t an abstract right. It was a tool — the only tool they hadn’t yet been allowed to use.

The Cost That Made the Papers

The macro cost of suffrage is well documented. Women were arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for demanding the right to vote. The most infamous episode — the Night of Terror on November 14, 1917, at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia — came just days after New York’s women celebrated their state-level victory at the polls.

Thirty-three women, including the formidable Lucy Burns, were arrested for picketing outside the White House, where they had been standing for months as Silent Sentinels demanding President Wilson support a federal amendment. That night, guards at Occoquan attacked the prisoners. Women were thrown against iron beds and slammed into walls. Burns was chained to her cell door with her arms above her head and left that way through the night. When the women went on hunger strikes, they were force-fed through tubes — a practice that left them bruised, choking, and vomiting blood.

The public outcry was enormous. Newspapers carried the stories, and suffrage leaders used the brutality to turn public sentiment against a government that claimed to fight for democracy abroad while denying it to half its citizens at home. By 1918, President Wilson endorsed the amendment. Congress passed it in June 1919. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify what became the Nineteenth Amendment.

It is a story of courage and persistence, and it deserves to be told. But it is not the whole story.

The Costs That Didn’t Make the Papers

For every Lucy Burns who endured a prison cell, there were thousands of women whose costs were quieter, more private, and no less real.

There was the immigrant mother who walked into a polling station bewildered and proud in equal measure — proud because someone had fought for this right, bewildered because no one in the world she came from had ever imagined she would need it. The cost for her wasn’t violence. It was disorientation — the slow, wrenching recognition that the ground beneath her life had shifted and she hadn’t been consulted.

There was her daughter, who had whispered suffrage slogans in her bedroom and marched with a sign her mother didn’t know about. Her cost was the look on her mother’s face — the moment when ambition and gratitude collided, when wanting something new meant rejecting the life her mother had sacrificed everything to build. In East Harlem’s Italian community, where family loyalty was the bedrock of identity, a daughter’s political awakening could feel like betrayal.

There were the Black women who marched alongside white women for a right they would be systematically denied for decades afterward. The Nineteenth Amendment didn’t mention race, but Jim Crow didn’t care about amendments. Black women in the South faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation designed to keep them from the ballot box. Native American women and Asian American women were denied voting rights for decades after 1920. The cost of suffrage, like every other cost of becoming in early twentieth-century America, was never evenly distributed.

And there were the women who watched from windows. The seamstress who paused mid-stitch as the marchers passed. The young mother who pulled her daughter back from the curb. The old woman on the fire escape, wrapped in a shawl, studying the procession below with an expression no one could read. These women didn’t march. Some couldn’t afford to. Some had husbands or fathers or priests who would have made their lives unbearable. Some simply weren’t ready — not yet, not today, not with the children needing dinner and the rent due Friday. Their cost was watching and staying still, carrying the knowledge of what was possible without yet having the means to reach for it.

Lucie’s Year

By the spring of 1919 — the year the Promise Trilogy begins — the suffrage fight had entered its final chapter. Congress was debating what would become the Nineteenth Amendment. New York’s women had been voting for two years, and the sky had not fallen. The republic, as the suffragists had predicted, had not crumbled.

But in East Harlem, the atmosphere was charged with more than suffrage. The influenza pandemic had swept through the neighborhood the previous fall, killing thousands and leaving behind a grief that didn’t have a public vocabulary. Returning soldiers were flooding back into a city that had changed while they were gone. The Red Scare was making immigrants targets of suspicion. And the ratification battle that would decide whether the rest of America’s women could vote was playing out against all of it.

For Lucie Santoro — seventeen, the first daughter in her family to graduate high school, caught between her mother’s expectations and her own growing sense of what her life could be — the question of the vote was tangled up with every other question about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. Could you honor the sacrifices your family had made and still want something they never imagined? Could you step into public life without losing your place in the private world that had raised you? Could you become something new without breaking the people who loved the person you used to be?

These are the questions that the suffrage parades raised but couldn’t answer — because the answers were different for every woman, on every block, in every family. They are the questions that play out in the Promise Trilogy, where the cost of becoming is never abstract. It is always personal, always specific, and always paid by someone who didn’t get to choose the price.

The Promise Trilogy releases August 4, 2026.

Claim Your Free Story Here!

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

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Marching into History: How New York Women Fought Their Way to the Ballot Box

On October 27, 1917, more than 20,000 women marched through the streets of New York City, demanding the right to vote. It was one of the largest suffrage demonstrations the city had ever seen, and it came at a pivotal moment—just days before New York State would hold a referendum on women’s suffrage. Suffragettes knew that if they could win the vote in New York, the most populous and politically influential state in the country, it would be a significant step toward national suffrage.

But the road to victory was anything but easy.

For decades, women had been heckled, mocked, threatened, and arrested for demanding the vote. Their struggle wasn’t just against politicians who refused to change the law—it was against a deeply ingrained belief that women had no place in politics at all.
And in the final, crucial months before the vote, the backlash became more brutal than ever.

New York: The Battleground for Women’s Voting Rights

New York was a critical state in the fight for suffrage. Women’s rights activists had been campaigning for the vote since the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, but for much of the 19th century, progress was slow.

By the early 1900s, suffrage groups had grown more organized and militant. In 1915, a suffrage referendum was put before New York voters—but it failed.

Opponents claimed that women didn’t need or want the vote, and that it would disrupt the social order.

Suffragettes refused to back down. They intensified their efforts, holding mass demonstrations, publishing pamphlets, and lobbying lawmakers. Women from all social classes joined the cause—from wealthy society women like Alva Belmont to working-class activists like Rose Schneiderman.

By 1917, with World War I raging overseas, suffragettes tied their cause to the war effort. Women were working in factories, serving as nurses, and keeping the country running while men fought abroad. They argued: If women could contribute to the nation in war, why couldn’t they vote at home?

As the 1917 referendum approached, tensions were high.

The Consequences of Protest: Arrest, Brutality, and Imprisonment

Peaceful protests weren’t always met with peaceful responses. Women were frequently harassed, assaulted, and arrested by police.

* They were charged with disorderly conduct or obstructing traffic—thin excuses to justify arrests.
* Many were roughed up by police, dragged by their hair, punched, or struck with batons.
* Some suffragettes were sentenced to workhouses or prisons, where conditions were brutal.

One of the most infamous incidents occurred just a few weeks after the October 27, 1917, march in New York:

The Night of Terror: November 14-15, 1917

While New York suffragettes were celebrating their victory at the polls on November 6, 1917 (when the state finally granted women the vote), their sisters in Washington, D.C., were facing a nightmare at Occoquan Workhouse.

On November 14, 1917, 33 women—including Lucy Burns—were arrested for picketing outside the White House. President Woodrow Wilson had long refused to support a federal suffrage amendment, and women known as the Silent Sentinels had been protesting his inaction for months.

That night, guards at Occoquan Workhouse viciously attacked the prisoners in what became known as the Night of Terror:

* Women were thrown against iron beds, slammed into walls, and kicked.
* Lucy Burns, one of the most outspoken leaders, was chained to her cell door with her arms above her head all night.
* When women went on a hunger strike, they were force-fed through tubes shoved down their throats—a torturous practice that left them bruised and vomiting blood.

The public outcry over their treatment was enormous. Newspapers covered the brutality, and suffrage leaders used it to turn public opinion against the government’s handling of women protesters.

The Final Push for National Suffrage (1918-1920)

After New York granted women the right to vote in 1917, the suffrage movement shifted its focus to the federal level.

* In 1918, President Wilson finally endorsed women’s suffrage, partly due to public pressure over the treatment of imprisoned suffragettes.
* The House of Representatives passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (what would become the 19th Amendment) in 1918, but the Senate rejected it.
* In 1919, it passed both houses of Congress, and the long battle for state ratification began.

Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, securing women’s suffrage nationwide.

What Did It Cost?

The right to vote was not freely given—it was fought for with courage, sacrifice, and pain.
Women like Lucy Burns, Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells, and thousands of unnamed activists endured arrest, humiliation, and violence to secure a right that many take for granted today.
Even after the 19th Amendment was passed, the fight wasn’t over. Many Black women in the South were still disenfranchised due to racist Jim Crow laws. Native American and Asian American women were also denied voting rights for decades after 1920.
The lesson of the suffrage movement is clear: progress is never inevitable. It must be fought for.

Why This History Matters Today

The women of 1917 didn’t just fight for their own rights—they fought for future generations. Their struggle is a reminder that:

* Political change requires persistence. The suffrage movement didn’t succeed overnight. It took decades of relentless activism to win.
* Those in power rarely give it up willingly. The women of 1917 were mocked, jailed, and brutalized because they threatened the status quo.
* We must protect the rights they won. Voting rights remain under attack in many ways today.

The best way to honor these suffragettes is to exercise the right they fought for.
As we remember the events of October 27, 1917, and the brutal aftermath of the Night of Terror, we should ask ourselves: What rights are we willing to fight for today?

Conclusion

The fight for women’s suffrage was never just about voting—it was about power, inclusion, and justice. Women like Lucy Burns and the thousands of suffragettes who marched in New York City paved the way for future generations, but their work isn’t finished.

More than a century later, we still face battles over who gets a voice in democracy. Their story isn’t just history—it’s a call to action.

No right to silence. No right to surrender. The fight continues.

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When Standing Up Meant Standing Apart

Look at her – poised in that sun-drenched classroom, every inch the picture of a proper 1920s teacher. But don’t let the high collar and perfect posture fool you. For women like Lucie Santoro, the hero in Sherilyn’s soon-to-be released novel, choosing the classroom over the kitchen wasn’t just a career choice – it was an act of revolution.

“Education changes people, Lucia,” her mama warned. “It takes them places a mother’s prayers can’t follow.”

Mama wasn’t wrong. But sometimes the most dangerous steps are the ones that lead us exactly where we’re meant to be.

From Home to the Classroom: The Transformative Power of Education in Historical Fiction

Picture this: A young woman in early 20th century East Harlem, her eyes bright with ambition, clutching a high school diploma in one hand and a dream in the other. Her family sees a future bride and homemaker. She sees a classroom full of eager students, waiting for her to unlock their potential.

Welcome to the world of Lucie Santoro, the feisty heroine of *The Promise*, and buckle up for a journey that’s about to turn the page on traditional expectations!

## Education: The Ultimate Rebel’s Toolkit

In the realm of historical fiction, education isn’t just about books and blackboards. Oh no, it’s the secret weapon our heroines wield to shake up the status quo. It’s the key that unlocks doors, the torch that lights up dark corners of possibility, and sometimes, it’s the metaphorical stick of dynamite that blows societal expectations sky-high!

For our girl Lucie, education is all that and a bag of chips. It’s her ticket to:
– Independence (bye-bye, arranged marriages!)
– Intellectual fulfillment (because there’s more to life than pasta recipes)
– Making a difference (one student at a time)

## The Graduate’s Dilemma: Diploma vs. Domesticity

Imagine graduation day. The air is thick with possibility (and maybe a little mothball scent from those robes). Lucie’s heart is doing the cha-cha of excitement and dread. On one shoulder sits the angel of ambition, whispering of chalk-dusted futures. On the other, the devil of duty, mumbling about wedding bells and cradles.

It’s the ultimate showdown:
–  Classroom or  Altar?
– Textbooks or Diapers?
–  Apples for the teacher or Spaghetti for the family?

Talk about a cliffhanger, folks!

## Sister Agnes: The OG Cheerleader

Every heroine needs a sidekick, and for Lucie, it’s Sister Agnes. Think of her as the Dumbledore to Lucie’s Harry Potter, minus the beard and plus a habit. She’s the one who sees the spark in Lucie’s eyes and fans it into a flame.

Sister Agnes is serving up:
– Encouragement (with a side of tough love)
– Guidance (GPS for the soul, if you will)
– A much-needed reality check (when Lucie’s dreams need a little grounding)

## Breaking News: Women Can Think!

Hold onto your hats, because *The Promise Trilogy* is about to drop a bombshell: women have brains! I know, shocking, right? But in Lucie’s world, this is headline news. She’s riding the wave of a revolution where women are starting to step out of the kitchen and into… well, everywhere else!

World War I is shaking things up, and suddenly:
– Rosie the Riveter is everyone’s new #WCW
– Education for women is becoming less “Why?” and more “Why not?”
– The future is female (but don’t tell the menfolk just yet)

## The Rocky Road to Teacherhood

Now, don’t go thinking this is all smooth sailing. Lucie’s path to the classroom is bumpier than a Model T on a cobblestone street. She’s got:
– A mother who thinks “career woman” is code for “old maid”
– A community that raises eyebrows higher than their Sunday hats
– Her own doubts nipping at her heels like a pesky puppy

But does our girl give up? Heck no! She’s got grit, determination, and a vision of a future where she calls the shots.

## Lucie Santoro: Rebel with a Cause

In the end, Lucie’s not just fighting for a job. She’s fighting for:
– The right to define her own success
– A future built on her terms
– The chance to lift up others through education

Her classroom isn’t just a room with desks and a chalkboard. It’s her declaration of independence, her soapbox, her stage. It’s where Lucie Santoro becomes the leading lady of her own life story.

So, dear readers, the next time you crack open a historical fiction novel, keep an eye out for the Lucies of the world. They’re the ones with ink-stained fingers, fire in their eyes, and dreams bigger than their hometown. They’re the ones who remind us that sometimes, the most revolutionary act is simply to learn, to teach, and to never, ever stop questioning the world around us.

Class dismissed!

# Don’t Miss a Moment of Lucie’s Journey!

Hey there, fellow time travelers! Ready to be part of something extraordinary? Because let’s be honest – we all know that feeling of wanting to shake things up, of standing at the crossroads between what’s expected and what’s possible. That’s exactly where Lucie Santoro finds herself in 1925, and trust me, you’re going to want a front-row seat for what happens next!

## Why Join Our Newsletter Family?

Picture this: Every month, you’ll get an exclusive peek behind the curtain of The Promise Trilogy, including:
– Behind-the-scenes glimpses of Lucie’s world
– Sneak peeks at upcoming chapters- Chapter One of Book One is available now, just email Sherilyn after you subscribe.
– Hidden historical gems that inspired the story
– First dibs on becoming a beta reader
– Special subscriber-only content
– Free stories and exclusive offers- keep reading to find out how you can get your free copy of Red Sky at Night

Plus, you’ll be part of a community that gets it – that understands why a young woman in 1925 might trade her mother’s marinara recipe for a piece of chalk and a classroom of possibilities!

Remember, some stories are too good to keep to yourself. Join our newsletter family today and let’s make a little history together!

# But Wait… There’s More! A Special Welcome Gift!

Sign up today and you’ll get an exclusive early peek at Cleo Lythgoe’s story in “Red Sky at Night“!

Picture this: It’s 1932, Prohibition is in full swing, and Cleo Lythgoe is about to learn that running liquor on Rum Row takes more than just guts – it takes moxie! When a storm washes away a mobster’s booze order and pirates are circling like sharks, what’s a girl to do? Especially when the company’s reputation (and maybe her life!) hangs in the balance…

## Why You’ll Love This Story:
– High-seas adventure
– Prohibition-era drama
– Fierce female protagonists
– Rum-running excitement
– And a dash of romance with the legendary Bill McCoy himself!

Think “Peaky Blinders” meets “Pirates of the Caribbean” – but with a woman calling the shots!

This full-length story is my gift to you, available immediately when you join our newsletter family. Because let’s face it – who doesn’t love a tale about a woman making waves in a man’s world?

## Double the Drama, Double the Fun!
Follow BOTH Lucie and Cleo’s journeys – from East Harlem classrooms to high-stakes rum running. Two women, two different paths to independence, one amazing adventure!

P.S. Did I mention there are pirates? And mobsters? And a swoon-worthy romance? Just saying…

**SIGN UP NOW and get a free novella Red Sky at Night**

P.S. Mama Santoro would definitely not approve of this newsletter… which is exactly why you should subscribe!

#DareToTeach #HistoricalFiction #WomensStories #ThePromiseTrilogy

#HistoricalFiction #WomenInHistory #1920s #TeacherLife #ItalianAmerican #WomensStories #ComingSoon #ThePromiseTrilogy

How about you? Would you have dared to defy tradition for a dream?

The post From Home to the Classroom appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

Ciao amici! Bette Hardwick here, whisking you away to the heart of Italian immigrant life in 1918 New York City. Join me as we explore the mouthwatering scenes and savory secrets from Sherilyn’s upcoming novel, “The Promise Trilogy.”

Set against the bustling streets of the Big Apple, this trilogy brings to life the vibrant energy and rich culinary traditions of immigrant families like the Santoros.

Step into Mama Santoro’s kitchen, where the air is thick with the aroma of simmering sauces and freshly baked bread. In this bustling haven, cooking isn’t just a chore – it’s a cherished ritual that binds families together, creating memories that last a lifetime. From the clatter of pots and pans to the laughter of a rambunctious family, every meal is a celebration of love, tradition, and togetherness.

But why is food so important to the Santoros? It’s more than just sustenance; it’s a way of life, a reflection of their history, and a means of preserving tradition. As immigrants far from home, these recipes are time capsules, preserving the flavors and memories of generations past. Each dish tells a story, carrying with it the love and labor of those who came before.

And now, I have a special treat for you straight from the pages of “The Promise Trilogy” – Mama Santoro’s famous Funghi Trifolati recipe. This mouthwatering dish showcases the flavor of mushrooms enhanced with garlic, parsley, olive oil, and sometimes a splash of white wine. It’s a simple yet delicious taste of Italy that’s sure to transport you to Mama’s kitchen with every bite.

Ingredients:

– 500g mixed mushrooms (such as button, cremini, shiitake), cleaned and sliced
– 2 cloves of garlic, minced
– 2 tablespoons olive oil
– 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
– 1 tablespoon fresh parsley, finely chopped
– Salt and pepper to taste
– A splash of white wine (optional)
– Lemon zest (optional)

Instructions:

1. Heat the olive oil and butter in a large skillet over medium heat until the butter is melted.
2. Add the minced garlic to the skillet and sauté for about 1 minute, until fragrant.
3. Add the sliced mushrooms to the skillet. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms are tender and browned, about 8-10 minutes.
4. If using, add a splash of white wine to the skillet and cook for another 2-3 minutes, allowing the alcohol to evaporate.
5. Season the mushrooms with salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the chopped parsley and lemon zest, if using.
6. Remove the skillet from heat and serve the Funghi Trifolati hot as a side dish or over pasta.

So, grab your apron and get ready to embark on a culinary journey through 1920s Italian heritage. From savory sauces to hearty meatballs, each recipe is a testament to the power of food to bring families together and keep traditions alive. And remember, as Mama always says, “There’s never enough salt.”

Buon appetito! Get ready to savor the flavors and stories woven into every bite of Mama Santoro’s kitchen creations.

 

The post The Culinary Joys Found In The Promise Trilogy appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.