| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002)

GABACCIA AND IACOVETTA have organized a volume that demonstrates the benefits of scholarly collaboration for transnational history. The book springs from a project on Italian migration crossing national borders, a project that allowed researchers from several countries to compare the experiences of migrants in different settings and to question the national historiographies that have pushed researchers to frame scholarship in specific ways. The project produced another volume primarily on male labourers: Italian Workers of the World (edited by Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli). The relative absence of women or gender concerns from that book inspired Gabaccia and Iacovetta to provide some balance, both about women who remained in the homeland when men migrated and about women workers and activists. They wanted to incorporate the history of women and gender into labour history. Though it remains a separate volume, the results are noteworthy.

After a lengthy and extremely useful introduction by the editors, the volume divides into four parts. Part One examines the experiences of women who remained behind when men migrated. Linda Reeder's piece, "When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration, 1880–1920," parses some of the material found in her book White Widows, which studies a region where agricultural work for women was taboo. Reeder argues convincingly that women took on new roles in relationship to the state, gained more education, and changed their consumption patterns in large measure related to migration of men. Her litany of female power, as in describing women who refused to migrate to join husbands and of equality in familial decision-making, perhaps overemphasizes this role, though it acts as an important corrective to previous literature. Likewise Maddalena Tirabassi challenges older literature on both domestic work and morality, showing the centrality of negative portrayals of women's waged-work by bourgeois commentators both in Italy and the United States as one of the key reasons for later stress on women's homemaking. Here one can discern the power of national and class narratives interweaving to shape history.

Andreina De Clementi examines the situation of the continental sections of southern Italy — excluding Sicily. When the Italian state pushed all communities towards inheritance for all children, De Clementi argues, it forced many who had relied on subsistence and reciprocity to move towards wage-earning. More male sojourning abroad was one response, as well as increased reliance on women to carry on subsistence production and agricultural work. De Clementi illustrates how the migration of young men often unintentionally shifted gender roles and generational relationships, providing more power to younger men who could earn wages, and to their wives, who better represented the nuclear families' interests in the context of extended family demands and hence received the cash. In this De Clementi supports Reeder's conclusions about the role of international capital flow among working-class individuals in reshaping women's relationship to the state and to consumption.

Part Two focuses on Italian migrant women wage-earners. Paola Corti looks at women crossing the border from northern Italy to France. In the northern migration, women were much more prominent than in overseas migration. Women agricultural workers, domestics, and wet nurses fit into general labour migration patterns, with temporary work common. In the case of silk workers, women also were organizers for skilled female chain migration to specific jobs, not a category typically associated with women. Diane Vecchio complicates the image of Italian immigrant workers in the United States through a study of Milwaukee's Italian businesswomen and midwives. She shows that women were not simply involved in family business endeavours led by men, and she stresses that midwives, professionally trained in Italy, devoted themselves to careers.

In Part Three, the authors concentrate on radical activism. José Moya examines gender ideology in Buenos Aires, noting that anarchism was more attuned to women's interests and their domestic situations than other labour ideologies, and hence drew greater female participation, particularly in the rent strike of 1907. Caroline Waldron Merithew reinforces this with a study of the coal-mining town of Spring Valley, Illinois, an arena with few wage-earning opportunities for women. Merithew suggests that women sought to promote anarchist goals in various ways, most notably with anarchist motherhood — reproducing radical cultures that many brought from Italy as well as linking to anarchism elsewhere, as in translating children's books. As Merithew describes it, anarchist motherhood included educating children and others in a critique of both capitalism and patriarchy.

Jennifer Guglielmo, in "Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s–1940s," challenges the portrayal of Italian women as less radical than Jewish immigrant women. Rather, Guglielmo suggests, Italian women did not join the ILGWU 1909 strike extensively because the union did not reach out to them or represent their concerns at that time. Taking the story further into the 20th century, Guglielmo shows much greater Italian labour participation, and introduces an argument she has elaborated more recently in a collection on whiteness, that Italian women began distancing themselves racially from other garment workers in the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when they gained power numerically and politically in the unions.

Robert Ventresca and Franca Iacovetta provide a brief biography of Virgilia D'Andrea, an anarchist exile moving through Europe and North America in the early years of the 20th century, living in expatriate communities of political radicals, writing and organizing along the way when health permitted. As the partner of Armando Borghi, she lived a non-conventional life in many ways. Yet Ventresca and Iacovetta stress the continuities of D'Andrea's poetry to Italian cultural nationalism of the 19th century and to maternal images. This contrasted rather sharply with the style and substance of many male radical leaders of the time. Unlike D'Andrea, Enza Rotella, the subject of Anne Morelli's chapter, was not inclined towards radical causes until after she married Nestore Rotella and moved to Belgium, where she joined in communist organizing. Morelli points to the relationship of home and family life to different organizing strategies. She also demonstrates how Rotella transferred the more gender egalitarian activism she knew from Belgium back to Italy after the fall of fascism.

Part Four briefly examines how national issues play into identity. Angelo Principe examines early 20th-century Canada, with particular attention to the role of fascist ideology in the interwar years. His work also points to the biases of sources in finding Italian women activists. The final essay, from Roslyn Pesman, begins a story of Italian migrant women in Australia in the post-World War II era. The history of Italians in Australia remains largely unwritten, she notes. Because those who did study Italians there had particular agendas in mind — primarily related to social problems — material tended to portray women as victims. Pesman correlates the image of Italian immigrant women to prevailing gender ideology in Australia in different time periods.

In all, the collection offers much for those interested in transnationalism: the role of migration and remittances in shifting class patterns; political ideology, familial roles, and medical practice (re-) crossing borders for a working-class group; and the way in which scholars from various countries can bring insights to one another. Like previous studies, this one sometimes overstates particular points in hopes of countering earlier positions to the contrary. Hence there is more on women radicals than their numbers might warrant. Further, the emphasis on women's emancipation over-corrects for studies which portrayed women's "passive" home roles. The study overall, however, remains one of the best in bringing together scholarship on women and migration from the perspective of labour history.


Suzanne Sinke Florida State University

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