Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World

453 Pages·2002·23.2 MB·English

by  Donna R. Gabaccia

WOMEN, GENDER, AND TRANSNATIONAL LIVES:
ITALIAN WORKERS OF THE WORLD
Edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta
Scholars in the United States have long defined the Italian immigrant
woman as silent and submissive - a woman who stays 'in the shadows.' In
this transnational analysis of women and gender in Italy's worldwide mi-
gration, the contributors challenge this stereotype, using international
and internationalist perspectives, feminist labour history, women's his-
tory, and Italian migration history to provide a woman-centred, gendered
analysis of Italian workers.
Analysing the lives of women in Italy, Belgium, France, the United
States, Canada, Argentina, and Australia, the contributors offer realistic
and engaging portraits of women as peasants and workers and uncover
the voice of female militants. Most importantly, through a compar-
ative approach to the study of women's migration over the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, this volume examines not only the work and
activism of migrant women but also the experiences of those women who
remained in Italy. The result is a rich volume that ranges from the white
widows of Sicily to union organizers in the United States, from anarchists
in Argentina to Fascist-era activists in Canada.
Groundbreaking and original, this erudite collection of thirteen es-
says brings a fascinating new perspective to women's studies and migra-
tion history.
(Studies in Gender and History)
DONNA R. GABACCIA is Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at
the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
FRANCA IACOVETTA is a professor in the Department of History at the
University of Toronto.
STUDIES IN GENDER AND HISTORY
General Editors: Franca lacovetta and Karen Dubinsky
Women, Gender, and
Transnational Lives
Italian Workers of the World
Edited by
DONNA R. GABACCIA and FRANCA lACOVETTA
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 20
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-3611-2 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-8462-1 (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Main entry under title:
Women, gender and transnational lives : Italian workers of the world /
edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta.
(Studies in gender and history series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-3611-2 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8462-1 (pbk.)
1. Women - Italy. 2. Women employees - Italy. 3. Women immi-
grants - Italy. 4. Women alien labor. 5. Women immigrants -
Political activity - History. 6. Italy - Emigration and immigration -
History. I. Gabaccia, Donna R., 1949- II. lacovetta, Franca, 1957-
DG453.W65 2002 305.4'0945 C2002-902129-4
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to
its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for
its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
To our mothers,
Marjorie Anne Krauss Gabaccia
and
Dalinda Carmosino Lombardi lacovetta
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 3
Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca lacovetta
Part I When Men Go Away: Women Who Wait and Work
1 When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration,
1880-1920 45
Linda Reeder
2 Gender Relations and Migration Strategies in the Rural Italian
South: Land, Inheritance, and the Marriage Market 76
Andreina De dementi
3 Bourgeois Men, Peasant Women: Rethinking Domestic Work and
Morality in Italy 76
Maddalena Tirabassi
Part II Female Immigrants at Work
4 Women Were Labour Migrants Too: Tracing Late-Nineteenth-
Century Female Migration from Northern Italy to France 133
Paola Corti
viii Contents
5 Gender, Domestic Values, and Italian Working Women in
Milwaukee: Immigrant Midwives and Businesswomen 160
Diane Vecchio
Part III Fighting Back: Militants, Radicals, Exiles
6 Italians in Buenos Aires's Anarchist Movement: Gender Ideology
and Women's Participation, 1890-1910 189
Jose Moya
7 Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary
Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns 217
Caroline Waldron Merithew
8 Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City
Garment Trades, 1890s-l940s 247
Jennifer Guglielmo
9 Virgilia D'Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of
Exile 299
Robert Ventresca and Franca lacovetta
10 Nestore's Wife? Work, Family, and Militancy in Belgium 327
Anne Morelli
Part IV As We See Ourselves, As Others See Us
11 Glimpses of Lives in Canada's Shadow: Insiders, Outsiders, and
Female Activism in the Fascist Era 349
Angelo Principe
12 Italian Women and Work in Post-Second World War Australia:
Representation and Experience 386
Roslyn Pesman
Contributors 411
Illustration Credits 415
Index 417
Illustrations follow page 216
Preface
Italian women as 'workers of the world' may not be a familiar image
for our readers. Italy's women have often seemed foreign to Anglo-
Americans, who imagine Latin and Catholic patriarchs controlling
women's lives, leaving them - unlike their supposedly more emanci-
pated English-speaking 'sisters' - silent, submissive, and at home 'in the
shadows.'1 To Italian readers, by contrast, focusing on women's history
as workers threatens to separate women artificially from men, ignoring
what they both shared historically, whether family loyalties or shared
subordination in a world dominated economically by northern Europe-
ans and North Americans.
When we decided to attempt a woman-centred but gendered analysis
of the twenty-seven million migrants who left Italy in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, we suspected we might challenge conventional por-
traits of Italian women. Building on the historiography on Italian women
immigrants in the United States, we were most interested in the relation-
ship between work and female agency, but we were determined to follow
women's activities wherever they led us. Thus, we insisted on seeing both
the majority of females who 'waited' (while men went abroad) and the
minority of females among the emigrants as integral actors in what was
arguably the single largest international migration system of the world's
modern era. We wanted to view the global social networks created by
massive male emigration from Italy through female eyes.2 Our hope was
not just to make women more visible in a migration literature focused on
male migrants but to pinpoint also the origins of persistent stereotypes
of Italy's women in a literature disproportionately focused on immi-
grants to the United States.
x Preface
Still, we were surprised by what we found. In the same spirit in which
Italian women on five continents confronted exploitation at home and
at work, our book highlights the complex, transnational lives of feisty,
and at times frustrated, but always formidable and fascinating women. If
our contributors had to work hard and long to create this volume, they
certainly drew inspiration from the hard-working women they studied.
This book is the result of international collaboration at its best. It
originated in 1996 when U.S. historian Donna Gabaccia (who, together
with Fraser Ottanelli, was editing a collection of essays on Italian workers
around the world) approached Canadian historian Franca lacovetta to
discuss their project's difficulties in integrating research on women.3 We
then decided to plan a second project that - while focused on questions
of gender in women's work, labour organizing, and radicalism - would
also touch issues such as family and household, sexuality, community,
politics, and identities. If we could not easily integrate women into a
history of Italian radicalism, then we would write a gendered feminist
history of their lives and labour both together and in struggle with men.
As we turned our attention to this new project, we noticed immediate
changes in our networks of collaboration: perhaps unsurprisingly, male
participation dropped off somewhat. But the boundaries around our
field of research also broadened to include unpaid as well as waged
work, the lives of peasants in Italy as well as of emigrants around the
world, and activism outside as well as within traditional labour, political,
and radical movements.
It is scarcely original to observe that economic globalization has re-
cently pushed feminist and labour historians like us to attempt to rewrite
world history 'from the bottom up.' Although hardly a new historical
development, globalization is again transforming the relationship be-
tween wealthier Northern and poorer Southern nation-states and - as in
the past - is again pushing people from the South to earn wages in the
North. But while today's international labour migrations are relatively
gender-balanced, the ones we intended to study in the past were heavily
male-dominated - an intriguing difference that has not yet found the
analytical and theoretical attention it deserves from scholars of interna-
tional migration.4
Fortunately, feminist scholars are no strangers to building intellectual
networks across national boundaries. For almost ten years, our indi-
vidual scholarly development had shared certain key features - not the
least an on-going critique of the dominant stereotypes of Italian immi-
grant women in North America as docile, anti-union, housebound women
controlled by men or victimized by a deeply patriarchal Latin culture.