Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Studies in Gender and History)

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 world-wide migration, Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia use international and internationalist perspectives, feminist labour history, women's history, and Italian migration history to provide a woman-centred, gendered analysis of Italian workers, and by so doing, challenge this stereotype. Comparing the lives of women in Italy, Belgium, the USA, Canada, Argentina, and Australia, Iacovetta and Gabaccia offer a realistic and engaging portrait of women as peasants and workers, and uncover the voice of female militants. Most importantly, by using a comparative approach to the study of women's migration over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they treat both women who stayed home during male migration, and the work and activism of those who moved. By pursuing this comparative method, they show how Italian women could become Communist militants, union organizers, or anti-fascist radical exiles in some countries while seeming to disappear into stereotypes in others. Ground-breaking and original, this erudite collection of thirteen essays will bring a fascinating new perspective to women's studies and migration history. Contents 7 Preface 9 Introduction 19 1 When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration, 1880-1920 59 2 Gender Relations and Migration Strategies in the Rural Italian South: Land, Inheritance, and the Marriage Market 90 3 Bourgeois Men, Peasant Women: Rethinking Domestic Work and Morality in Italy 120 4 Women Were Labour Migrants Too: Tracing Late-Nineteenth-Century Female Migration from Northern Italy to France 145 5 Gender, Domestic Values, and Italian Working Women in Milwaukee: Immigrant Midwives and Businesswomen 172 6 Italians in Buenos Aires's Anarchist Movement: Gender Ideology and Women's Participation, 1890-1910 199 7 Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns 239 8 Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s-l940s 269 9 Virgilia D'Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of Exile 321 10 Nestore's Wife? Work, Family, and Militancy in Belgium 349 11 Glimpses of Lives in Canada's Shadow: Insiders, Outsiders, and Female Activism in the Fascist Era 369 12 Italian Women and Work in Post-Second World War Australia: Representation and Experience 406 Contributors 431 Illustrations Credits 435 Index 437