| Book Review | Labour History, 88 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (eds), Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002. pp. xvi + 433. US $70.00 cloth.

Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa (eds), Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialised Women in Canadian History, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004. pp. xi + 418. US $29.95 paper.

Overwhelmingly, we have come to understand economic globalisation and the concomitant movements of people within this space as something only men contribute to, participate in, shape and reinforce. Two collaborative works emerging from Canada provide an insightful contribution to the historiography of culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and class diverse migrant women's lives, serving to fill a gap in the literature on migration. These two offerings are united by the fact that they go beyond simply placing migrant women at the centre of the analysis. Both texts provide interesting and refreshing entry points into the story of female migration and thus new insights into our understanding of the ways in which these women have contributed to the construction of workplaces, economies, social structures and institutional arrangements. Theoretically, while keeping the integrity of feminist labour history, both works provide the reader with multiple theoretical lenses through which to understand these women's experiences.

Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World provides a transnational/comparative work on Italian migrant women, where the story of these women's lives while diverse is linked throughout the text by the ethnic/cultural and migrant experience of these women. The transnational analysis provides the reader with an understanding of these women's lives within nations and across nations. The text covers Italian women living in four continents and seven countries, linking life in Italy simultaneously to several receiving countries in Europe, as well as in Australia and America. What emerges through the comparative analysis is the story of how these women's lives are bound and divided by migration, gender and most significantly their Italian background.

Through a collaborative mosaic transgressing that of a national historiography, the edited narrative challenges the conventional portraits of Italian migrant women of the nineteenth and twentieth century by presenting the relationship between work and female agency through the stories of women who waited in Italy while the men left; and, the minority of women who emigrated, drawing the reader's attention to the global social networks created by female migration.

The text challenges the clear-cut dichotomy between the silent submissive social agent: quietly participating in the work sphere or relegated to the home sphere (the dominant portrayal of migrant women), and the active, union organising, politically astute force. In this text the lives of both collide. While 'silent', what emerges is a story of women actively creating coalitions and networks of support to transform the pre-existing political, economic and social milieu. This is not the only story told though. The story told of all these women is transformed further by the excavation and portrayal of the lives of a very active militant minority.

The book is divided into four sections which are thematically bound by the transnational bonds between the Italian women touched by the process of migration and those participating in migration themselves. Part One of the book (contributors: Reeder, De Clementi and Tirabassi) shows how the migrating individuals, invariably men, influenced and impacted on the lives of those left behind, invariably women. What emerges is that the gender imbalance in the migration process from 1870-1914 was a conscious and strategic decision based on the premise that men would reap greater returns. The institutional arrangements defining the time were also significant in the decision shaping who left and who stayed behind. De Clementi shows that temporary male migration was forged as a result of formal inheritance rules. These chapters bring to bear the impact on the lives of those left behind as a result of migrating males. While De Clementi and Reeder note the increased stresses on women as a result of agricultural responsibilities, also noted is the increased solidarity between husbands and wives, forged across nations, due to the more obtuse stresses, a pressure only alleviated by the influx of remittances. Part One of the text shows the contradictory impact on men and women of the migration process, an impact that remains overwhelmingly hidden in the dominant literature — that being — the 'proletarianisation' of men and the 'emancipation' of women.

Part Two of the text (contributors: Corti, Vecchio) examines the influence of culture and economic opportunity on women's work as they began to leave Italy, comparing Italian women's work in many locations. This section of the text raises issues about the notion of the social construction of work. While this is implicit throughout the text, it emerges explicitly in this section.
The reader is introduced to the varied occupational spaces that immigrant women entered — defined by the gendered characterisation of the workspace — including: domestic work, manual labour, cooks, seamstresses, hotel workers, gardeners and a significant cluster of women entering sweat shops.

Entry portals into these labour markets are also defined in terms of gendered characteristics with recruitment emerging through a system of 'female labour bosses'. From the point of migration to settlement and labour market entry, female mediators play a central role — a mode and method of chain migration and recruitment which today has fostered the sex trade by women recruiters of women throughout Europe.

Vecchio introduces readers to Italian immigrants in the US, comparing the lives of Italian business women including: green grocers, restauranteurs, dry goods store owners with professionally trained midwives. Vecchio notes that the work histories of Italian business women she unearthed were in the main influenced by these women's domestic responsibilities. In contrast, the small groups of Italian midwives saw themselves as 'transplanted' professionals and put work above family expectations. As individuals, the midwives Vecchio describes shared a willingness to challenge tradition along with the militant women and collective activism among industrial workers of the time.

This section presents the reader with the shift from subsistence production to industrial employment and petty entrepreneurs, a transformation which the reader uncovers shaped the emerging labour militants at home and abroad.
Part three of the text (contributors: Moya, Waldron Merithew, Gugliemo, Ventresca and Iacovetta, Morelli) introduces female militants and thus a revised historiography on Italian immigrant women. The contributors demonstrate that Italy's female militants could be found everywhere including labour movements shaped by anarchist, syndicalist, and communist ideals.

This section challenges portrayals of female passivity. Italian women are presented as playing leading roles in creating national labour movements and encouraging transnational models of proletarian mobilisation. Most interesting is the emphasis placed on how the spatial arrangements of the country of migration and the labour market entered, shaped and influenced the behaviour of these women.

Gugliemo's work on Italian activists in New York city's garment industry from the 1890s to the 1940s, directly challenges US historiography. She offers readers an insight into how Italian women's activism differed in form and locus and not in intensity from that of their Russian and Eastern European Jewish counterparts.
Finally, the concluding chapters (contributors: Principe, Pesman) draw our attention to the importance of identity formation and the variables shaping and constructing this, underscored by transnational links: that is, a connection to Italy, ethnic loyalties and family and community networks.

Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant Ethnic, and Racialised Women in Canadian History is a collaborative effort which explores minority women's contribution to projects of nation building. This theme is examined by looking at the way in which minority women — marginalised by nature of their migrant, ethnic, racialised status — interact with each other, men and their families within and between the communities that combine to shape Canadian society.

The text seeks to respond to an earlier collaborative effort released in the late 1980s by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, Looking in My Sister's Eye's: an Exploration in Women's History. With the benefit of time and a more critical eye — the previously developed notion of feminist cohesion is challenged in this collaborative effort which examines the differences as rigorously as the similarities. Having said this I should point out that the text goes beyond dualisms pointing out the more complex nature of minority experience (and all that goes with this term). The text thus engages in the problematic posed by the divisions among women and challenges these head on in a Canadian context.

Migration and settlement are in some way part of each chapter. This thematic underbelly is approached through the case presentation of: women immigrants as active subjects; women as part of a broader/external political, social, economic legal agenda; and indigenous women experiencing the impact of migration (although the third component is touched on in less detail).

The historiography of female migration is explored through the eyes of first, second, third generation migrants. Their stories provide ever more complex layers to the complex story of nation building and migration. These layers are built by the exploration of difference in experience based on whether one is a voluntary or involuntary immigrant; aboriginal Canadian; recent newcomer; by examining characteristics of ethnic and racial identity that individuals and groups willingly adopt and those imposed on them, and thus, the dialectical nature of identity formation. In posing new insights into how we come to understand the role of ethnicity, gender, race, migrant and indigenous experience in history and society, the implications of this multifaceted examination are significant.

The smorgasbord of spaces shaped by the women, who are featured as workers, wives/mothers/widows and symbols: includes the household (contributors: Ayukawa, Mar, Walker and Mianda); the workplace; lobby groups and political coalitions and social networks (contributors: Guard and Reiter); and institutional arrangements/nation building (contributors: Mclean and Barker; Dua; Flynn; Iacovetta and Korinek).

The explorations of these women's lives are both nationally bounded and transnational, with Epp, Lindstrom, Draper and Swympa analysing the pre and post migration experience.
The conceptually integrative nature of the project coupled with the methodological breadth of source material unveils a multidimensional illustration of migrant/minority women.

Readers are presented with stories filled with the humanity and the struggle defining these women's experiences. These are not bleak representations of the story of migration and minority status. The texts are not in the genre of migration literature we have come to know, literature that flooded us in the 1970s and 1980s, depicting the submissive, factory fodder, down trodden and exploited politico-economic migrant. Instead, these women are presented as active participants in defining their lives in their new place of settlement, in their new circumstances, and in the world of work that they occupy. What emerges in both texts is a story of the spaces established in the home and work sphere and in the broader society through coalitions/networks: sites where they are seen as coming together to represent their interests and voice their concerns. Overall, we are presented with a more complex illustration of the experience of these women and their circumstances and their role in shaping their circumstances. For those interested in the feminist labour history of migration these are definite reads.


University of Sydney	DIMITRIA GROUTSIS

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