
“It was a six-tenement house. It was my … aunts, and myself, me, I was brought up there.”
![Olivia’s grandmother, Mrs. Antonio Raposo Terceira, Sr., née Maria De Jesus Ferreira Andrade, in later life. <p><p><em> “My grandmother grew up in [Feteiras do Sul, São Miguel,] Azores, but she was brought up in Hawaii. She had quite a travel, you know.” </em></p></p>](https://fallriverhistorical.org/WomenatWork/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/04/Abdow2_edited-1web/3271079568.jpg)
“My grandmother grew up in [Feteiras do Sul, São Miguel,] Azores, but she was brought up in Hawaii. She had quite a travel, you know.”

“She got married, and she went to work. She eloped. She eloped so she could stay here and she went to work.”

Seated: José ‘Joseph’ Raposo Terceira, Jr.
“Just four – my three brothers and myself. And my mother kept working until my older brother was sixteen and she says, ‘Well, I, I give up. I’m not working anymore.”

“It was a cold water flat. And my mother got the tub out from hanging on the door … and it was only once a week. And she’d bring out the tub and we would all take a bath. And then my brothers got old enough to go to the Boy’s Club – I thanked the Boy’s Club many times – so they could go swimming, but I had to use the tub.”

“Sometimes I hated being a girl. My brothers go swimming to the sandbars … I couldn’t go, I was a girl.”

![The Durfee Mills, Pleasant Street, Fall River, Massachusetts, in an early 20th century postcard; the building at the left later housed Nancy Dress Company, at 473 – 475 Pleasant Street. <p><p><em> “I worked in the shop, one shop [Nancy Dress Company] … twenty-eight years – that’s not counting the others.” </em></p></p>](https://fallriverhistorical.org/WomenatWork/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/04/Abdow8web/734879860.jpg)
“I worked in the shop, one shop [Nancy Dress Company] … twenty-eight years – that’s not counting the others.”

“And we had, we never went without. We had a good, good upbringing.”
![Sister Marie de la Nativité, of the order of Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers, at the Convent of the Good Shepherd in Cairo, Egypt, with her niece, Mary Doumite; the girl, would later marry Nahem ‘Nathan’ Eid Abdow and become Olivia’s mother-in-law. Mary was fluent in six languages: Arabic, English, French, Greek, Italian, and Latin. <p><p><em> “And my mother-in-law was brought up in the convent in Egypt. Her parents had died, and then she came to this country [and] she got married.” </em></p></p>](https://fallriverhistorical.org/WomenatWork/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/04/Abdow10_edited-1web/212948246.jpg)
“And my mother-in-law was brought up in the convent in Egypt. Her parents had died, and then she came to this country [and] she got married.”

“And my husband is Lebanese.”


“Yeah, because, first of all, we took the bus to, uh, the Durfee. We saw a nice movie.”

“Cause I got married at twenty and he was twenty himself.”



Olivia captioned the photograph:
“Steven’s 5 year old party. Keith was on his way.”
![Olivia’s in-laws, Nahem ‘Nathan’ Eid Abdow, and Mrs. Abdow, née Mary Doumite, at their grandson Steven’s <em>“5 year old birthday party</em>,” 1957. A smoker, Mary was a devotee of the <em>nargile</em>, the traditional Lebanese water pipe; she holds a <em>fenjan</em>, or cup, of <em>al-qahwa</em>, strong Arabic coffee. <p><p><em> “Because when my husband said he wanted to get married … my mother-in-law found out I was Portuguese, she didn’t like the idea too well. But I am going to tell you [she] took care of my children while I went to work …” </em></p></p>](https://fallriverhistorical.org/WomenatWork/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/04/Abdow22web/1220632860.jpg)
“Because when my husband said he wanted to get married … my mother-in-law found out I was Portuguese, she didn’t like the idea too well. But I am going to tell you [she] took care of my children while I went to work …”

“They are wonderful people … and as you meet them and get to know them, you realize what wonderful people they are.”

“I wanted them to have a good education.”


“I don’t have any regrets, marrying my husband, having my children, I just wish … that I probably could have had a little more education. That is what I think I would have liked, a little education.”
![The Robeson Mills, 240 Hartwell Street, Fall River, Massachusetts, circa 1870s; reincorporated as the Luther Manufacturing Company in 1903, the structure later housed Rondo Knit Sportswear. <p><p><em> “There was a shop [Rondo Knit Sportswear] that opened up for a while. I worked there for a while over there, and it brought my pension right down. Right down, it went right down.” </em></p></p>](https://fallriverhistorical.org/WomenatWork/wp-content/uploads/cache/2016/04/Abdow27web/1469064198.jpg)
“There was a shop [Rondo Knit Sportswear] that opened up for a while. I worked there for a while over there, and it brought my pension right down. Right down, it went right down.”

“It was a great big city. We had a parade one time, over a hundred people in the parade and it was all from people that worked in the mills – that worked in the mills.”