Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives

by Gabaccia, Donna R.; Iacovetta, Franca

• ISBN13: 9780802084620
• ISBN10: 0802084621
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Donna R. Gabaccia is Charles H. Stone Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Franca Iacovetta is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Introduction	3	(42)
Donna R. Gabaccia
Franca Iacovetta
Part I When Men Go Away: Women Who Wait and Work
When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration, 1880--1920	45	(31)
Linda Reeder
Gender Relations and Migration Strategies in the Rural Italian South: Land, Inheritance, and the Marriage Market	76	(1)
Andreina De Clementi
Bourgeois Men, Peasant Women: Rethinking Domestic Work and Morality in Italy	76	(57)
Maddalena Tirabassi
Part II Female Immigrants at Work
Women Were Labour Migrants Too: Tracing Late-Nineteenth-Century Female Migration from Northern Italy to France	133	(27)
Paola Corti
Gender, Domestic Values, and Italian Working Women in Milwaukee: Immigrant Midwives and Businesswomen	160	(29)
Diane Vecchio
Part III Fighting Back: Militants, Radicals, Exiles
Italians in Buenos Aires's Anarchist Movement: Gender Ideology and Women's Participation, 1890--1910	189	(28)
Jose Moya
Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns	217	(30)
Caroline Waldron Merithew
Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s--1940s	247	(52)
Jennifer Guglielmo
Virgilia D'Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of Exile	299	(28)
Robert Ventresca
Franca Iacovetta
Nestore's Wife? Work, Family, and Militancy in Belgium	327	(22)
Anne Morelli
Part IV As We See Ourselves, As Others See Us
Glimpses of Lives in Canada's Shadow: Insiders, Outsiders, and Female Activism in the Fascist Era	349	(37)
Angelo Principe
Italian Women and Work in Post-Second World War Australia: Representation and Experience	386	(25)
Roslyn Pesman
Contributors	411	(4)
Illustration Credits	415	(2)
Index	417