|
|
|
Review
| Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America, by Diane C. Vecchio. Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 130 pages. $35.00, cloth.
|
| If anyone needs proof that big things can come in small packages, this 130-page book provides a wonderful example. In her study of Italian immigrant workingwomen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Diane Vecchio challenges long held notions regarding the status of women within Italian families with particular attention to their contributions to household economies. Her prologue points out that many Italian women arrived on American shores with skills and work experiences that scholars have often failed to acknowledge. In Italy, whether employed in non-wage family agricultural work or wage work on farms and in factories, working class women made significant contributions to the well-being of their families. These work experiences, Italian cultural values, and available job opportunities played crucial roles in determining the kinds of employment they would seek in the urban United States. What governed the work they did in America was the local economic structure, gender segmentation of the workforce, kinship patterns of job recruitment and childcare, proximity of jobs to residence, and their life cycle. How these factors played out in different urban settings resulted, the author notes, in two models of women's work; one outside the home and one within the home environment. To illustrate each of these models, Vecchio focuses on the work experiences of Italian immigrant women in two communities, Endicott, New York and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. |
1
|
|
The former was a city of light industries dominated by the massive Endicott Johnson shoe manufacturing corporation, the latter a city noted for heavy industry, particularly breweries and steel fabrication. In Endicott, New York, the vast majority of Italian workingwomen turned to Endicott Johnson for employment because the company required the skills that the women already had or could easily learn, such as fabric stitching and cutting. Moreover, immigrants were able to settle near the factory complex in a growing Italian neighborhood because the company encouraged employee recruitment of kin. In assigning work to men and women, the company also respected a gender division of labor that was in keeping with the Italian practice of separate work spheres for men and women. Also of considerable importance was the corporate welfare policy of the owner, George W. Johnson. In return for worker loyalty, company employees were provided with extensive health benefits, flexible working hours for women with children, reasonably priced company-built homes, and a wide variety of social and educational activities attractive to women. |
2
|
|
As in Endicott, financial necessity required Milwaukee's Italian immigrant women and their daughters to seek employment. However, unlike in Endicott, Milwaukee's heavy industries offered Italian women few opportunities for wage employment outside the home. Nevertheless, Vecchio provides ample evidence that within their Third Ward neighborhood, often within their homes, these women engaged in businesses catering to the needs and tastes of their community, among them taking in boarders; establishing and managing groceries, restaurants, saloons, and dry good stores; and utilizing skills as dressmakers. Taking issue with depictions of these women as "helpmates" of their husbands, the author insists that they be viewed as independent entrepreneurs whose "business enterprises helped establish an economic base in the ethnic enclave, while preserving cultural traditions important to sustaining an Italian way of life" (p. 83). |
3
|
|
While the Italian communities in Endicott and Milwaukee are offered as case studies, the lives of Italian women in other ethnic enclaves are also discussed. The primary focus of this book is upon laboring women and small business entrepreneurs, but a chapter is devoted to midwives who served as the primary deliverers of newborns in Italian American communities well into the second decade of the twentieth century. Marshalling ethnic pride and sound scholarship, Prof. Vecchio provides substantial evidence to counter descriptions of these women as uneducated, superstitious workingwomen. Many, she points out, were professionally schooled as well as governed by licensing requirements in several states. |
4
|
|
The author not only offers fresh perspectives on the lives of Italian woman immigrants and their children, she also compares their experiences with those of other ethnic newcomers. In each chapter, the experiences of individual women and their families enhance the reading. The wives and daughters in this work certainly do not appear to be severely constrained by domineering husbands and fathers. Twenty-five pages of notes reflect impeccable scholarship. In addition to drawing upon a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Vecchio has enriched her study by conducting numerous interviews in Italy as well as in the United States. Upper level high school students as well as college students will find this book both enlightening and enjoyable, and so will their instructors. |
5
|
| | |
| College of Staten Island, City University of New York |
Frederick M. Binder |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|