Jennifer Scuro | Exploring Personal History: A Case Study of an Italian Immigrant Woman | Oral History Review, 31.1

Exploring Personal History: A Case Study of an Italian Immigrant Woman

by Jennifer Scuro

Abstract This paper is a study of an Italian immigrant woman based on interviews conducted with my grandmother in 1996. Her testimony alongside traditional conceptual frameworks shows that interpreting oral history is a work that must be handled with care. With this article, I have tried to give validity and context to the uniqueness of the experience of an Italian-American immigrant woman. I also argue against Virignia Yans-McLaughlin's interpretation of interviews and the basis of her comparative work. Following Jürgen Habermas's call for self-knowledge in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), this paper is a work of personal discovery as well as an attempt to liberate and take responsibility for the ways in which interpretation of immigrant testimony can enforce presuppositions and suppress careful and interested dialogue about gender difference and ethnic diversity.

What may appear as naked survival is always in its roots a historical phenomenon. For it is subject to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life.

— Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests¹

This article presents the case of an Italian immigrant woman and reconstructs the social and historical contexts for the particularity of her experiences, her perspective as an immigrant and as a woman, and her struggle for identity. The question of interpretation is important for this case and I argue that particular conceptual frameworks must be used with caution. I have conducted a lengthy interview with my grandmother,² and by comparing this testimony to some of the traditional readings in ethnic and women's studies, I will show that the Italian immigrant experience can be subject to misleading generalizations if not handled with care and responsibility.

Interviewing my grandmother and evaluating her testimony placed me in the roles of both an interpreter and an interested participant. As the descendant of Italian immigrants in the process of discovering my own personal history, I find it important to identify this work with those who Virginia Yans-McLaughlin called "'indigenous ethnographers' who reject imperialist investigators and begin to study their own culture from the inside."³ There is a subtle context for the conditions of immigrant women's experience; this interpretation is descriptive and compensatory of that context and should not be simply understood as a contribution to oral history.⁴ This study is a work of interpretation offered with care, sensitive to the contexts that can allow for the experience of my grandmother to be seen as unique, and more importantly, as an opportunity to reconsider standardized approaches to immigrant and women's history.⁵

From Naples to New York

[There were] all Italians.... There was friends from like the same town and all that.... And when I came here, my father gave me a gold five-dollar piece. He gave it to his children—a five-dollar gold piece. I took it and I saved it all the while.... Well, from the day I came to this country, I thought it was the most terrible thing I ever did. We should have never come.

Gelsemina was born on April 20, 1917 in Naples, Italy. At the age of 12, she came to America on a ship called the Augustus with her mother, Antonietta, and her two sisters, Patricia and Nancy. Her family reunited with her father, Joseph, who had settled in America five years before, and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Although this new life in America meant the reuniting of her nuclear family, she recognized the irreparable effect of her migration to America:

[In] 1929 the [crash of the stock market] came and it was a bad experience because I had a very nice childhood until 12 years old.
...That was 1929. And this 1929, put me to work at 12 years old. Soon as I came to this country, I didn't stay one week without work. I had work. That's why I tell you my youth—the twelve years in Italy—they were really childhood for me. After that, I was like an old lady.

Gelsemina's response to the experience of work as a young girl was equivalent to an abrupt end of childhood. In an interview by Marie Hall Ets, another teenage immigrant named Rosa described a similar experience: "As soon as I could walk again I went back to work at the mill. They had a special room in the mill just for nursing babies.... So I was around fifteen years old and I had to be like an old woman."⁶ In Naples, the labor of young girls was not considered emancipatory, but rather necessary; it increased their obligation to the family.⁷

As a child in Southern Italy, Gelsemina had not minded the work that she did, but once in America, at the sacrifice of her education, the family depended upon her to contribute to the household income.⁸ At 7 or 8 years old, she recalled:

I went to this lady to learn how to sew. I would go to school, then I'd come back, and I would go straight to her with my scissors, my thimble, my needle.... It was like a school for me. And then, not only that, a lot of times when there wasn't that much to do by her, I would go and help all these old ladies. They used to make sheets, you know, like ... what do you call it ... I don't know how to say it in English ... they made cloth.... Linen. They make linen. And I would make them spools. I would fill the spools for them.... I used to spool like this, see? (she gestures) I used to spin it. So that, I fill up the spools and she would put in that little cradle and throw the spool back and forth and weave the cloth.... There was a man come around and he used to sell baked apples. So, if I wanted baked apples, I used to go and help these old people and they would give me old rags. These old rags would buy me an apple.

Gelsemina understood the work she did as a child to be part of a learning process. If her family had stayed in Italy, most likely she would have continued to depend on homework and family connections.

Antonietta Russo née Pulcrono and her children: (left to right) Patricia, Nancy, and Gelsemina.

In Naples, family connections and networks of women sustained her family during the separation from her father. These informal and familial networks, divided by gender, centered around the household. As V.A. Goddard's study of Naples demonstrated, "The burden caused by the shortage of jobs and the inadequacy of the State support is borne by individual families.... 72–88 percent of families in poorer social groups pool their incomes, providing a safety net for the unemployed and their dependents. But the price to pay is the continuing or indeed increasing pressure on women to uphold the family and maintain these networks and relationships."⁹ Even without her husband being around (absent first as a "salesman"¹⁰ in Italy and then as a migrant to America as a unskilled laborer), Gelsemina's mother remained dependent mainly on her husband's pay even while working informally among other women.

Gelsemina's maternal grandmother worked autonomously as a businesswoman, not an uncommon experience for women in Naples, supporting her children and financially independent of her husband:¹¹

When my [grandfather] ... he died ... my grandma used to be a very hard working woman too. She used to sell by the barrels from her own house. She used to sell corn by the barrel. She used to sell oil by barrels. She used to sell wheat by barrels.... From the wholesale place. She used to sell ... and make profit ... [from] the farmers.... And then she used to give money out to land—like you take money from a bank. Right? She used to give it out too and make interest on it.... All by herself.
Q: ... So she did this after he died?
A: She did it before too.

She remained independent until she married again later in her life:

And then, this farmer, he was a widower, and he's bothering my grandma. She was about 65.... [T]hen she also had chickens that laid eggs for her. And when she married this man, she took her chickens, took her furniture and went to live with on this farm, ... she gave up that work. [When she got sick] ... the man didn't care no more. He was only out to have her money cause he was losing his farm. And that would have helped him. So, they lived together only about five years. And then, she died.

In the years before to coming to America, while her father was working as a plasterer in New York, her mother stayed at home in Naples and took care of the three children. Gelsemina's mother remained a consistent and important, although unrecognized, source of income essential to her family's survival. In her ethnography of Neopolitan kinship structures, V.A. Goddard describes this phenomenon, "[T]here were a number of arrangements and exchanges between kin and neighbors. These exchanges, and the growing informalization [solve] a number of economic and political problems by offering survival opportunities for those excluded from full and proper employment."¹² Antonietta's extended family and network of other working women helped her to "get by."

[We] had a landlady, she had a store—like grocery store—my mother used to help her to bake and used to help her to knead the bread. And I used to help her to clean around the store.

With the large numbers of men migrating to America for work, women commonly experienced family separation, usually altering the structure of the family income.

Q: Did your mom live on that money that got sent?
A: Yeah, sure.
Q: She didn't work or anything? She just had to do it herself?
A: No. Yeah, she had to do it. She had to do it. But over there, my other grandma could afford it and she used to help my mother a lot. You know? She used to help my mother a lot because she used to be a saleswoman like I told you. And she used to make a nice dollar.

Dependent upon her established exchange network and her husband's income over the five year separation, Gelsemina's mother waited for her husband to send money—which he did inconsistently—until she, too, could come to America and join him.These networks grew to be essential to protecting individuals against underemployment and poor economic conditions. They were organized not only according to household, but also according to gender.

My mother was so lovable to people that she knew a family that had all brothers and just this one daughter. So this one daughter could not sleep over there—it's not like here, have all the rooms divided, at that time ... now its better ... here—this girl didn't have her privacy. Beautiful girl. She was 19 then. And my mother said, "You could sleep with us, we're all girls." So she took her in. And then, one time, because she was a young lady, she bought her silk stockings.... So then, (pause) she was nice though. She taught me how to sew.

This systemization of connections and exchange occurred between women then and is still in effect in Naples today. Goddard summarizes the uneven design of this networking:

In the Neapolitan case the centrality of ideas concerning the family and the mobilization of solidarity through kinship was true of many households.... This does not imply that households are ... based on ... reciprocal arrangements and that reciprocity is unproblematic.... On the contrary, the examples ... exemplify the unequal distribution of time and resources between household members.¹³

Women and children took on the burden of homework as well as household duties, regardless of whether the paternal head of household was employed or even consistently involved in the household income.

Q: So your mom was sewing and working when you guys got here, yeah?
A: Yeah. But most of all it was me. I had to make the arm holes. And this was the best thing on the man's jacket. It was who made that. When the boss looked at the jacket all finished, all he did was look at the armhole. How it was made. I used to make tiny, tiny stitches. And then you had to bring in the shearing where it needed and if you didn't put it in the right place, it won't fall right. But there was work for the woman, and not for men.
Q: Oh so your dad wasn't working at the time?
A: Nope. And we had to give him money in the pocket too to go.... He used to go play cards.
Q: He used to gamble it and stuff, yeah?
A: Yeah.
Q: What did your mom do about that? Did she just keep working or did she know that he was gambling it?
A: Did she know? Sure she knew.

As a young girl, the effects of migration had a double significance of both a reunion with her father in America and a disruption of her life in Naples.

Q: Did [your mother] marry for love?
A: Yeah. He loved her immensely. He loved her that he really cherished the ground she walked on. And, over here [in America], because he was alone, and these people that he knew, this woman lived downstairs as I understand. This woman lived downstairs and she used to be family with these people. And my father used to go to these people a lot. But he was here living with other men, you know, just to go to work. And so these people made him meet her. So that's what he wanted—he wanted to go in bed with someone.

Without finding blame for her father's infidelity, Gelsemina understood the traditional framework and the conditions of migration as a source of what would become the physical and mental abuse of her mother in America. She also understood that the private, familial, and traditional ways of her culture kept her mother submissive to the abuse of her father and dedicated to the patriarchal system:

So, why? We don't need ... we don't have to take this abuse all the time—all the time. My poor mother was always beat up.... Yeah. There was ... they did not talk about it. Did you see that my mother was old fashioned and didn't think it was nice to the people ... she went by the old times, you know? Say you can't—you marry and that's it. He's yours for better or for worse.

In her adult life, Gelsemina eventually learned to manipulate a situation that she could not affect when she was younger. In one of the more violent episodes, she had tried to get the police to arrest her father after he threw her mother down the stairs:

Nobody knew what my mother was going through. Nobody. My mother says, "What happens in the family, you don't tell anybody." She says, "You don't tell things that happens in the house." So, we couldn't say nothing.
Q: Was she really mad when you went to the police?
A: No. The police came [and] she said, "Don't believe my daughter. I fell myself. My husband is not home." She says.... Yeah, but she knew that it was true. She says, "What are people going to say if he goes away? What are they going to say?" That was her only love.

Here, Gelsemina was old enough to know how to stop the abuse of her mother and too young to fight the patriarchal system which kept her mother willing to remain silent rather than dishonored.

Humbert S. Nelli has observed that "As long as the father was 'the main provider, as long as he was healthy in mind and body, his rule and authority were unquestioned.... Above all, [the wife] should be kept in her place as subordinate, for there is no peace in a house where a woman leads her husband.' "¹⁴ Gelsemina internalized the importance of these networks early in life, hence establishing a place for her in the traditional Southern Italian family system. In Naples, Gelsemina's life represented a stability of tradition that often did not survive the transition to American life. In this case her family suffered an additional trauma because of the migration of her father to America without her, her sisters, and her mother five years earlier.

Gelsemina's mother supported her introduction into the family economic structure, further establishing Gelsimina's gender role as the eldest daughter. In New York, isolated from the networks that her mother had established in Italy, Antonietta became dependent on her husband's family connections and increasingly on her daughters' labor for financial support. Gelsemina not only bore the responsibility of contributing financially to the family, she also had to accept the emotional and moral obligations of Southern Italian culture.

Becoming "American"

Yeah, they changed my name. They didn't know what to call me in school. Cause Gelsemina, really should have been Jasmine.... But they didn't. Then ... when my ... I have a cousin here that's [also] named Jessie. Also named after Grandma.... My father's mother was Gelsemina.

In America, family obligations remained a priority for Gelsemina, even more important than getting an education. Essential for her family's survival in America, Gelsemina's "real" education taught her to work for income as quickly and as perfectly as she could. These obligations became more of an obstacle to her education because of the language barrier:

I just came here. How did I know English? So ... but I understood a lot if you put it down on paper. I understood a lot because a lot of it is similar writing and means the same thing also. But when I went to school, whatever the teacher put on the board, like examples of arithmetic, I knew the answers.
... My teacher was very nice. Her name was Mrs. Murphy. And she would say, "Don't worry. I'll teach you. I'll teach you." And she writes me a note to bring it home. Say, " I'll keep your daughter in a little extra so that I could teach her some of the things." But who could stay after school? I could never stay after school cause I had to run home to help my mother sew.

In America, the exploitation of child labor was prevalent and the need for financial support within the family became a matter of survival. Violations of child labor law were still taking place in 1931.¹⁵

My mother used to go get the coats. Big bundles on her back, like this (she gestures). Big bundles. Maybe about forty at a time. Forty jackets at a time. Fifty jackets. And she used to carry them home like this (she gestures). And carry them back like that.... Because I was 14, I got working papers cause they changed my birth certificate ... my mother. I had to go to work.
Q: So your mom got your birth certificate changed?
A: Yeah.... She made it 16. Sixteen you could get working papers. So then I had to go once a week—I had to go to report to the working papers. You know, where you work. And ... but I was fourteen years old, I was earning $14.00 a week.... That was like three dollars a day—not even three dollars a day.

Gelsemina understood the immediate, practical goal of producing more in order to make more money, understanding her work as fulfilling an essential role in her family. Gelsemina understood that this role also included being a link for her mother's viability as an immigrant removed from the comfort and consistency of her familial networks.

Q: And so where did you go to work at that point?
A: Where my mother used to go for coats.... I work in the shop.... And then she start to work in the shop.

She earned her position in the family as a source of income in a new country and aided her mother's transition as well.

Maintaining the privacy of the family and security of the nuclear familial relationship was closely intertwined with ideas of honor and shame. For Gelsemina, the double-edged sword of privacy/honor over public/shame became a source of much conflict.¹⁶ She mentions her mother's silent submission to her father's abuse and the requirement to "not let anyone know what she was going through," in both negative and positive contexts. By repeating it several times in the course of the interview, Gelsemina demonstrates that she clearly recognized the manipulative power of privacy and the "double personality" needed to maintain it:

    No. My father, he was like Dr. Jeykl and Mr. Hyde. Outside he was loved by people immensely. But as soon as he put his foot in the hall to come in the house, he was a different person.
    ... And then he'd come home and gets his foot into the house and it's like a different person. He was like Dr. Jeykl and Mr. Hyde, I told you. And you couldn't talk to him, right away he'd use his hands. Or call you bad names.
    ... I told you he was like Dr. Jeykl and Mr. Hyde—everybody loved him outside, but when he came in the house, he was no good.
    Q: But they had to have known.
    A: No. They never knew. They never knew how he was inside cause we never told.... [They] didn't know he was so mean. Understand? They didn't know because outside he was as good as gold. He loved every kid he saw. The laborers—everybody loved him. I told you he was two different people.

Although her mother could be described within the stereotype of the Italian submissive woman, Gelsemina saw the physical and mental abuse of her mother and later reversed this role for herself.¹⁷ Until she left home and eloped at almost 19, she and her two sisters always had to give their father a sealed paycheck.

Virginia Yans-McLaughlin finds a similar scenario described in her interview, "Complaining that her father expected her entire pay envelope, Betty Gnocchi reflected, 'I never had anything for myself' " [emphasis added].¹⁸ Clearly, in context, obligations to the family in Italy and the transition to New York better explain why there is a conflicted reflection of "never having anything" for oneself—especially in light of the shifting role of immigrant women coming from a tradition of informal and uneven kinship structures. That Yans-McLaughlin interprets this perspective as a complaint minimizes the complexity of the immigrant experience.

In The Italian Diaspora: Migration Across the Globe, Maria Tirabassi discusses that quantitative research, which gives a certain perspective of family and work, cannot account for the internal conflicts that occurred for women in their respective relationships: outside the family, inside the family, and toward themselves.¹⁹

Yeah. So, we worked and worked and worked. But then, my father start to abuse my mother.... Oh, he hit her terrible. Then we found out he had somebody else.... That's why he used to hurt my mother.... So, she put up with abuse for five years of the hitting and the abuse and everything else. And she was working the whole time and doing everything.

Having left behind her familial connections, what had been symbolically significant to Antonietta changed with Gelsemina's understanding of power and gender in the next generation.

[The] lady who was our landlord in Italy, she was in this country a long time.... But she also—she knew that my father was already fooling around. In Italy she knew.... And she says, "When you go to see your father, greet him and say 'you are a son of a bitch.' " And that's what I told him. And he says, "Who taught you that?" I says, "I don't know. My landlady who lived where we lived says I should greet you with 'son of a bitch.' So that's ... [he said,] "The way you say it now, never repeat it again."
Q: And that was when you ... first came over.
A: I was just twelve.

This separation of her family and then the long delay before their reunion caused a rupture in the traditional family dynamic. Goddard's view of gender supports the fact that immigration distorts these relationships. "[G]ender ... is a significant organizing principle of overall social life, which shapes women's opportunities and life chances, as it does men's. Gender is, thus, 'a set of social relations which organize immigration patterns.' "²⁰ The symbolic familial system of honor and shame,²¹ perpetuated by gender roles and sexuality, diffused any motivation for Antonietta to leave her husband:

I used to tell my mother, "Why don't you leave him? We don't need him. We work and we make a living. I don't want him here. Let him go. And he's got this other woman. Let him go. We work and we make a living. We don't need him." So she says, "Oh no," she says, "Daughter, what will the people say? That we chased your father away?" I said, "I don't care. He's no good mom. He's no good." So she says, "Well...." ... She used to get a beating and then she'd go out, she goes with a smile. Nobody ever knew what she was going through. She used to work that time in the house sewing coats. And he'd come home and he wants his supper and he don't care what you had done or not. Very domineering. A very bad disposition. Very ... like, no feeling for his kids.

When her mother died suspiciously in 1934, and her father remarried nine months later, Gelsemina was old enough to understand the extent of her father's control. Goddard reminds us that "Although Neapolitans have a folklore of 'getting by', they also have a folklore of rebellion."²² Without her mother to support her well-being and to secure her position in the family, she grew defensive against her father, literally and symbolically.

[He] was just jealous of his kids. He was jealous of his daughters cause he didn't want nobody to touch them. He didn't want nobody to touch them.... [I]n a way, that I think, that he didn't want no man to touch his daughters. You understand? ... (Pointing to her head) That was in here on him. It was in his brain. So ... because he was bad, he thought all men were bad. You understand? In his mind ... he thought that all men would be like ... it was ... that all men were like that. So, I guess in his way, he didn't want his daughters to ... to get ... to you know, to be like in his position, maybe that he put his wife. You could never tell what was on his mind because outside he was a wonderful person. Everybody loved him. But he came in the house, he was a different person. He was like two personalities.

In this struggle to break away from her father and the traditional family patriarchy, Gelsemina was able to understand her father's abuse. She also wanted to liberate herself, her mother, and her sisters from it. She understood that self-sufficiency for women was possible by the fact that she looked for ways to resist this patriarchial structure. Although she did not have articulated concepts of gender and power, her efforts and actions in response to her father's abuse signifies that she had internalized this gender-based power struggle and sought agency against it.

After Gelsemina's mother died, courtship became a symbolic power struggle with her father, more so than traditional rituals and interfamilial connections. Her father still had control over her paycheck and her choices, and refused to let anyone of her own choice court her, contrary to custom.²³ In her interview, Gelsemina told of three different men that she liked, all of whom she would see "on the sly," in part because she understood that her father would not allow her to take part in the marital decision. Her father consistently asserted his authority over her, imposing the tyranny of the family structure. He would follow her and try to "catch" her, and so, as she understood it, taught her to trick him.

See, he taught me how to, like, you know, to trick him, right? So I tricked him. He tried to trick me. "So, you want to fool me"— I says to myself—"you taught me how to think." So, he says, "I know you were going to meet the Jew." I says, "What's the matter with the Jew?" I says, "They make better husbands than you ever made." So then I got hit. And that was that. So then, one day, there was a woman ... she was not close related to my mother, like three or four generations, like cousin, cousin, cousin.... And I used to visit her because my mother always used to visit her. And so I passed there and I just go in to say "hello," "how are you" and all that. So, there was grandpa there. And grandpa had nice car but I never thought—it never dawned on me—nothing. So, he goes, "What are you doing? You going out with somebody?" And I says, "No. I'm not going out with nobody. My father's very mean." I says, "You know, if anybody asks me ... to go with me, you know I can never say yes because my father wants me ... will want to know first."

For Gelsemina, resisting the paternal family structure translated into "trickery" and she had to deceive her father in order to make her own choices.

Gelsemina's consistent responsibility to her family despite her resistance showed the imprint of her native culture. In Naples, the tradition was not liberal, and as Miriam Cohen observed, "A young woman in Southern Italy who remained at home near her kin was considered virtuous, whereas a woman who wandered off ... was considered immoral and an unattractive potential marriage partner.... Such protectiveness had a practical purpose."²⁴ This scenario was similar for Gelsemina's two sisters. When she eloped, her father enforced this gender-based power on his other two daughters:

Everybody was too young to ... the daughters were too young to get married. So, what happened ... So, my sister all of the sudden, she says, "Well, I know I'll never ... I'll never win." Cause my father used to follow her everywhere she went. That's after I got married. Everywhere she went. And then he would tell her, "Go be a bum like your big sister." I was no bum. Cause I went with my husband? I was no bum. He was the only fella I knew. You know. And I married him. Or he married me. So, my sister says, "My sister's no bum." "Oh yeah, you're going to go out and be a bum like your sister." So, she said, "My sister's no bum." So, she knew that she could never win. But they ... she also brought home the envelope closed with all the money and could not open.

In America, having experienced a traumatic disruption in her family, Gelsemina established her own family rather than stay with her father, thus risking alienation from the protective structures of traditional kinship networks.

"It would be the girl's mother who would start thinking about the corredo [trousseau] and preparing it," Goddard explains. "[T]he mother may be the administrator of the girl's income, receiving it and using it to purchase the various items."²⁵ The trousseau included store-bought and handmade items such as linens, towels, bedclothes, and tablecloths and also had significant symbolic value to Italian women. But Gelsemina's step-mother took her trousseau and gave it to her own family in Europe. Without her mother's support, Gelsemina lost the opportunity to have a traditional courtship and marriage free of physical abuse and emotional manipulation. In response, she thought and acted practically.²⁶ The only suitor permitted to sit with Gelesemina (once a week with supervision and without conversation) was the one whose proposal she accepted.

Yeah. So, what happened now. I answered, "Yes, I want him." But I didn't care who it was. I really ... I liked Grandpa, but not love him. But then love grew later, you know? As time went by. But I really wanted this John. And it hurt me a lot. And then I says, "I don't care if it's a dog in the street," I says, "I go with because I can't take no more the abuse at home."

Once married, Gelsemina supported her family and herself since her husband, Dominick, was a seasonal laborer like her father.

Grandpa didn't work. It was tough again. It was unemployment. Unemployment was $15 a week. You know what we used to eat? Spaghetti with a little sauce. Everyday. Grandpa and I. But I didn't do that to the kids. To the kids I buy them lamb chop or I buy the food they're supposed to have. No, but not for us. We were just eating spaghetti with a little tomato sauce.... And that's how we pulled through. So, when it came that we ... when it came that we moved ... he still was not working. But I always had a couple of dollars on the side for the rainy day.

After having children, Gelsemina relied on homework to support her family. She recalled how her husband would take the bundles of clothes on the train and bring them home to her. Unlike in her childhood, when work was an imposition by the family, she took pride in her independence and being the main financial support of her own household:

There was a little store in the basement where people went and buy—they were good clothes.... And the people that bought it always needed an alteration so she had three or four people doing alterations for her. So, I used to do that. And I did it for a long time. I was making nice money then. My sewing machine drawer was always full of money.... Used to do.... So, I didn't feel no more if my husband didn't work—I didn't feel it. You know?

With her own nuclear family, she understood these traditional rules well enough to work around them:

Grandpa and I cared for one another. Oh, we did. And Grandpa was the same thing. He was helping me with chores. He would help me like on a Sunday, he would take my furniture and clean it all up. Yeah. He used to ... I never dusted my furniture.... [He] used to do it. I had silverware, he used to clean it all the time. He used to always make it shine.... Yeah, he used to help me wash dishes. Cause he had pride, he didn't want no body to know it—that he was doing dishes ... 'cause he was the old fashioned type. But he used ... but he never wash windows, he never washed diapers.

Once Gelsemina left her family and eloped, she was cut off from her own family connections and support. She lived with her husband's aunt in the early years of her marriage, but even this kind of dependency seemed abusive to her:

She had me like a little slave. Like my husband was a little slave. And she got me. She thought she could do that with me too. But it went so far and then I got smart. I says, "You can't do that to me too. You did it to my husband enough."

Gelsemina (Jessie) Scuro née Russo with her husband, Dominick, and their children: (left to right) Richard, Annette, Joseph, and Vincent.

Over the course of next few years, she rented a couple of apartments, and eventually bought a house on her own. She saw her sisters only "on the sly." There was little solidarity of the traditional familial system for Gelsemina, or even trust with good friends:

[Sometimes] you got to be aware of good friends. They're not all ... all good. They scheme. They want to know your business and then they give it to you, you know?

Because Gelsemina was able to recognize first-hand the abuses of kinship networks, she no longer trusted old world networking and familial exchange. The traditional family structure could only threaten her future financial and emotional autonomy.

As Louise Odencrantz noted, "The problem for readjustment for the adult immigrant is quite different from the problem of the child immigrant."²⁷ Gelsemina's view of the patriarchal traditional family as she experienced it only heightened her distrust of the "outside" world, which for a Southern Italian immigrant was at most composed of extended familial networks. Nelli, in his study of Italain Americans, noted that "In the impersonal and hostile environment of the [Italian] South the ordinary peasant could place his trust and faith only in the nuclear family—that is, the immediate members of his household. Extended family closeness and supportiveness, an ideal much admired ... was seldom attained because of the harsh economic and social conditions."²⁸ Gelsemina lost this connection in America. After her mother died, she could no longer trust even the hegemony of her own nuclear family. Gelsemina responded with distrust toward almost all other men and women in her adult life, and a corresponding pride in her self-sufficiency.

Identity and Immigration

I didn't go to high school. I didn't even go to the elementary school for maybe a year. What I know I learned all by myself.... A little at a time.

V.A. Goddard observed "an absence of commitment to a community" as it was noted by Edward C. Banfield (1958) in connection with in rural Southern Italian society.²⁹ In this environment, there is often a so-called "exaggerated individualism" coupled with an "amoral" familialism that is not bound to church or state. Goddard defines familialism as "a consequence of ... the practical and sentimental importance of family life."³⁰ The characteristics associated with exaggerated individualism can be misunderstood as a simplistic symbolic understanding. In fact, this individualism is more likely a complex consequence of assimilated native social structures with the disruptions of immigration experience. The case presented here shows the complexity of this phenomenon.

In taking control of her family, Gelsemina became able to dictate her autonomy. Her role in the family was transformed and she was no longer scripted by the powerlessness of being an immigrant or being a woman. She did not have to obey the dictates of an abusive patriarchical structure. Yet, the difficulties of having forged her independence remained with her.

Yeah, because they were peacemakers.... They liked ... because they knew that my husband was a good person. See? "And so why be mad at your daughter?" They say, "He never did nothing to you." But then after, he [her father] says—when we did make up—he says to Grandpa, he says, "You know? She's no good." That I was no good. "She's no good. If she doesn't put a tablecloth on the table, and napkin," he says, "give it to her. Smack her. Hit her. Let her do what she's supposed to do." He says, "See, I'm not that type." He says, "If she knows she has to put the tablecloth, she'll put the tablecloth. If she don't want to put the tablecloth, that's okay with me too." Cause Grandpa really loved me. But at the beginning I wasn't so ... I just wanted to get out. For me, it was get away. See? But then, I learned how to love him because he was nice.

Gelsemina married the only man with whom she had been permitted some contact. She had purposefully forestalled the possibility of any further paternal influence by eloping. Regardless of her distrust toward the familial network system, friends of her father later became involved in resolving their estrangement. She called them "peacemakers":

[Then], some people got in between and says, "Why? Why you hold a grudge your own—your daughter—it's mostly your fault that they ran away. Cause they wanted to get married and you didn't want it. So why don't you go ahead, let everything go? Bygone." So then, they came to tell us, "Go to your father. Your father won't say nothing. Go to your father." So you feel you want peace in the world and let the kids grow up and fine. So what they don't know—the kids don't know—you know? So we went. I was pregnant to Joe, to Uncle Joe. Well, he kicked me in the belly.... Yeah, kicked me in the belly. And those people were so disappointed that he did that act.
Q: Who were those people? Who?
A: They were friends but you know, like somebody that people would respect more, like lawyers and I don't know—they were respected by a lot of people—like the peaceful people. You know? ... [They] were disappointed the way he act because ... so I says to Grandpa, "No use." I says, "Let's go." But then, those people convinced us not to and simmered him down and that's how we made up.

For the sake of appearance, for the "respect" required of her, Gelsemina became a part of her father's life again. The catalyst of extended family networks brought Gelsemina back into a relationship with her father. When asked how she was able to overlook his abuse and associate with him again, she responded:

You would [not understand] but I had a reason why. Because I had different feelings in me and I says, only God ... if God forgives him, I will. And I says, "I forgive him because he's still my father." See? He's still my father. God forgave his enemies that pierced his heart, right? So I felt, if I forgave him, maybe he'll understand me differently.

And when he died, she said:

I leaned over him and I says, "If God forgives you, what you did to me, I forgive you." So it's up to God—the bad things he done me wrong, then he paid for it. But if God thinks he didn't do me wrong, then God knows. But he did me wrong a lot because I could have been somebody else. What I wanted, he took it away.

She still recognized her father as a symbol of both power and abuse, and only with his death could she truly consider forgiveness. An all-knowing God symbolically was the permission she needed to soften her resistance to her father, although this appeal to a higher authority was still patriarchical. This appeal to God was her way of resolving the conflict between the need for privacy and the requirement to keep silent about the conditions that haunted her adolescence and diminished her autonomy.

The cultural consequence of "exaggerated individualism" and the focus on the familial relations can be traced to a larger native distrust of politics and the State. Goddard describes the source of this tradition of distrust:

[P.A.] Allum points to a preference for personal, paternalistic relations, the origins of which he traces back to the Bourbon kingdom, arguing the poor of Naples have never shaken off these archaic views of government in favor of bureaucratic institutions of the modern republican state.... The people did not see themselves as "belonging" to the world of politics nor did politics "belong" to them.³¹

The source of what seems to be an "exaggerated individualism" could more likely be better attributed to the fact that "values that stressed individual autonomy [that] had little meaning in [Italian] culture because they could not be translated ... into prescriptions about how to proceed with one's life."³² In other words, Gelsemina knew she could not tolerate the abuse of the patriarchal family, so with no role model or social support system, she empowered herself by taking the role of the father within her own family. With no corresponding prescription or social metaphor for this motivation, she refers to this autonomy symbolically with what may seem to be an "exaggerated individualism," especially if the analysis is done without an understanding of Southern Italian social relations. When Gelsemina mentioned disciplining one of her own sons, she reveals her assumption that she needed to employ the same manipulative power as her father had used in order to maintain control over her family:

But I punished him hard. I says, "The way it happened now," I said, "that will not happen again." So I tied his hands in the back, [she smiles] and he was punished. But what I had did, I put him in the wine cellar. Where we had the wine. I said, "Now you're going to be there and think about it—what you did wrong—and you're not going to do it again because I cannot be running after you. I have work to do here and I have to cook, I have to clean...." It was me everything cause Grandpa didn't know how to do a darn thing. I had to do everything.

Virginia Yans-McLaughlin's "rules for the interpretation of oral interviews," developed in her comparison of the testimonies of Jewish immigrant women with Italian immigrant women, has a bearing here. As Yans-McLaughlin argues:

Both immigrant groups regularly cited the importance of friendly and family connections in securing work, but the Italian narrators, unlike the Jewish, reflected on a reality in which it was virtually impossible to obtain work on one's own.... In the Italian presentation individuals did not function by will and autonomy, nor did they trust their ability to manipulate circumstances in order to obtain needs and ends. Fate, luck, America, even position in a kin network determined their past and their destiny.³³

She places "autobiographical exercises" into two categories: either as gestalt ("self in history") or as atomistic ("history of self "). By placing Italian immigrant testimony into the atomist view, Yans-McLaughlin's analysis of the Italian perspective remains merely critical, not comparative:

[Jewish women and] their choice of language, which itself influences what is and is not available to human awareness, reveals a comfortable preference for political rhetoric. Most Italian women expressed no repertoire of union formulas, no ironic tradition that might have helped them to categorize past experience or to create an emotional distance from the past—and from their own frailties.³⁴

I would argue that her interpretation is suspect. I argue that in the case of Southern Italian women, the socio-psychological response to the problems in the homeland was to maintain the private, personal, familial structures while seeking change through migration. By defining "self-representation" in terms of a "temporal understanding," Yans-McLaughlin presents an analytical bias in favor of a culture that "prepares individuals to see relations among the past present and future," or as "a self against history."³⁵ Yans-McLaughlin's rules for interpretation, when applied to the case examined here, in fact lead to a particularly distorting objectification of my grandmother's struggle for self-identification. So, to assume that because one does not demonstrate or account for a clear public/private connection, that such a connection does not exist, is erroneous. It does not necessarily follow that there is not an understanding of themselves in history. There is no appropriate critique of a culture, especially in terms of a deficiency or symbolic lack, without demonstrating a form of imperialism—which is exactly what is contained in Yans-McLaughin's conclusions.

I cannot assert here that Gelsemina's immigration to America was the sole influence for her motivations toward an autonomy apart from her family. I can only tentatively conclude that the extended separation of her family over the ocean for almost five years most likely influenced the infidelity of her father and the abusive turn in her family's private life, strengthening the patriarchal power structure. In describing her own father's transition, Clara Corsica Grillo reiterates the difficulties of Italian immigrant identity:

Upon his impact with the New World, he had suffered the usual cultural shock when he realized that his idea of America clashed with the reality he had to face.... To him, America represented not only hard work but also "mutilation" of the family left in Italy, with the inevitable consequence of a feeling of complete estrangement.³⁶

Especially in this context, Maddalena Tirabassi's call for a more in-depth investigation into the issue of family violence is insightful.³⁷

As the oldest daughter and at an impressionable age, Gelsemina witnessed her father's abusiveness and mother's unrecognized hard work. Affected by a tradition of amoral familialism and cultural transition, at the sacrifice of any significant trusting relationships outside of her nuclear family, she responded by investing in her accomplishments manifested as a great sense of individualism. The primary motive for her self-identified empowerment and consistent refusals to take the help of others was in order to regain honor with her own family.

Concluding Remarks

In self-reflection knowledge for the sake of knowledge attains congruence with the interest in autonomy and responsibility [Mündigkeit]. My ... thesis is thus that in the power of self-reflection, knowledge and interest are one.... My ... thesis is thus that the unity of knowledge and interest proves itself in a dialectic that takes the historical traces of suppressed dialogue and reconstructs what has been suppressed.³⁸

As Habermas describes above, there is an important power in reconstructing historically suppressed dialogue. Mündigkeit is possible with reflecting on the words and deeds of people who have undergone powerlessness and suppression. The project here is a work of self-reflection and is a reconstruction of an important dialogue between gender as well as ethnicity. I hope what makes this project most interesting is that it presents the possibility of liberation from and taking responsibility for assumptions about immigrant experience.

As Rudolph Vecoli explains, "[I]mmigrants did not abandon modes of thought and behavior that they brought to America; instead, they used their traditions in adapting to modern industrial life."³⁹ Recent work in immigrant and women's studies has shown the process of assimilation formally attributed to ethnic groups forming in the United States as a process of change, in terms of a cultural dialectic rather than in terms of individual economic successes. For Southern Italian immigrants, as in the case of my grandmother from Naples, the duality of honor/dishonor, complicated by questions of trust and obligations, manifested in privatized, enclosed familial structures, emerges from the social structures of their indigenous culture.

"[T]he question of subjectivity was central for understanding, and changing, the relations between men and women.... [W]omen had to play the key role in this transformation of themselves and their society; they had to become the subjects rather than the objects of the 'woman-question,'" according to Goddard.⁴⁰ As an object of study, my grandmother seems to portray a false or exaggerated individualism, a confused escapism toward religion and acceptance of the paternalistic design of the family, as well as an atomist view of herself in history. In response, I have taken a genuine interest in the Habermasian sense of Mündigkeit and seek, in her defense, "a freedom from presuppositions."⁴¹ As Habermas argues,

Only when philosophy discovers the dialectical course of history the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication does it further the process whose suspension it otherwise legitimates: mankind's evolution toward autonomy and responsibility.⁴²

In this way, I have followed suit. I hope to have presented here a fairer portrait of the choices that my grandmother made, contextualizing the ways she perpetuated gender roles and power structures and yet in other ways rebelled against them.

Yans-McLaughlin's "rules for the interpretation of oral interviews" is inappropriate for evaluating the design of Southern Italian culture, and as a presupposition can be violent to genuinely interested dialogue about the immigrant experience. For Southern Italian immigrants, the duality of honor/dishonor, manifesting in privatized, enclosed familial structures joined by a mixture of distrust and obligation directly manifests from the social structures of their indigenous culture. Goddard more accurately reflects this phenomenon: "Familialism is thus not a product of backwardness and underdevelopment ... [O]fficial familism ... it has been internalized and interpreted ... it does inform people's views of themselves and their society" [emphasis added].⁴³ The lack of trust in public support systems disconnected many immigrant families and their networks from identifying themselves within a greater public history, but this is not without reason, without understanding.

As Kathie Friedman-Kasaba states regarding her own grandmothers' stories, "[M]oments of autonomy have disrupted and displaced any linear interpretation of their experiences as ones of resignation or even of simple empowerment."⁴⁴ To place "autobiographical exercises" into either a gestalt or an atomistic category only perpetuates certain "one-line" stereotypes about immigrant populations and their perspectives. Although Yans-McLaughlin discusses a "non-imperialist" analysis in dealing with immigrant history, these categories "for identifying strikingly different group portraits of Italian and Jewish men and women"⁴⁵ can only do the opposite. Her stereotyping of "Italian speakers," as "rarely connect[ing] themselves with historical background" and "acknowledged slight awareness of the public world in which they functioned,"⁴⁶ does not address, and is not sensitive to the cultural manifestation of these views and their inherent validity.

For my grandmother, there was no one to be obligated to, no unifying place for her in a greater, more "linear history" because of what any other "outsider" may have represented: someone to distrust and within her own ethnic group, someone who maintains the abusive, traditional familial structure. Using the source of Gelsemina's language as based in the family,⁴⁷ her work as both affected by European and American cultural influences, and her power as a mix of rebellion while supporting certain gender roles, supports the fact that, as Cohen noted, "the household was the most important economic and social unit; the division between the private and the public was therefore not distinct."⁴⁸ Using research of her native culture, particularly Goddard's anthropological work on Naples,⁴⁹ and examining alterations to this cultural context through the impact of migration this study offers opportunity to analyze the motivations and perspectives of my grandmother, and to understand the wrenching impact of immigration on culture.

Jennifer Scuro is an adjunct professor at Fordham and Pace Universities in New York City, teaching philosophy and environmental studies. She is completing her dissertation in philosophy, "The Phenomenon of Bearing Witness: History, Testimony and the Face of the Other," at the Graduate Faculty at The New School. She has articles also forthcoming in Kinesis and International Studies in Philosophy in the Spring of 2004.

Notes

¹ Quoting Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 312.

² These interviews were conducted November 1 and November 2, 1996. I want to thank Prof. Kathy Uno (Temple University) for her comments on this paper.

³ Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, "Metaphors of Self in History: Subjectivity, Oral Narrative, and Immigration Studies" in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 260.

⁴ According to Maddalena Tirabassi in "Bringing Life to History: Italian Ethnic Women in the United States," "Studies of Italian ethnic women missed the compensatory or descriptive stage though which women's studies had to pass, and precociously and often involuntarily included gender without sufficient prepatory research." In The Italian Diaspora: Migration Across the Globe, eds. George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez (Ontario: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992), 136.

⁵ It is important to note here the work in feminist criticism oriented toward an ethics of care. See Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Also see Karen Warren on the importance of personal narrative in developing feminist ethics that can resist the oppressive conceptual framework of patriarchy, "The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism" (Environmental Ethics 12, 3 [Summer 1990]: 125–46).

⁶ Marie Hall Ets in "He Has the Right to Command You" in Immigrant Women, ed. Maxine Schwartz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 45.

⁷ Tirabassi, 137.

⁸ See Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19.

⁹ V.A. Goddard in Gender, Family and Work in Naples (Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1996), 12.

¹⁰ In the interviews, Gelsemina was hestitant to describe what kind of salesman her father had been and it is not clear that this kind of work in Italy resembles what we might mean today by "salesman." My impression was that a "salesman" did not provide a consistent income, and that was a contributing factor to her father's migration to America.

¹¹ "In immigrant communities women's earnings in the home, whether in the form of wages from industrial homework or profits from small informal sector/family enterprises, were seldom reported to government investigators. Moreover, the existence, let aside the importance, of women's non-waged domestic labor, whether performed in the country of origin or destination, ... has been systematically neglected in U.S. government investigations of migration." Kathie Friedman-Kasaba in Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870–1924 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 17.

¹² Goddard, 51.

¹³ Goddard, 14.

¹⁴ Humbert S. Nelli, From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 132–33.

¹⁵ Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1919), 102.

¹⁶ Keeping the design of Southern Italian culture in mind, "public" as it is used here signifies the world "outside" of the nuclear family. Specifically, the personal, extended familial network of her father.

¹⁷ "Once Italian women left their parents to become wives, their ability to control their own lives and those of others increased. That Italian women could exert such control runs counter to the conventional wisdom about patriarchal southern Italian culture.... married women played very active roles within the family and took part in important decisions about the behavior of its members." Cohen, 27.

¹⁸ Yans-McLaughlin, 279.

¹⁹ Tirabassi, 137.

²⁰ Friedman-Kasaba, 10.

²¹ Goddard, 15.

²² Goddard, 63.

²³ "Although parents played decisive roles in their children's marriages, it was unusual for a family to select a spouse for a son or daughter against the child's wishes or to veto a choice made by a son or daughter.... There is some other evidence indicating that families became less able to control their children's choice of partner." Cohen, 24, 26.

²⁴ Cohen, 20.

²⁵ Goddard, 146.

²⁶ "[O]ne must appreciate that ethnic culture was deeply pragmatic. It was born of the understanding that in America, as in Europe, families would have to shift behavior in order to survive." Cohen, 6.

²⁷ Odencrantz, 23.

²⁸ Nelli, 28.

²⁹ Goddard, 67. Goddard is citing Edward C. Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Free Press, 1958).

³⁰ Goddard, 180.

³¹ Goddard, 55.

³² Cohen discussing Bodnar, 10.

³³ Yans-McLaughlin, 278.

³⁴ Yans-McLaughlin, 282.

³⁵ Yans-McLaughlin, 274.

³⁶ Maria Parrino, "Italian Immigrant Women in the United States through Their Autobiographical Writings" in The Columbus People: Perspectives in Italian Immigration to the Americas and Australia, eds. Lydio F. Tomasi, Piero Gastaldo, and Thomas Row (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1994), 433. This is an excerpt interpreted from the autobiographical writings of Clara Corsica Grillo regarding her father's experience as an Italian immigrant man.

³⁷ Tirabassi, 147.

³⁸ Habermas, 314–15.

³⁹ Cohen quoting Rudolph Vecoli, 4.

⁴⁰ Goddard, 10.

⁴¹ Habermas, 311. This idea is in fact a notion that Habermas borrows from Kant and extends to the possibility of progressive historical self-knowledge. Habermas attempts to resusitate Enlightenment ideas from "objectivist attitude" of modern theory by taking this Kantian idea of "thinking for oneself" and applying it critically to a hermeneutic of traditional objectifications and theories. "To the extent that this is the case, the critique of ideology ... [takes] into account that information about lawlike connections sets off a process of reflection in the consciousness of those whom the laws are about. Thus the level of unreflective consciousness ... can be transformed." Habermas, 310.

⁴² Habermas, 315.

⁴³ Goddard, 180.

⁴⁴ Friedman-Kasaba, 6.

⁴⁵ Yans-McLaughlin, 274.

⁴⁶ Yans-McLaughlin, 275.

⁴⁷ "As Donna Gabaccia has noted, scholars of immigrant women tend to study them within a family context because the evidence, both oral and written, suggests that women generally identified with their families." Cohen, 11.

⁴⁸ Cohen, 28.

⁴⁹ Goddard's anthropological work of Naples has been an invaluable resource for this paper.

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