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.