American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women 9780823290840

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AMERICAN WOMAN, ITALIAN STYLE

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AMERICAN WOMAN, I TA L I A N S T Y L E Italian Americana’s Best Writings on Women

 edited by

Carol Bonomo Albright and

Christine Palamidessi Moore

Fordham University Press New York 2011

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Copyright 䉷 2011 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American woman, Italian style : Italian Americana’s best writings on women / edited by Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine Palamidessi Moore.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3175-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3176-8 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3177-5 (ebook) 1. Italian American women—Social life and customs. 2. Italian American women—Social conditions. 3. Italian American women—Biography. 4. Italian American women—Literary collections. 5. Sex role—United States. 6. Ethnicity—United States. 7. United States—Ethnic relations. I. Albright, Carol Bonomo. II. Palamidessi Moore, Christine. III. Italian Americana. E184.I8A5248 2011 973⬘.0451—dc22 2010039554 Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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For Grandmother Teresa Guerrieri Mother Margaret Bonomo Godmother, Angela Grande and Daughter Sally Effman With love

 For my aunts and sister Fasca Painter Orestina Errico Pamela Palamidessi Dimaio con molto affetto

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine Palamidessi Moore

1

Education, Work, and Home Life Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women: Childhood, Work, and Marriage Elizabeth G. Messina

15

‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York Lorett Treese

32

Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives in Milwaukee’s Italian Third Ward Diane C. Vecchio

49

Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants Maria Parrino

57

Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns: Italian-American Women in New York City William Egelman

78

Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis of National Data William Egelman

87

Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo

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Gender Relations among Italian Americans Richard Gambino

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viii Contents

Food, Recipes, Cookbooks, and Italian-American Life: An Introduction Donna Gabaccia

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The Tradition of Invention: Reading History through La cucina casareccia napoletana Carol Helstosky

123

Italian-American Cookbooks: From Oral to Print Culture Donna Gabaccia

133

Immigrant Kitchens, Community Cookbooks, and Italian-American Life: An Introduction Donna Gabaccia

142

A Taste of Memories Catherine Tripalin Murray

143

The Italian Immigrant Kitchen: A Journey into Identity Cassandra Vivian

150

Literature Transformation in the Verbal Art of Clementina Todesco Carole Brown Knuth

159

The Novels of Mari Tomasi Alfred F. Rosa

166

Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa Lisa A. Meyer

177

Lucy Mancini: The New Woman Paul Levitt

202

Foodways in Italian-American Narrative Rose De Angelis

206

In Our Ears, a Voice: The Persistence of the Trauma of Immigration in Blue Italian and Umbertina Mary Ann Mannino

215

Mary Caponegro, Prize-Winning American Writer in Rome Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

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Contents ix

Mary di Michele’s Elegies Nathalie Cooke

232

Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert Christina Bevilacqua

240

Simona Griffo, Detective Hero: A Series of ‘‘Troublems’’ Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

250

Writing Life, Writing History: Italian-American Women and the Memoir Edvige Giunta

260

Art, Music, and Film Concetta Scaravaglione, Italian-American Sculptor Carol Scarvalone Kushner

271

Rosa Ponselle, Incomparable Diva James Drake

284

Nancy Savoca: An Appreciation Jacqueline Reich

300

Studies about Italian-American Women Italian-American Women: A Review Essay Donna Gabaccia

307

Materials from Arno Press: The Italian-American Woman Maxine Seller

333

Italian Women in America: Sources for Study Betty Boyd Caroli

337

List of Contributors

349

Index

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to so many people who have been of help to me in editing this book, people who have shaped my thoughts and challenged me to look in new ways at a subject I’ve been ruminating about for thirty-five years. The most obvious person is Fredric Nachbaur, the director of Fordham University Press, who has shepherded this volume through to completion with such grace and insight. And always John Paul Russo for his intellectual breadth and depth and for his sage advice, and Dona DeSanctis for her knowledge and commitment to things Italian-American. At this point in my life, I find myself looking back to some very early influences in my development: my eighth-grade teacher at St. Joseph Academy, Sister Mary Ellen, whose depth of learning was as remarkable as her encouragement of me, a very shy, reticent child. The Sisters Mary David, Chrysostom, Mary Francis, and Paula Holdman and Professors Mary Brady and Janine Marzi at the College of Mt. St. Vincent modeled an intellectual life for women to follow. Their unabashed rooting for our success encouraged imitation. My grandmother, mother, and godmother were three strong and loving women who always had my best interests at heart. How could they not have shaped me in ways that I am still discovering? Finally, my husband, Birge, who has always supported me in my intellectual interests. His own wide reading has stimulated mine. carol bonomo albright In the summer of 2008, when Carol and I first spoke about collaborating on this project, time shifted a bit and an eerie but affectionate presence stood between us: Sister Matthew. She introduced both history and geography into our curriculum. After the books made their way down the aisles, I flipped through each one. ‘‘Where are the stories about girls?’’ I asked. Sister Matthew fluffed the side of her habit, laughed, and said, ‘‘You’ll have to write them.’’ The scholars and writers whose articles, essays, and histories are included in American Woman, Italian Style contributed their time, intellectual passion, xi

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xii Acknowledgments

and interest to make this volume possible. Mille grazie. Many thanks, too, to the professional staff at Fordham University Press—Mary-Lou Elias Pen˜a, Kathleen Sweeney, Eric Newman—whose careful work has put us all in good company. christine palamidessi moore

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Introduction carol bonomo albright and christine palamidessi moore

With the success of Wild Dreams: The Best of ‘‘Italian Americana’’ (Fordham University Press, 2008), we began to think about publishing another ‘‘Best of . . .’’ collection. We again approached Fordham University Press, with which we had developed a strong working relationship. Our first anthology focused on fiction, poetry, and memoir. A second volume, this time about Italian-American women, shouted out for attention. As we perused past articles published in the journal,1 what struck us was that, from out of the more often than not difficult beginnings of poverty, Italian-American women demonstrated a strength, inventiveness, persistence, and ingenuity that was formidable. Hands down they had trailblazed a stunning path for current and future generations of immigrant women. We believed that the research, articles, and essays deserved a showcase. From Italian Americana’s very inception in 1974, articles about ItalianAmerican women as well as poems and memoirs penned by women, and book reviews about such major authors as Helen Barolini and Daniela Gioseffi, graced the journal’s pages. Through the 1970s and ’80s we published short stories written by women. By the 1990s, the number of women’s stories in our pages exploded. Furthermore, in the public sphere critics discussed and wrote about Italian-American women’s writings; their literature was taken seriously. So was their history. We asked ourselves: Why not publish the best articles about women in a second Best of ‘‘Italian Americana’’ volume? Our enthusiasm supported our hunch that such a book would be welcomed not only by scholars interested in Italian Americans but also by those interested in cross-cultural studies, history, immigration studies, sociology, and gender studies as well as the everyday person and more recent immigrants. In reviewing the thirty-five-year history of Italian Americana, we chose a broad range of articles with an eye to many disciplines. At times we asked 1

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authors to update their articles or to submit only the section of an article which dealt with Italian-American women. Then we divided the topics into four sections: Italian-American women’s education, work, and home life; literature; art, music, and film; and studies about Italian-American women. The anthology formed an appropriate reflection of an ethnic woman’s progression into American culture—in this case, the Italian-American woman’s. With that in mind, we started our book by looking at the interior life, if you will, of elderly adult children of immigrants. For six months in 1990, working as a participant-observer, psychologist Elizabeth Messina interviewed nine Italian-American women, ranging in age from seventy-two to ninety. She asked questions about, and then analyzed the women’s relationship with, their family members, their work, courtship, and sexual and marital experiences. The article is striking for the interviewees’ honesty and their occasional acceptance of their harsh lives as well as the bitterness of their hostility. The subjects’ repressed anger sometimes led to revenge exercised in sexual withdrawal and psychological torture. Given the small sampling, it is difficult to know how widespread such reactions might be within the larger population. More research will be needed to determine whether Messina’s data was particular to her interviewees and/or if other immigrant cultures might reveal similar responses. Migration necessitates a psychological dislocation as well as a physical uprooting. Though not often discussed, emotional ramifications for the children and grandchildren of immigrants are significant. Temple University professor Mary Ann Mannino argues that second- and third-generation Americans seek therapeutic treatment for depression and anxieties that relate to ancestral immigration. She uses two Italian-American literary texts—Blue Italian and Umbertina—along with her own psychological studies to explore the immigration trauma in assimilated granddaughters. The article raises questions about loss and the absorbed pain of immigration that mark mother–daughter relationships. Such loss makes expressions of love difficult and, therefore, threatens the strong self-esteem necessary for establishing independence. This article can act as a springboard to contrast its finding with other ethnicities of the same period and as a comparison to America’s evernew wave of immigrants; on a personal level, it can act as a vehicle for compassion for both one’s ancestors and the current generation grappling with such issues. Nathalie Cooke’s article about Mary di Michele’s poetry echoes similar generational losses and the psychological impact of migration— though in her later poetry di Michele moves beyond personal reflections to

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concern herself with larger issues of social justice. Both Rose De Angelis’s article and Blossom Kirschenbaum’s essay on Mary Caponegro’s writings focus on the consequences of immigrant trauma. Lorett Treese’s article on mothers’ clubs in New York City in the 1930s and ’40s gives us a different perspective on the lives of women as they make the transition from Italian mothers to Italian-American women. Some of the women had both the leisure time and interest in joining together to expand their social and intellectual lives. After first outlining a woman’s role in the family structure of southern Italy, Treese chronicles a New York City mothers’ club’s activities. Although Treese refers to the Mezzogiorno culture, she notes that Rosa Cavalleri, who had been denied all but the most rudimentary education in northern Italy, demonstrated the same values as women from the south: their common culture was stronger than regional differences might suggest. The club’s outings created possibilities and opened doors, whether symbolic or real, that affected how the women could create new lifestyles for themselves and their families. The women visited, for example, the New York Times, Fordham University’s library, and Rockefeller Center. The clubs served other functions as well: the social activities addressed isolation and rising intergenerational conflicts. The women expressed themselves by writing and producing plays; the presentation of folk songs and dances allowed the mothers to celebrate their roots with their children; and the clubs provided women with leadership qualities to exercise their talents. By the 1950s, the membership in one New York City club decreased greatly and by the 1960s it shut its doors. But perhaps this brief reign was a mark of its success: The women no longer needed such a movement to engage in a larger world. Educational opportunities in America allowed women to claim rich personal lives and, in some cases, careers outside the home. An article by University of Genoa professor Maria Parrino examines the educational struggle as seen in the memoirs of four women: Rosa Cavalleri, Bruna Pieracci, Grace Spinelli, and Clara Grillo—all of whom belonged to the Great Migration of people entering the United States from 1876 to 1924. What makes the study noteworthy is that the geographic scope expands beyond the usual urban areas. Grillo challenged her father’s old-country values about a woman’s place by leaving his house and working her way through high school. This action is contrary to the widely held stereotype of Italian-American women’s silence. Cavalleri worked as a washerwoman and attended an

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after-work-hours Catholic school where she learned to read and write English. Many of the actions immigrant Rosa took, not only in the realm of education—such as her decision to leave her first, abusive husband—again belies the notion of passive Italian women. Many who have had an immigrant Italian grandmother can testify to the inaccuracy of this stereotype. And in describing Italian-American women’s actions during unionization, Maxine Seller refers to Edwin Fenton’s Immigrants and Unions study in which he states that by 1919 some of the Italian women in the garment union ‘‘proved to be exceedingly energetic and bellicose, as the police roles showed.’’ According to Fenton, union leaders recognized the relationship between subservience in the family and on the job and worked to radicalize women at work and equalize their positions at home. Spinelli, a Sicilian immigrant, became a New York City social worker; her education was guided by a generous teacher who promoted cultural pluralism and provided her with a sense of public recognition. For Pieracci, her Iowan family highly valued learning. These resilient women’s dreams were realized in America because they pursued education in a system that embraced individual freedom, despite the same system’s attempted homogenization of their ethnic culture. The article questions the commonly held assumption that Italian Americans were uninterested in education. Exploring the roles that economics and outsider feelings played in limiting access to educational opportunities might prove fruitful areas for research. The custom of a family’s contributing their pay to put the most promising male through professional school is another important subject for research: Did they do the same for the females? A number of articles in American Woman, Italian Style, such as Parrino’s, and those by Messina, Vecchio, Gambino, and Reich, suggest the richness of still unstudied gender exchanges and encounters with institutions, employers, and fellow workers. Continuing with the theme of education is Christina Bevilacqua’s interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert. A distinguished feminist critic, Professor Gilbert makes the point that her mother was a ‘‘little bitter’’ about having attended normal school, and not college. The need for a family’s adult child’s paycheck was often an overriding consideration, especially if the adult child was female. Family resources for higher education often favored the male child. Other topics in this interview encompass Gilbert’s scholarly works (the landmark The Madwoman in the Attic, among others),

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her poetry and memoir (in which she speaks about secrets and silence), and her critical works on women’s issues and issues of identity. Another article focusing on issues of identity is Professor Paul Levitt’s perspective on the character Lucy Mancini in The Godfather. He states that Lucy Mancini transcends the mores of the old country and embraces the modern world. An additional point he makes is that the English meaning of mancini, left-handed, is a metaphor for the outsider. The feeling of being an outsider, from being estranged from two worlds, is a thread that runs through ethnic literatures. Mari Tomasi’s novel Like Lesser Gods was published in 1949, preceding Mario Puzo’s The Godfather by twenty years. The novel posits a gradual approach toward assimilation over generations as a way of easing the conflict about being an outsider. We asked author Alfred Rosa to present the section of his article regarding Tomasi’s insights about the Vermont Italian-American stonecutters as well as Rose Basile Green’s assessment of Tomasi’s work. Carole Brown Knuth’s article, ‘‘Transformation in the Verbal Art of Clementina Todesco,’’ discusses the preservation of oral folktales. In 1941, Todesco’s daughter, Bruna, wrote down her mother’s stories. Nearly thirtyfive years later these folk stories were rediscovered at the Wayne State University Archives. The material resulted in the first ethnographic study of a storyteller from Italy, Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman by Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa. The work sheds light on what might have remained elusive: the oral tradition of Italian women. Jumping from folktales to crime fiction, Professor Blossom Kirschenbaum in ‘‘Simona Griffo, Detective Hero: A Series of ‘Troublems’ ’’ applauds the feminist detective genre (this article might well inspire study of present-day author Lisa Scottoline’s detective novels) that has reconceived a woman, in this case an immigrant woman, as hero at the center of the story. Simona Griffo, a character of novelist Camilla T. Crespi, is a transplanted Italian working for a small New York City advertising agency. On the side she investigates murders. Her Italian identity is built up by a zest for food, espresso, and a spouting off of random Italian expressions when she is excited. Professor Edvige Giunta’s article, ‘‘Writing Life, Writing History: Italian-American Women and the Memoir,’’ belies cliche´s about italianicity. The large number of memoirs written in the 1990s asserts the power of the Italian-American woman as an intellectual voice. The memoirs expose what many Italian-American families and communities would rather leave unsaid.

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The writers possess a visceral attachment to family and culture and contradictorily express anger, violence, and sorrow toward the same. Giunta argues that the contradiction peels back a noteworthy realization that stresses the importance of a self-conscious understanding of the power of memory. In ‘‘Breaking the Silence: Interview with Tina De Rosa,’’ Los Angeles Times reporter Lisa A. Meyer in 1999 succeeded in getting the reclusive novelist of the classic Italian-American novel Paper Fish to talk about her work. An ethnic woman from working-class Chicago, De Rosa was in no way an easy subject to interview. She rebuffed feminist, Italian-American, metaphorical, and political pegging of her work. She insisted that what happened to the characters in her novel was literal and not symbolic. ‘‘My purpose in writing is to hold on to people and places before they disappear,’’ she explained. In an essay written toward the end of the 1990s, Richard Gambino, one of the founders of Italian Americana, responds to critics of the Italian-American family and offers insights into an authentic understanding of the relations between the sexes. He talks about the complementary roles of men and women. Using statistics, Gambino shows that Italian-American women who are under twenty-five and over forty-five have the highest percentage ranking in the workforce among all U.S. ancestry groups. During the childbearing years, the percentage of Italian-American women working is much lower. He argues that the statistics suggest cultural norms that differ from mainstream employment practices and child-rearing priorities. Whether Gambino’s view will hold in the twenty-first century remains to be seen, especially when we consider William Egelman’s findings in ‘‘Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns of Italian American Women in New York City’’ and in his demographic analysis of Italian Americans in 2000. Egelman, a professor of sociology at Iona College, reinforces the idea that when ethnic contacts remain high, traditional roles persist, but if ethnic contacts are weakened, traditional gender roles may change. Additionally, Egelman notes that data from the year 2000 shows that Italian Americans relocate as often as Americans. This may be due to their current high levels of education and professional employment, which goes along with increased mobility. Data from Diane Vecchio’s article implies that Italian-American women struggle to straddle both traditional and workforce roles: they ‘‘juggle.’’ In ‘‘Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives in Milwaukee’s Italian Third Ward,’’ she fleshes out the ‘‘juggling’’ role further in her study

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on the status of Italian-American women’s lives by focusing on one Milwaukee ward in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Based on research and interviews, Vecchio presents a lively roster of entrepreneurial women who founded businesses, which they often operated initially in their homes. Simultaneously the women took care of the children and family. The womenowned retail stores—groceries, bakeries, butcheries, and tailoring shops— were means for a family’s upward mobility and depended on the support of the immigrant community and the cooperation of daughters and granddaughters. While younger Italian women contributed to family income by working in factories, the mothers and grandmothers ran their own businesses and took care of the children. In his memoir, Immigrant’s Return, Angelo Pellegrini describes a similar practice in Italy, ‘‘where . . . grandmothers [were] spinning, weaving, and tending children for their daughters . . . ’’2 as the young mothers worked in the fields. To ensure success, the women’s ingenuity and persistence, undertaken within Italian cultural values, adapted to American circumstances. Again it remains to be seen whether such accommodations can be retained in the light of disappearing ethnic neighborhoods. Grandmothers may be unavailable due to either their working outside the home or living far from their married children. Plus the demands of new professions require more than a nine-to-five work day. New adaptations will make for a fruitful future study. Not all women followed traditional life and work patterns. Though few in number, some children of immigrants performed on an international stage. Born in 1897, Rosa Ponselle became an acclaimed opera singer, not only at the Metropolitan Opera House, but in foreign capitals, winning accolades from the likes of Luciano Pavarotti. Of her, Pavarotti said, ‘‘Vocally [there was] . . . no one like her . . . interpretively she helped set the style for modern dramatic singing.’’ Ponselle reached the heights of stardom in an unusual fashion: by starting her singing career in vaudeville. From a poor immigrant family of nine children, Concetta Scaravaglione became a noted sculptor despite her widowed mother and brothers wanting her to become a stenographer. Having seen Scaravaglione’s talent, a dedicated teacher convinced Scaravaglione’s family to send her to art school, where she began to feel a tension between the expectations of her family’s traditionally held gender roles and her desire to devote herself to her art. She went on to teach at Vassar, received the Prix de Rome award from the American Academy in Rome, and was elected to be one of thirty members comprising the New York Society of Women Artists. Scaravaglione’s grandniece Carol Scarvalone Kushner is working on a biography of her greataunt. We encourage this most fruitful endeavor. The model biographies of

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Italian-American artists, such as those written about photographer Tina Modotti, spotlight early experiences of poverty as the foundation for future values. Modotti, an immigrant from Udine, evolved from actress, to artist model, to celebrated photographer and social activist. Touched on in several articles is the question of what is an ItalianAmerican woman. We view ethnicity partly as a dynamic inner process that Bonomo Albright explored in ‘‘Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Acculturation, and Feminism,’’ which appeared in Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book (1985). The immigrant generation, having few encounters with the host country, retains trust and love for its original culture; the next generation, coming into contact with the new country through school and work, experiences conflict over the differing values of its home culture and the new country; the following generation tries to resolve these conflicts and develop an individual identity; and succeeding generations put to rest such conflicts, combining an individuation integrated with their heritage and their personal goals. None of these stages of ethnicity, of course, evolves in any kind of straight path. Variations exist, but such a construct gives form to what so many Italian-American women experience. It allows for Italian-American women not to be in lockstep as to where they are on the continuum. We offer here one definition—including both descent and consent—which readers might want to debate and modify. An Italian-American woman resides in the Americas and is one who has been raised with Italian cultural values and with an ancestor who was Italian, or, if she is the immigrant, she was an Italian national. An Italian-American woman chooses to continue some of those cultural values, whether consciously or not (often, as Messina’s article suggests, the seeds of such values take root without, at times, our consciously knowing it). While we use the above definition, which better suits our purposes, we recognize that historians and sociologists refer to all the descendants of Italian immigrants as ‘‘Italian Americans’’ and we respect this definition. In her article on the writings of avant-garde writer Mary Caponegro, Professor Blossom Kirschenbaum places Caponegro’s work into the dynamic school of ethnic writing, in which ethnicity undergoes alterations over the generations. In discussing Caponegro’s unique style, the author states that ‘‘yearnings of mind and body, rather than naturalistic characterization focus Mary Caponegro’s fictions.’’ The films of contemporary filmmaker Nancy Savoca opens a myriad of issues about the lives of Italian-American women that demand further study.

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In her appreciation of Savoca’s work, Professor Jacqueline Reich of Trinity College discusses Savoca’s artistic insights regarding the lack of communication between men and women, rituals of male and female bonding, and the often suffocating constraints imposed by socially prescribed rules of proper masculine and feminine conduct. The films discussed are True Love, Dogfight, and Household Saints. Sociological research and demographic studies confirm the themes of some articles included in American Woman, Italian Style. Egelman uses statistical information from official documents and analyzes the implications of the findings. For example, Egelman’s analysis of Italian-American women’s evolution from the private to the public sphere in ‘‘Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns of Italian-American Women in New York City’’ comments on that city in the first quarter of the twentieth century and finds that the societal changes of a modern metropolis freed women, to some extent, from traditional parental constraints. The urban work pattern pushed women into a middle-class milieu, where there was increased demand for typists, stenographers, salespersons, and other ‘‘women’s jobs.’’ Italian-American women made dramatic strides in employment from 1980 to 1990. A key variable related to their employment was education. In a mere decade, college graduate rates doubled to 15.2 percent, according to the statistics cited by Egelman. This gain translated into another doubling of Italian-American women’s participation in executive and managerial categories in the same decade. There is a lot to recommend about Italian-American women’s synthesis in the workforce and American Woman, Italian Style chronicles the changes. By the time of the 2000 Census, writes Egelman in his analysis of that federal document, the percentage of Italian-American women who were college graduates again nearly doubled in a ten-year period. The climb in education superseded that of the American population as a whole. This, in turn, increased Italian-American women’s high representation in professional status careers as auditors, lawyers, accountants, physicians, and surgeons. The percentage of Italian-American women active in these fields exceeded that of the general population, as did their income. Economic and class identity changes also affected marriage patterns and the rates of intermarriage with non-Italian men, particularly Jewish men, write William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo in their article, ‘‘Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse.’’ It remains to be seen if other distinct changes will occur in the next generation of Italian-American women, how women who are the product of ‘‘mixed’’

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ethnic marriages will identify themselves and their children, and how the definition of the Italian-American family may change. No essay on Italian-American women’s lives would be complete without mention of food, central as it is to Italian-American culture. In 1998, professor Donna Gabaccia, author of We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans and guest editor of a two-part series of Italian Americana, wrote, ‘‘Food and cooking are powerful expressions of our ties to the past and to our current identity.’’ Six essays on food from Gabaccia’s original series constitute a subsection of sorts in American Woman, Italian Style. This subsection includes an essay by University of Denver professor Carol Helstosky, who wrote Pizza: A Global History and Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy. Both Helstosky and Gabaccia focus on the complex connections among food, cookbooks, and Italian-American life and identity. Their articles explore how Italian immigrant kitchens differed from those of other Americans, other immigrants, and other Italians; and what Italian cookbooks published in America, as compared with community cookbooks, reveal about assimilation, the importance of regionalism when studying Italian Americans through food, culinary attitudes, and fast-food Italian style. Helstosky’s analysis of a 1930s Little Italy cookbook is followed by Gabaccia’s overview of a wider variety of immigrant kitchens with particular attention paid to ‘‘community’’ cookbooks. Compared to other immigrant groups’ well-documented recipe collections, which were often bilingual, very few examples of Italian-American cookbooks were found by scholars. In the Italian immigrant culture, Gabaccia posits that recipes were handed down orally and rarely penetrated outside their enclave. But Americans were interested in Italian food. In the 1920s, for example, non–ItalianAmerican households followed inauthentic recipes for spaghetti sauce that contained Worcestershire sauce and horseradish but no garlic. Next, authors of commercial, community, and self-published cookbooks reflect on their decision to write about immigrant kitchens. Catherine Tripalin Murray writes how she came to know her grandmother as she collected recipes and reviewed her family’s roots. Cassandra Vivian offers insights into the financial and creative choices that contribute to successful cookbook publication as well as to her family’s reluctance to alter culinary tradition. Rose De Angelis departs from this approach to food in favor of examining its metaphoric significance in fiction and memoir. In Helen Barolini’s ‘‘Greener Grass’’ and Umbertina, Louise DeSalvo’s memoir Vertigo, and Louisa Ermelino’s Sisters Mallone, food is seen to complicate aspects of self-identity. Notably, it can be linked with sex when a desire to be devoured exists;

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can suggest an inner emptiness; can mark the intersection between excess satiety and a hunger for new tastes; and can signal daughter–mother resentments. The final section in the collection may be of special interest to scholars— although we think all readers will discover a wealth of information. In addition to a retrospective of scholarly literature, the final section points to resources for future research. Donna Gabaccia’s article acts as a comprehensive overview, ranging from the 1970s to the early 1990s, of topics of interest to Italian Americans. A few of the issues examined by Gabaccia, director of the Immigration History and Research Center at the University of Minnesota, are female wage-earning, family responsibilities, mother–daughter ties, the centrality of kin networks, community and neighborhood, educational attainment, Americanization and settlement houses, social lives, and family interactions as presented in film, fiction, and popular culture. Many of the studies she cites are multiethnic in their considerations. Professor Gabaccia discusses a number of directions Italian-American women’s studies can move toward from these beginnings. Next, Maxine Seller reports on Arno Press’s 1975 thirty-nine volume series, ‘‘Italian American Experience.’’ In the section of her article that we present, Seller generally praises the Press’s array of materials but laments that the series does not devote one of the thirty-nine volumes exclusively to women. Despite this neglect, she states that ‘‘the careful reader can uncover a wealth of information on Italian women scattered throughout.’’ Seller, who reports on Protestant Evangelicalism, rejects old negative stereotypes by referring to a 1941 Omaha study of Italian Americans that presents a more varied and accurate picture of Italian-American women’s work lives, their role in unions, and their position in the home. Seller refers to community histories that shed light on women’s charitable, educational, and social activities outside the home. She notes that some of the most useful information about Italian-American women is presented in novels: Jo Pagano’s Golden Wedding (1943) and Garibaldi LaPolla’s Fire in the Flesh (1931). In the former, Marietta initiates many important decisions, such as to leave the coal mines; in the latter, Agnes is an independent, and frankly sexual, woman, who does not limit herself to a traditional lifestyle. Our final selection is by Betty Boyd Caroli, who points to resources available for further study. For example, the Annual Report of the American immigration commissioner breaks down northern and southern Italian women, after 1910, by age and marital status, literacy, financial condition and travel arrangements. On the other hand, Italian documents define

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12 Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine Palamidessi Moore

women’s status in the society which they left, citing occupations of immigrant women. While we await future studies, one thing is certain: Italian-American women have demonstrated much persistence, resilience, and ingenuity in the multicultural milieu that is America. Over the course of approximately a century, beginning in the 1880s with the Mass Migration, Italian-American women moved from lives of poverty and want into the forefront of very public, very professional lives. They wrote of their experiences in fiction and recorded their lives in memoir. They sought deeper understandings of themselves by looking back to their ancestors’ lives. In a country offering new opportunities, they used their inventiveness and strength. As a group, they can be celebrated for their dedication to family, and ultimately to education and self-expression. In this volume, our hope is that Italian-American women will reflect on the meaning of their journey in the new world while newer immigrant women will reflect on the experiences of those who came before them. In so doing, they may understand the commonality of women’s lives while retaining their own unique culture. We look forward to the further development of women in ways not yet imagined. Notes 1. Italian Americana is a semi-annual historical and cultural journal devoted to the Italian-American experience. Published out of the University of Rhode Island Providence campus, it publishes historical articles, fiction, poetry, and memoirs as well as book reviews. A history of the journal can be found in the Introduction to Wild Dreams: The Best of ‘‘Italian Americana’’ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). The journal also publishes a supplemental website at www.italianamericana .com. 2. Angelo Pellegrini, Immigrant’s Return (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 19.

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Education, Work, and Home Life

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women Childhood, Work, and Marriage elizabeth g. messina 1992

During a period of six months in 1990, I was a participant-observer of some first- and second-generation Italian-American women in New York City. The experience proved to be both rich and rewarding. The thematic content of the life stories of these women, who had lived all of their childhood and adulthood in Little Italy, New York, emerged and unfolded spontaneously during our meetings. Our discussions centered on what these women remembered, thought, and felt about their relationships with their families of origin as well as their remembered work, courtship, sexual, and marital experiences. The selection of topics arose from the group’s evolving relationship with me over time and the dynamics of that process. As I listened to the women at the Mott Street Senior Center, where the interviews took place, it appeared that none of them had been educated in their families of origin to put their feelings into words. Yet, in their interactions in the group, their fluency in the language of feelings and their skill in communicating those feelings to one another were striking. Their statements were powerful, particularly with regard to their mature acceptance of their harsh lives, as well as for how hostile they felt about the many deprivations they had suffered. Their stories are the source of a rich psychological narrative that gives insight into the intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamics of these women. This narrative describes their struggle to make lives for themselves within the parameters of their social class and the sexual, legal, and religious mores set for them by tradition. The participants were nine women then residing in Little Italy and ranging in age from seventy-two to ninety. All except two women were widowed. The participants had all been born into large families, ranging in size 15

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16 Elizabeth G. Messina

from seven to sixteen children, who immigrated to New York. Most of the immigrants came from Naples and Sicily. Of the nine women, two completed high school; two, the third grade; and five, the eighth grade. All of the women worked outside the home intermittently while they were married and raising families. Their children moved out of Little Italy and reside in the suburbs and other boroughs of New York. The narrative histories of these women and the themes that emerged from the data of my observations and interviews will be used to discuss some of the significant features of their psychological lives. These themes were developed by identifying recurring topics and patterns in the data. Theme 1: Work was the center of our experiences. Our parents worked hard, and we learned to work hard in order to survive. Theme 2: Our parents’ marriages worked because there were no other options open to them. Theme 3: When we were growing up, emotional sexual intimacy in our parents’ marital relationship was hidden from view and surrounded by secrecy. Theme 4: We had our own ways of handling our problems with our husbands but we paid dearly for those solutions psychologically. Theme 5: Looking back, we are not too happy with our lives, but we did the best we could with what we had.

I shall present each theme with some quotes from the women with my own comments and analysis that may also reference other relevant psychological studies.

Theme 1 Work was the center of our experiences. Our parents worked hard and we learned to work hard in order to survive. Heroic sacrifice and hard work by parents to ensure their children’s survival was an outstanding characteristic of each woman’s descriptions of her childhood. An ethic of heroic suffering and personal sacrifice dominated the expectations of how one fulfilled family obligations, which, as we will see shortly, began at a very early age. Parental example taught the values of hard work, self-deprivation, and the assumption of multiple social responsibilities. In the words of Anna, a seventy-eight-year-old woman: Parents were so good to the child. They got up at five in the freezing cold to go to work. . . .

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 17 My father was happy just to have children [seven boys and two girls]. He used to say, ‘‘I’m rich in blood.’’ He was so proud of his children and he worked hard to take care of us. He worked for the city. . . . He was up at five every morning. He used to sweat in the summer and freeze in the winter. . . . He loved his family. My father just gloated when he saw the family together. He worked hard to take care of the family. My parents had no complaints. My mother worked hard. Our house was always clean. She was a devoted mother. She cooked, cleaned, pressed shirts, didn’t go anyplace. Pleasure, her pleasure was a big family—that made everything!

(In this and all subsequent quotations from the various participants, the added emphasis in italics is mine.) As these narratives suggest, parents’ and children’s fulfillment was derived from their role in meeting family responsibilities rather than through fulfillment of one’s personal desires or needs. Another elderly narrator reflected: I was a year old when I came here. We lived on Grand Street across from Ferrara’s Bakery. My mother had sixteen children—nine boys, six girls, a set of twins. . . . My father’s mother had twenty boys and one girl. What a regiment! My father was good looking, handsome and hardworking. He made nineteen dollars as a longshoreman and he painted apartments on the side. He had to do something to support all those babies he made! . . . My mother made her own bread, cooked. . . . She worked very hard; we were such a big family. Do ya know what it’s like to cook for such a family?!

In a world where the family’s status is derived by ‘‘signs of family wellbeing which emanates from the household’’ (Femminella and Quadagno 1976, 63) one sees in these narratives that the woman’s role was central to securing this status. Like, the windows! Why did everyone’s windows have to be clean? A lot of people were judged by their window from the outside. People could tell by looking at your windows if you were keeping up with your house inside.

A woman’s power in the domestic sphere inhered from the fact that her work was vital to the survival of the family and the community (Anderson and Zinner 1988). The women seemed to identify with their mothers as the centers of the household. Girls were prepared at young ages to assume and endure many tasks and household responsibilities that prepared them for

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18 Elizabeth G. Messina

their lives of hard work. The strong bond of identification that the girls developed with their mothers not only strengthened their sense of competence but also at times became so complete that they barely acknowledged their own intense industry. When I came home from school and saw the work that needed to be done I wanted to cry, but I got over it. I used to go shopping and take care of the younger kids for my mother. My mother had twelve kids, only nine survived. Some died young. . . . We had no tub and no hot water. We had to boil the water to wash the clothes. I used to hate doing that. We lived, we were happy, we had food! My mother used to sew coats in the house. By the time I was six years old, I was making coats too. They didn’t have a big salary. We appreciated it—their hard work.

There is some indirect evidence from cross-cultural studies (Weisner and Gallimore 1977; Werner 1979; Whiting and Child 1953) that sibling caretaking is an important source of support, stability, and continuity for children who grow up in large families. It might be inferred from the women’s narratives and from the evidence of studies (Werner and Smith 1982) that the assumption of responsibilities as a sibling caretaker may have contributed to the girls’ development of a sense of competence, responsibility, and a form of autonomy so extreme—due to the impossibility of their childhood needs being met—that it precluded the possibility of developing an adult interdependent relationship with their spouses. The narratives also suggest that as children, these girls learned to become cooperative and obedient and to intuitively repress any need that might go beyond the parents’ conception of their needs. This included repression of not only their emotional needs but also their desire for education and occupational mobility. The welfare of the family and the maintenance of its cohesion superseded individual fulfillment. I studied shorthand and typing in high school. I wanted a job as a secretary. My mother said no, you have to go to work with your two older sisters. It was a paper factory down there on Spring Street. . . . My mother didn’t know it, but she sent me to my husband! I met my future husband at work. My boss [foreman] married me.

The family’s survival was dependent upon the labor of all its members; the girls had to leave school to work and contribute to the support of the family. Not only was parental control of the girls maintained through strict discipline, but the girls searched for and found reasons to support their parents’ actions.

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 19 I helped my mother with everything. She was a very hard-working woman; you’ll never find a woman like her. We had to work, or else! If I said anything it was, bing, right across the face. I don’t mind working. When you work, you look younger. . . . My parents always worked the feasts in the streets to make an extra dollar. I remember the San Gennaro feast in 1929. I was ten. My parents let me work with them. ‘‘You’re a working woman now,’’ they told me. . . . By the time I was fifteen, I left school to make ladies’ gloves, drapes and curtains in the factory.

The intensity of these work activities may have also served as a powerful coping tool that enabled the women to develop some immunity to the psychological stresses they endured as children. The research of Gal and Lazarus (1975) suggests that ‘‘activity’’ promotes a sense of mastery and control in addition to discharging energy generated by stressful life situations. The narratives suggest that the harshness and emotional isolation of daily life was soothed, particularly for the women, by their connection to the extended collective network of women in their apartment buildings and neighborhood. Through the mutual support and cooperation of neighbors, many daily burdens were eased. Yeah, I remember those days. No tub, no hot water, but you could visit without calling. Today you have to call first. Neighbors were neighbors then. Doors were always open. . . . We’d say, ‘‘I’m goin’ shoppin’, want me to pick something up for ya?’’ You didn’t have to lock your doors. We looked out for each other.

Cross-cultural studies indicate that regardless of social class and culture, a mother’s warmth and emotional stability toward her children is greater when there are more adults around to assist in their care (Werner and Smith, 1982). These women’s narratives suggest that mothering was embedded within an extensive network of kin and non-kin relations, thus softening the effects of deprivation in their lives. These women’s narratives also indicate that parental affection, combined with strong parental control as well as the presence of an extended network of kin and friends, contributed to the development and maintenance of family stability and cohesiveness. This family cohesiveness, in turn, appeared to be conducive to the development of what Antonovsky (1979) calls a psychological ‘‘sense of coherence,’’ a feeling of confidence and trust in the predictability of one’s environment and that things will work out as reasonably as can be expected.

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20 Elizabeth G. Messina

It is clear from the narratives that the women perceived their parents’ hard work as a deep expression of parental love for them as children. However, parents preoccupied with providing material resources for their children’s survival may have little time or emotional resources available to provide consistent emotional interactions with the children. Emotionally armored at young ages to forbear and accept the hardships of life, these women learned not to burden their parents with many of their feelings or problems. One way in which they won parental love was by being both competent and controlled, emotionally and sexually. In times of stress, children who have been unable to elicit emotionally responsive behavior from adults are prone to continue these patterns into adulthood. As we shall see later in this article, these patterns will affect their attachment behavior with their spouses.

Theme 2 Our parents’ marriages worked because there were no other options open to them. The women’s attitudes toward marriage appear to represent those of the feudal society from which they and their parents had emigrated. It is similar in form to that of the European peasant family. In the hierarchy of that family structure, husbands and wives were workmates bound together to ensure the family’s survival. Similarly, the marriages of these women as well as those of their parents appear to have been based on a mutual system of obligations with little or no expectation of emotional intimacy and sexual fulfillment. We married at our own level. This is very important to a successful marriage. Marriages were successful because they had to be. . . . In those days men didn’t have the time or money to fool around. . . . Those marriages years ago were solid. [My parents] were matched. My cousin introduced them. A short romance. You got married; that was it. You didn’t have to be in love. Everything was in the home. Divorces were shameful.

Historically in the European peasant family structure, the more immediate practical considerations of taking on the roles of wife and mother through marriage had ascendancy over considerations of emotional or sexual intimacy in the marital relationship. The narratives suggest that some marriages were pragmatically arranged and essential to survival: My father was in the war and arranged my marriage to a man I never loved. Non avevo amore. [I wasn’t in love.] We were poor and not in love but we married right away. There wasn’t anyone better at the time.

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 21

Theme 3 When we were growing up, emotional and sexual intimacy in our parents’ marital relationships was hidden from our view and surrounded by secrecy. Romantic expectations of emotional fulfillment in the marital relationship were not aspired to and, therefore, not cultivated (Poster 1980). The picture that emerges in the women’s narratives of parental marital relations suggests that gestures of physical affection between the parents in front of the children, as well as verbal expressions of emotional or sexual desire, was strictly taboo. I never once saw my father kiss my mother. We always joked that Mom had eighteen children and had never been kissed! . . . No, everything was hidden; we were ashamed. We never seen them, so discreet, no kisses. God forbid, you cursed.

sub-theme Because sexual activity was never spoken of openly in our homes, we had few, if any, opportunities to develop our knowledge of sexual and emotional intimacy. It was so backwards; it wasn’t funny. They had all those kids. They were ashamed to talk to us. They fed you, they sheltered you, but they didn’t talk. We were so green; we didn’t know about marriage. . . . Everything was a secret. No curse words, no sex. How could you enjoy sex? Everything was a mystery. . . . Everything was private. Not even the word pregnant was used. [Instead] they’d say ‘‘in the family way.’’ They were strict that way.

The taboos in the family surrounding talk about sex appeared to generate in the children a collective fear, and ignorance, of even the most elementary physiological facts of the sex act, pregnancy, and birth: My mother never talked about nothin’. . . . In those days you had your babies at home. You know we believed her [my mother] when she told us: the midwife brings the babies. My mother would say: ‘‘Now go upstairs to your Aunt Fran’s. Rosa Maria [the midwife] is coming and she’s going to bring us another baby.’’ I’d see Rosa Maria comin’ up the stairs with a suitcase and remember thinking to myself, ‘‘But how can a baby fit in such a small bag?’’ But I believed my mother when she told me that Rosa Maria brings the babies to the house. . . . We didn’t know anything [about sex]. . . . Where

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22 Elizabeth G. Messina were you going to learn? . . . We didn’t know how the children were made! . . . Every two years I had a child. Can you imagine my husband wanted twelve! . . . only one son died.

The narrators reflect their mothers’ view of sex; the mothers transmitted to their daughters the idea that sex is primarily a matter of procreative duty rather than fun or pleasure. The birds and the bees? No, you never discuss sex with your mother . . . the subject was closed. Never spoke about it. Having babies was her duty!

Sexual repression of a woman’s impulses prior to marriage was the norm: only marriage legalized and sanctified her sexuality. The woman who engaged in any independent sexual activity outside of marriage was considered a whore. Consequently, southern Italian culture encouraged women to emulate the feminine ideal of the Madonna in her roles as virgin and mother (Warner 1976). The Madonna’s most outstanding quality is her asexuality. She became a mother without becoming a wife (Parsons 1969). The Virgin’s renunciation of sexuality infuses maternity with a repudiation of erotic impulses and, as such, a woman’s culturally proscribed satisfaction was to be derived primarily from her nurturing, caretaking, and servicing roles. In this context, woman’s sexual fulfillment is not a consideration. It appears that the women internalized their mothers’ cultural ideal of the asexual Virgin in their roles as wives and mothers. The narratives suggest that the women internalized implicit parental prohibition of all sexual activity outside of marriage. The wish to not incur parental disapproval and disappointment was an internally powerful psychological force that motivated women to inhibit and repress their instinctual life. Two women’s comments, below, exemplify this desire to avoid parental disapproval or disappointment. The only reason we didn’t have sex before we got married is because we didn’t want to hurt our parents. They were so good and worked so hard; how could we hurt them? Oh, no! You never talked to your mother about any of this. I was no kid when I got married; I was twenty-eight. Like I said, I never did nothin’, like having sex, before I got married, because I didn’t want to hurt my parents. And, it’s a good thing I didn’t do it before. Look how fast I got caught. In one month I was pregnant. Imagine if I had done it . . . . Men had a lot of respect for the women they dated in those days. They wouldn’t try anything.

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 23

Mothers appeared to be unable to discuss any aspect of their daughter’s sexuality with them. Even the onset of menstruation appeared to be experienced by many of the women as an abrupt and puzzling event that aroused feelings of danger, anxiety, and shame. We never told our mothers when we first got our period. I remember I was at the San Gennaro feast; I didn’t know what ‘‘it’’ was. I was bleeding. I went home and told my mother: ‘‘Ma, I’m bleedin’ from the bottom.’’ She got red in the face and started yelling, ‘‘Which boy touched you; tell me who it is; I’ll kill him!’’ I kept cryin’ and tellin’ her, ‘‘But Ma, no one touched me!’’ Finally, she listened and stopped yellin’ but she couldn’t talk about ‘‘it.’’ I was only ten and a half years old. She sent me next door and told me to talk to my aunt. Aunt Josie got a diaper and showed me how to fold it. In those days there was no Kotex. She told me to be sure to keep clean, to change it every few hours and wash it real good and put a clean one on so I don’t smell. ‘‘Everybody bleeds.’’ That’s all my mother said when I had my first menstruation. . . . I remember the clean sheets were torn into strips. We rinsed them in cold water. We never talked about it.

The contingencies of biological necessity, interwoven with sexual taboos, appeared to create a shame-generated system of internalized rules and boundaries that governed everyday life inside and outside the home. It used to be when we were young, everyone was always watching us. People talked and whispered if they saw you with a boy. You were never free no matter where you were. Even at work you couldn’t talk to a man. They were always warning us about boys: ‘‘If you let them touch you, you’ll be given a beating!’’ Don’t lift up your dress or go with boys; that’s all my mother said.

Not surprisingly, the women carried into their marriage relationships the norms learned in the parental home. The parents’ perceptions of natural instinctual life were consciously and unconsciously carried into the relationship with the woman’s marital partner. The narratives reveal that these women were well acquainted with the duties, and very few of the pleasures, of conjugal relations. As a result of the excessive sexual repression required of these women prior to marriage and the imperative that they bear many children in marriage, many of them became mothers without ever experiencing orgasmic and sexual pleasure.

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24 Elizabeth G. Messina Sensations? Who had sensations? You were always worried you’re going to get pregnant. Who could enjoy? After we had the change of life, we were free, but then we’re too tired to do it! You work, you come home, you cook, who wanted to? Thank God I had a man who didn’t bother me too much!

This attitude toward sexual relations is strikingly similar to that of the peasant women interviewed by Ann Cornelisen (1977) in Lucania, Italy. They, too, perceived sexual relations with their husbands as ‘‘something necessary, as duty, as trial, but not passion’’ (20). Women didn’t know a climax. Always kids between them, in the bed, outside the bed. They [the couples] were caught [meaning, ‘‘they became pregnant’’] so fast they used to sneak it. Then it was all over!

Despite the religious and legal prohibition against abortion, the narratives reveal that abortions were an alternative if a husband arranged or agreed to it. Abortions were performed by midwives and physicians under circumstances that threatened the women’s lives. Several of the narratives illustrated this. I had an abortion. My husband didn’t want it [the baby]. He couldn’t afford it. He arranged it; he sent me to a doctor on the West Side. He scraped it. Thank God, I had no problems! Everything went nice! My mother had this preservative. . . . It worked if you didn’t want to keep a child . . . but my husband wouldn’t let me use it. I was pregnant every fifteen months! . . . I asked the doctor what I could do to slow things down. He told me to divide the beds, sleep apart. Eventually, I refused my husband all the time. You know it was illegal, but there was the midwife. People in the neighborhood knew about her. My sister had it [an abortion] done and she hemorrhaged badly. She went to the hospital emergency room for help. She told them she fell. You had to be careful; they were always checking up. Detectives came into the emergency room and questioned her, but she stuck to her story; she didn’t squeal . . . but the poison needle almost killed her.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the psychological conflicts engendered by the experiences described thus far resulted in marriages that were built on attachments that were so unconsciously and intrinsically conflicted, there

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was little opportunity for the marital pair to develop sexually or emotionally fulfilling relationships.

Theme 4 We had our own ways of handling our problems with our husbands, but we paid dearly for those solutions psychologically. Because of the early link between affection and dependency, subsequent attachments often reflect the child’s developmental history of love and affection (Parsons 1969). The study of the socioemotional development of infants (Ainsworth 1969, 1979; Ainsworth et al. 1978; Bowlby 1958, 1969) suggests that an individual’s early attachment relationships provide a working model of the world that lays the foundation for future interpersonal interactions. Thus the adult attachment acts as a continuation of the attachment system begun in infancy. The quality of this early attachment enables the adult to establish a variety of relationships across the life span. A child whose attachment figure is responsive and caring during periods of distress, and lovingly administers to the infant’s physical demands, may provide the infant with a working model of trust and safety. Thus far the narratives have suggested that in the women’s families of origin, their parents’ resources were directed toward meeting the child’s and the family’s survival requirements as well as restricting the availability of parental resources for the cultivation of the child’s inner emotional life. While basic needs for physical care and affection appear to have been met, the women’s early adaptation required that they not endanger their parents emotional equilibrium. They learned not to express any feelings of inadequacy or discomfort. In a desire to maintain a positive regard for the parents—on whom their survival depended—they learned to deny the reality of many of their childhood desires and feelings. Unacceptable feelings, including aggression related to longings (sexual and emotional), rejections, and deprivations, were subjected to an enforced silence, practiced by their parents and probably their parents before them. This pattern of enforced silence and nonverbalized emotions was replicated later in marital relationships. Many of the women traced their husbands’ inability to be emotionally intimate, loving, and affectionate to developmental deficits suffered by their husbands in their families of origin. The women theorize that their husbands’ parents had too many children and too little time to be openly affectionate with all of them. So, they reasoned, parents chose not to be openly affectionate with any of them.

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26 Elizabeth G. Messina Years ago our parents had no time for us. That’s the way they [our husbands] were raised. . . . Yeah, they had thirteen, eighteen children. Who are they going to kiss first? They probably figured it was better not to kiss any of them. Someone would always be left out.

While the flood of disappointment that the women felt about their husbands was put into words in the narratives, they describe marriages that were dominated by emotional silence, sexual confusion, and unnamable feelings. As they viewed it, their husbands were not educated to express feelings verbally. This subsequently interfered with their ability to put feelings into words in their marriages: You know what the problem is, it’s a shame really. He never shows affection. If I came over to my husband and put my hand on his shoulder or touched his face just to show him my feelings, it always meant ‘‘the bed.’’ He doesn’t know how to show love or appreciation. You know what it’s like; you don’t exist in the house. You’d think once in a while he’d compliment me on a good meal, no! You sit down at the table and he never says, ‘‘Maria, what a good meal!’’ or, ‘‘You did a great job!’’ No, you know what he says when I tell him that once in a while he could tell me he likes something? He says, ‘‘You see the dish empty; that’s the compliment! You don’t see the chef coming out asking the customers to thank him. The empty dish says it all. It’s the best compliment you can give a cook.’’

The interactional patterns of the husband are such that feelings and thoughts are not put into language. From his perspective, his wife should understand from his actions that the meal was satisfying; words are unnecessary. The husband is incapable of perceiving the uniqueness of his wife’s needs apart from his own. This precludes the possibility that this conflict can be resolved. As a result of early childhood deficits, both husband and wife were locked into separate, psychological prisons, leaving them illequipped to meet each other’s needs in a maturationally progressive manner. Not surprisingly, the women did not recognize how their own unmet maturational needs may have contributed to an emotionally disappointing marital experience. From a psychoanalytic perspective (Kirman, 1989), people who marry are looking for an idealized version of their parent, but they usually find a version of the parent they actually had. Their marital disappointments notwithstanding, it appears that many of the women developed strong attachments to their spouses. Bowlby (1969,

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1980) suggests that in the heterosexual bond, a person may be seeking the kind of security one experienced as a child with one’s parents. These women provided ‘‘care’’ for their marital partners through learned behaviors that mirrored their life experiences and replicated their early experiences with their caretakers as children. The women were left with a working model of the world (derived from their interactions with their attachment figures) in which individuals do not recognize or respond to most of their emotional needs. As in their interactions with their parents, nurturing and food-giving behaviors appeared to have dominated their interactions with their husband and children. Such patterns suggest that needs are to be gratified and met through non-verbal action-oriented behavior When this becomes a working model in which needs are to be anticipated and met by the caregiver without putting one’s needs into words, then conflict and disappointment are most likely to ensue. For some women, another source of marital conflict is the incorporation of the double standard into the marriage relationship, contributing to the maintenance of a power imbalance in which women are required to take major responsibility for preserving the marriage bond and managing the risks of the husband’s sexual infidelity and emotional abandonment. The husband’s legendary right to be unfaithful is experienced by the woman as a source of deep humiliation and betrayal. I was young and I believed a man. It is only with experience that I realize how things really are. ‘‘Tutti sono traditori!’’ [They are all traitors!] Men, before they marry, treat women like a god; everything is nice; they are affectionate and say nice words. When they marry, everything changes. Non sono fidele, sono traditori! [They’re unfaithful; they’re traitors!] You know what ‘‘va’ fa’ in culo’’ means? [‘‘Up yours!’’] That’s what we told our husbands without saying it if they bothered us.

The incorporation of a double standard into the relationship can lead to a marital pattern in which the wish for revenge becomes greater than the hope of being loved. When a person suffers repeated humiliations and is unable to influence or change the situation, that person and those around her suffer the weight of accumulated repressed anger. Recent studies (Leiblum, 1988; Rosen, 1988) have found that the emotional life of couples shapes their sexual life. These studies show that depression and anger are particularly devastating to erotic desires. What appears to be a loss of desire had often been found to be a disguised form of anger or part of a power

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struggle. Repressed rage creates hatred and fantasies of revenge which can interfere with keeping alive loving feelings. A wife may conceal her own wish for revenge on her husband by torturing him psychologically in her withdrawal from him sexually. The acting out of revenge can become a substitute for experiencing the grief and loss that both partners feel when their emotional needs remain unmet. In this context, the wish for revenge expressed indirectly throughout the narratives may be viewed as a desperate attempt to compensate for the emotionally wounding experiences created in the marriage.

Theme 5 Looking back, we are not too happy with our lives but we did the best we could with what we had. As many of the women looked back on their domestic and working lives they seemed to be seeing with new eyes just how demanding their roles were, particularly when they compared their lives to those of women today. How did we do it in those days? No help from nobody. One in the stomach, one trailing behind, one climbing the stairs; we shopped, cooked and cleaned like that! Today they got everything: window washers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers; and, they’re always tired!

Some of the women even seemed to be acknowledging the oppressiveness of their lives and of roles not freely chosen. Years ago, how did we do it? What did we know? What did our mothers know? I cooked on Sunday after my husband died for my daughter and grandchildren. Now I cook for my brother and I hate it. Can you explain that? I get disgusted and tired. I don’t even like to cook for myself. How we did it, went to work, went shopping, bring stuff up to the house before we went to work!

The narratives suggest that marriage was often a source of inescapable suffering that provided little opportunity for the development of love and affection. In the words of one woman: If you write a book, tell everyone, ‘‘Only have two children. La Sacra Famiglia [The Holy Family]! Matrimony is made for children. It has no other use, no other purpose.’’ My parents lived in misery. I lived in misery. I would have liked to go to school, but there was no opportunity!

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 29 . . . Today I would divorce. Before marriage, there is love and affection. After marriage, maledizione [damn it all]! If a woman isn’t perfect, the man makes her miserable. No, today I would divorce. Should I suffer and be miserable or suffer and be free? What do you think?

Some of the women seemed, psychologically, able to rise above the constriction of their life experiences and express an appreciation for the greater sexual freedom of women today. Today virgins are out of style! If they’re still virgins, they shouldn’t be. Believe me. I’m Catholic, but you should try it first to see if you like it . . . You don’t know a man until you sleep with him. I knew my husband for seven years before we married, but I didn’t know him [sexually] until the night of our wedding. Finally, women have liberta` [freedom]! I’m old, but if I were young, I’d do as I feel. Il Dio ha creao il sesso, perche, no usare? Si non usare, e studpida! [God created sex, why not enjoy it? If you don’t, you’re stupid!]

These nine women of Mott Street appear to have developed a resourcefulness and inner strength early in life that enabled them to meet the challenges of raising families while working and managing households in a culture that granted them little opportunity to develop as sovereign individuals. Their sense of power seems rooted in their awareness that they did not survive their experiences by chance alone: they developed a sense of selfcompetence and pragmatism through the early assumption of family responsibilities. This helped them build the high level of tolerance and emotional self-control necessary for survival. They earned their psychological hardiness by enduring the many adversities of their childhood and adult lives. They were courageous and strong women who fulfilled their familial duties with a sense of purpose and commitment. They identified with the strength of their mothers as ‘‘centers of households’’ but also expressed discontent with their traditional marriage roles. The psychological accommodations that were necessary for survival over the centuries required that many parts of the ‘‘self ’’ remain hidden and undeveloped. While their ability to be strong, pragmatic and self-sacrificing enabled them to survive, they were prevented from experiencing and coming to terms with many of their emotional desires, vulnerabilities and sexual needs in relationships. Like the participants of this study, we all carry, in the words of Alice Miller (1984), ‘‘bits of our unmastered past’’ into our adulthoods. I would add that we also carry within us, consciously and unconsciously, bits of the

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unmastered pasts of our parents and grandparents. If there is a lesson to be learned from the narratives of the lives of these women it is this: through making the unmastered past conscious, we become free psychologically to meet the developmental challenges of integrating aspects of our feminine identity which have been split and dissociated for centuries. Works Cited Ainsworth, M. D. S. 1969. ‘‘Object Relations, Dependency and Attachment: A Theoretical Review of the Infant-Mother Relationship.’’ Child Development 40:969–1025. ———. 1977. ‘‘Attachment Theory and Its Utility in Cross-Cultural Research.’’ In Culture and Infancy: Variations in the Human Experience, edited by P. H. Leiderman, S. R. Tulkin, and A. Rosenfeld, 49–68. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1979. ‘‘Attachment as Related to Mother-Infant Interaction.’’ In Advances in the Study of Behavior, edited by J. S. Rosenblatt, R. A. Hinde, C. Beer, and M. Busnel, 9:1–51. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1982. ‘‘Attachment: Retrospect and Prospect.’’ In The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior, edited by C. M. Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde, 3–30. New York: Basic Books. Ainsworth, M. D. S., M. C. Blehar, E. Waters, E., and S. Wall. 1978. Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Anderson, B., and J. Zinner. 1988. A History of Their Own. New York: Harper and Row. Antonovsky, A. 1979. Health, Stress and Coping: New Perspectives on Mental and Physical Well-Being. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Bowlby, J. 1958. ‘‘The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother.’’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39:350–73. ———. 1969. Attachment. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1980 Attachment and Loss, vol. 2. New York: Basic Books. Cornelisen, Ann. 1977. Women of the Shadows. New York: Vantage Books. Femminella, F.X., and I. Quadagno. 1976. ‘‘The Italian American Family.’’ In Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations, edited by C. Mendel and Habenstein, 61–88. New York: Elsevier Press. Gal, R., and R. S. Lazarus. 1975. ‘‘The Role of Activity in Anticipating and Confronting Stressful Situations.’’ Journal of Human Stress 1:4–20. Kirman, William J. 1989. ‘‘Revenge and Accommodation in the Family.’’ Modern Psychoanalysis 14.1:89–96. Leiblum, Sandra, ed. 1988. Sexual Desire Disorder. New York: Guilford Press. Miller, Alice. 1984. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books. Parsons, Ann. 1969. Belief, Magic and Anomie: Essays in Psychological Anthropology. New York: Free Press.

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Narratives of Nine Italian-American Women 31 Poster, Mark. 1980. Critical Theory of the Family. New York: Seaburg Press. Rosen, Raymond, ed. 1988. Patterns of Sexual Arousal. New York: Guilford Press. Warner, Marina. 1976. Alone of All Her Sex. New York: Vintage Books. Weisner, T. S., and R. Gallimore. 1977. ‘‘My Brother’s Keeper: Child and Sibling Caretaking.’’ Current Anthropology 12:169–90. Werner, E. 1979. Cross-Cultural Child Development: A View from the Planet Earth. Monterey, Calif.: Brooks/Cole. Werner, E., and R. Smith. 1982. Vulnerable but Invincible: A Longitudinal Study of Resilient Children and Youth. New York: McGraw Hill. Whiting, B. 1963. Six Cultures: Studies of Childrearing. New York: Wiley Press. Whiting, J. W. M., and I. R. Child. 1953. Child Training and Personality: A CrossCultural Study. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

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‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’ The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York lorett treese 1990

It was 1943, wartime, when the Italo-American Women’s Club of Williamsburg staged a homegrown play set in 1938 depicting the then gloomy situation of the first-generation female Italian immigrant. Their play was entitled Why, It’s Mother. In the first scene, leading lady Mrs. Passarella ruefully hears her grown daughters inform her they’re going out again—this time to a conference. ‘‘What’s that you mean, conference?’’ Mrs. Passarella asks. ‘‘Oh, dear, it would be so difficult to make you understand,’’ daughter Amelia replies. ‘‘Besides, you wouldn’t be interested.’’

Yet in the course of the play, Mrs. Passarella is transformed. Her English vastly improves, she begins subscribing to Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping, and she cooks wholesome American meals that cure her husband’s hypertension. She learns first aid and takes up interior decorating. Her previously neglectful family is delighted—once they get over their shock. What miracle creates this thoroughly modern woman with just a trace of an Italian accent? One thing the play lacks is subtlety. The credit all goes to Mrs. Passarella’s recent membership in her local Italian Mothers’ Club.1 The establishment of Italian Mothers’ Clubs was a short-lived twentiethcentury phenomenon. These clubs filled a need for many first-generation Italian immigrant women. The structure and mores of the Italian family isolated these women both from each other and from their American neighbors. They had little idea how to use the resources open to them in America and their ignorance tended to distance them from their own children. Many recognized something lacking and lamented their loneliness but did little about it themselves. In a scene in Why, It’s Mother, Mrs. Passarella 32

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glumly fingers her Mother’s Day gifts in an empty apartment. The gifts are symbols that her family loves her and respects her role in the family structure, but this does nothing to alleviate her isolation or bring a friend to the door.2 Various United States institutions intent on Americanizing immigrants attempted to reach out to women and children. The Italian Mothers’ Clubs established in New York in the 1930s and 1940s were examples of this trend. Many of these clubs were organized by Elba Farabegoli, an energetic second-generation Italian woman. The clubs touched off a brief period of synergy in which Italian women used the clubs both to learn American customs and to preserve their own culture while they willingly made the transition from Italian women living in America to Italian-American women. The activities of the various clubs offer insight into the nature and mentality of immigrant women in general as well as the specific experience of first-generation Italian immigrant women. They show ‘‘why it’s mother’’ who had a particularly tough time adapting to a new world. To understand the development of Italian Mothers’ Clubs, one must understand a woman’s role in the family structure of southern Italy. Virtually every historian who has studied the subject agrees that the Italian family was the only meaningful social institution in the Mezzogiorno culture from which most southern Italian immigrants came. A village was just a place, a government could rise or fall, but the family was constant.3 Italian families were nuclear families headed by the father or eldest male. One’s family also included one’s in-laws, other nuclear families to whom one was related by marriage. Among these people, there was solidarity; there was little more than distrust for anyone else. Mezzogiorno Italians felt no concept of community, because the family met all one’s social needs. Private associations with those outside the family were not encouraged and the American concept of friendship was unknown.4 Relationships with those unrelated by blood or marriage could only be formed through comparaggio or godparenthood. A person became a godparent through a ritualized series of steps that might have little to do with the actual baptism of a child. A godparent was considered technically a member of one’s family and therefore within the charmed circle of people one could trust.5 A girl born into a Mezzogiorno family quickly learned she had little importance as an individual. Her father and brothers had authority over her; her mother took precedence. From a very early age, she would be separated from the opposite sex and all her actions would be closely supervised. Her

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mother would carefully train her to become a future wife and mother herself. She would be taught that a wife’s faithfulness, loyalty, and obedience to her husband were of prime importance. However, she would be kept ignorant of even the most basic information about sex; that was for her husband to teach her. She was considered well educated if she knew her society’s rules and behaved accordingly. Her family would arrange her marriage to a bachelor who could further the family’s interests. Of course, she had no say in the matter, as a well-brought-up girl could hardly be expected to know any men in her village.6 Historians dealing with the Italian family also generally agree that Mezzogiorno culture was ‘‘patriarchal.’’ They disagree as to exactly what this means. Leonard Covello and Joseph Lopreato both contended that the family was not strictly patriarchal and did allow wives some say in family decision-making. Richard Gambino wrote that while the father was the ‘‘head’’ of the family, the mother was its ‘‘center.’’ Lydio Tomasi suggested that the family was ‘‘father-dominated’’ but also ‘‘mother-oriented’’ in that a wife implemented and therefore interpreted her husband’s wishes. In a more psychological study, Andrew Rolle wrote that the Italian mother reacted by courting her children’s loyalty and creating a family structure he described as ‘‘neurotic.’’ Feminists have recently criticized all these historians on the grounds that they never fully examined or analyzed the Italian woman’s point of view.7 How women felt about the Italian family structure, particularly once they left the Mezzogiorno and could view it in perspective, can be interpreted from some of their own statements. Doris Weatherfield studied immigrant women from various cultures and found that women from virtually every ethnic group were making negative comments about marriage in the period between 1840 and 1930. She wrote that by the 1930s, first-generation Italian women sometimes expressed an interest in visiting Italy, but never in returning to live in the Mezzogiorno. One Italian woman mentioned that in Italy, ‘‘the woman she works like the jackass.’’8 A female social worker named Marie Hall Ets recorded the autobiographical anecdotes of a loquacious Italian immigrant named Rosa. Although Rosa was from northern Italy, she followed Italian tradition by being consistently loyal to both her husbands. Her first husband beat and terrorized both her and their children, but her second husband was a much more affectionate and caring man. Even so, she felt better off when he died. As a widow, she said, she had ‘‘no man to scold me and make me do this and stop me to do that . . . I have it like heaven—I’m my own boss.’’9

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Clearly, an Italian upbringing and an Italian marriage that created another Italian family did not give a woman much room for personal growth. In Italy, this was the norm and might have gone unnoticed. In America it led to feelings of discontent and perhaps desire for change even among women who enjoyed their roles of wife and mother. Family historians agree that besides cooking, housework, and child care, an Italian wife’s duties extended to managing the family finances and arranging marriages for the children. Once Italian immigrants came to America, women were quickly divested of their ability to arrange marriages. Single men formed the first groups of Italian immigrants. While their own families in Italy may have supplied their brides, those brides were less able to perform the same service for their offspring. Although Italians preferred to settle among people from their own ancestral villages or regions, women no longer had a lifelong knowledge of all the eligible marriage candidates and were less equipped to pick spouses for their children.10 Today, we might consider a woman’s management of the household finances an important task that would give her considerable control over the family. However, while Italian women purchased household necessities and managed the budget, whether their authority extended to making major decisions regarding family resources is questionable. When Rosa’s second husband wanted to invest the bulk of their savings in what Rosa considered a dubious venture, she tearfully protested, but she also handed over the cash. Rosa might have been the family bookkeeper but her husband was the CFO.11 In general, first-generation Italian women worked hard, with lots of responsibility, but they had little real authority over their families. Yet Italians themselves respected a woman’s role and usually described it in somewhat romantic terms. Even Elba Farabegoli stated, ‘‘The mother is the family’s inspiration and guide.’’12 Historian Richard Alba described Italian immigrants as ‘‘more greenhorn than most.’’ They isolated themselves from the larger society and settled in Little Italies that shielded them for a time from American customs and mores. These Little Italies were themselves separated into blocks and tenements peopled by Italians from the same village or region. Historians use the term campanilismo to describe this settlement pattern. In Italian campanile means bell tower. The familiar sound of a village church bell could only be heard by those in the immediate area. Campanilismo refers to an extreme provincialism in one’s trend of thought. In America, campanilismo isolated

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people with the same manners and mores not only from Americans but from other Italians as well.13 Rosa described Italian clannishness when she said, ‘‘The people from Toscana, they’re not good like the people from Lombardia. But they’re not bad like the people from Sicilia.’’14 New York attracted the greatest number of Italian immigrants and served as a point from which many departed to other places in America. New York had several Little Italies, each one a hodgepodge of clustered people trying to reproduce the atmosphere of their village at home. In 1919, Robert Foerster described the Italians of New York as ‘‘unschooled, scattered, mobile [and] sundered by regional rivalries.’’ About ten years later, social worker Caroline Ware studied Greenwich Village. She found that blocks no longer consistently housed people from a single province but that Italians still retained their suspicions of those from other regions.15 Like other immigrant groups, Italians established mutual aid associations and fraternal organizations to provide uninsured workers in hazardous occupations with health and death benefits. These grew into lodges that offered a variety of entertainments. In establishing the organizations, Italian immigrants seemed to be following the lead of other ethnic groups in America. Yet such associations had also existed in the more industrialized north of Italy as well as the agricultural south. Their members generally included the village elite who used them to extend the resources of family and kinship networks.16 Italians managed to infuse even these organizations with campanilismo. The organizations were frequently named after the patron saint of a particular town and membership might be limited to those who had been born there. More ‘‘broadly based’’ organizations might be open to immigrants from a single region or province. In 1910, between one and two thousand such organizations existed, depending on who was doing the counting. In her study of Greenwich Village, Ware commented that no single person in New York could name all the Italian organizations in the city, though one newspaper was then making attempts to compile a list.17 Other ethnic groups consolidated their various associations under umbrella organizations. Italians tried to do the same thing, especially once World War I gave them a more nationalistic point of view. Italian umbrella organizations such as the Sons of Italy were founded, but the spirit of campanilismo lingered among Italians and prevented their umbrella organizations from ever being very effective. At the beginning of the 1930s, Ware found that membership in Italian associations in general was declining.18

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This brief interest in forming organizations had almost no effect on Italian women. In Italy, women had been welcome to serve food at association benefits but had acted more as spectators than participants at functions. In America women at first were banned from fraternal organizations. When they were allowed to become members (for the purpose of acquiring insurance), their participation was limited and did nothing to take them out of the house or give them opportunities to expand their horizons.19 One American experience that might have changed the lives of Italian women was their need to earn a wage. Their husbands’ work was often seasonal in nature and rarely brought in enough money to support a family. Necessity forced Italian wives into the workplace. Italian women sometimes earned wages that accounted for nearly half of the family income. But their status as wage earners failed to change their role in the family structure, eliminate their isolation, or Americanize them very much. In Italy a wife did not work outside the home, and in America, Italians did not admit it when she did. Neither husbands nor wives themselves defined what women did as ‘‘work.’’ Their status as wage earners was always considered a temporary situation. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, who studied this phenomenon, called it evidence of ‘‘continuing paternal control’’ of the male over the Italian family.20 As a result, Italian women never took much advantage of the opportunity to band together in labor unions. In 1919, Julia Poyntz, education director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, wrote that Italian women were still ‘‘suffering from that age long seclusion of women in the home.’’ Despite their work experience, Ware added, ‘‘Many of the older Italian women virtually never left their own blocks or went farther from their homes than to the market and to church.’’21 But within the home itself, things were changing. While Italian parents tried to retain the culture of the Mezzogiorno in an urban setting, their children were being influenced by American schools. According to Foerster in 1919, American schools acted as ‘‘a powerful instrument for adaptation’’ that Italian parents lacked. At school, children were exposed to American concepts of democracy and individualism plus different mores of courtship and marriage, all drawing them emotionally away from Old World ways.22 This created what historians and sociologists have termed intergenerational conflict, a trend that has generally been studied from the point of view of the second generation. Nothing has been written about the reaction of isolated Italian mothers and what they might have experienced as their children became increasingly American. However, the author of Why, It’s

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Mother was an Italian woman who had lived through the pain of this very experience. In the play, Mrs. Passarella’s daughters depart to pursue their activities, leaving their mother alone with a pile of mending. As she sighs and stares at it, an offstage narrator describes her feelings. Somehow of late, she had been feeling like an outsider in her own home. Her husband and children seem to belong to another world . . . a world which is just outside her door.

That ‘‘world’’ might as easily have been another planet. The first-generation Italian woman had no vehicle to take her there.23 Various American institutions, intent on their own purposes, would provide such a vehicle for Italian women. And Italian women, increasingly dissatisfied with their isolation and their subordinate roles, would be ready to take advantage of the opportunities they offered. In the 1890s, settlement houses began appearing in the urban slums. Social workers ‘‘settled’’ among immigrants both to teach and to learn from them. They offered educational opportunities that could help Americanize immigrants. Americans had long considered themselves individuals, and social workers reached out to women and children as fellow individuals, something women and children had not experienced in the typical Italian family.24 Caroline Ware described a movement to get women out of their houses and into clubs. She alluded to the existence of Italian Mothers’ Clubs in New York by 1930. Many women were receptive to joining such organizations. In Chicago, in an earlier period, one social worker asked Rosa to encourage other women in her neighborhood to join a mothers’ club. Rosa commented, ‘‘Those women didn’t know what it was, but they wanted to come anyway.’’25 In a study of Italian Mothers’ Clubs founded in Chicago during the twentieth century, Mary Ellen Batinich described an evolution in the control of these clubs which she linked to the transformation of Italian immigrant women in the same period. Italian women in the first decade of the twentieth century came to club meetings but were merely passive attendees. By the 1930s, they were planning their own activities, sometimes to the chagrin of social workers. During the 1940s, membership declined as a broader perspective among Italian women made them ready to take their places in American organizations such as the PTA.26 Many Italian Mothers’ Clubs in New York were sponsored by the YWCA, an organization that had been established after the Civil War. Trading on a spirit of reform and progressivism, the YWCA decided to expand

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its membership to immigrant women after the great migrations from southern and Eastern Europe began. During World War I, when disaffected immigrants seemed a threat to America, the YWCA decided to help Americanize these women, thus ensuring the permanent loyalty of immigrant families. The YWCA established its international institutes to serve the special needs of immigrant women and children. Their international institutes quickly multiplied from six in 1915 to forty-eight in 1923.27 At first, the international institutes sent social workers to the homes of girls who had arrived in America alone to check on their environment and welfare. Later, they expanded their activities and offered classes in English, American customs, and American citizenship. Like the settlement houses, they never criticized Old World culture, but they did contact women individually and encouraged them to identify personal goals and needs. Once they defined intergenerational conflict as a potential problem, the international institutes tried to become gentle mediators between the first and second generations, interpreting various aspects of an immigrant parent’s culture (such as folk songs and folk dances) to his or her children.28 Following this tradition, in 1934, New York’s Uptown YWCA asked Elba Farabegoli to organize an Italian Mothers’ Club. She was paid a salary, though it was hoped the clubs could eventually be supported by members’ contributions.29 Farabegoli was a second-generation Italian woman but her life was very different from those of the women she’d be working with. Farabegoli had been born in 1909 and had attended New York public schools until she returned to Italy with her parents for an extended stay. She graduated from an Italian teachers’ college in 1928 and returned to New York to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in education at New York University followed by additional studies at the New York School of Social Work. So much education might have made her one of the most atypical Italian women in New York. Her career made her even more unusual. In 1931, she had organized an Italian folk dance group, later known as the Coro d’Italia, to foster knowledge of Italian folk songs and dances. An educated, unmarried, second-generation career woman might have had little in common with a cloistered Italian immigrant woman, but Farabegoli obviously had a charisma that endeared her to future club members. Even after she left New York, friends from the clubs continued to correspond, warmly addressing her as mia cara (my dear) among other affectionate terms.30 Farabegoli approached a local school principal named Angelo Patri for the names of mothers in the area. She then canvassed door to door, urging

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them in Italian to attend her first meeting. She described their initial reactions as ‘‘timid.’’ These women had no experience with organizations and tended to shy away even from civic organizations like the PTA. Farabegoli’s first meeting was attended by only fourteen very skeptical Italian mothers.31 Farabegoli persisted and her efforts eventually resulted in the establishment of five more mothers’ clubs. each with scores of members. Italian Mothers’ Clubs were eventually founded in Italian communities in Greenwich Village, Harlem, Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Henry Street. Farabegoli’s mothers’ clubs were initially designed to open the door and get Italian women out of their apartments and into a variety of educational, social, and recreational activities. In one speech, Farabegoli described the first-generation Italian mother as ‘‘the one member of the family who has the most difficulties and who has the least opportunities to enter into the spirit of American life.’’ A brochure issued by one of her clubs expressed the same sentiment more melodramatically: ‘‘Families in the tenements need to get out of their small, dark rooms both for human friendliness and to learn.’’ Besides giving them something to do, Farabegoli’s clubs employed parliamentary procedures and allowed more ambitious women to pursue leadership roles within the organizations. Farabegoli contended this would make them aware of ‘‘their proper place in the general scheme of our daily lives.’’32 The YWCA also wanted the clubs to Americanize Italian women. One of the clubs’ purpose statements expressed the hope that clubs would make the women ‘‘an integral part of American life.’’ A paper entitled ‘‘Why Work with Women of Recent Immigrations?’’ also mentioned the need to bridge intergenerational conflict. ‘‘Their sons and daughters are becoming Americanized,’’ the paper explained, ‘‘social agencies have recognized the need both of helping the parents come forward a little and of giving the young a chance to learn something of the countries of their ancestors.’’33 Although club materials made virtually no mention of worldwide events, the alarming developments leading up to World War II caused the YWCA’s international institutes to try to use their organizations to promote world peace and mutual understanding among the immigrant groups. A bulletin produced by the international institutes stated, ‘‘The seizure of Ethiopia, European powers interfering in the Spanish Civil War, the invasion of China, and the absorption of Austria—have moved us all deeply.’’ Workers were asked to discourage stereotypes among the immigrant groups and work for peace. They were to get American immigrants to hate the idea of war without despising the individuals so unhappily involved. It appears that

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Farabegoli’s club members remained solidly loyal to the American cause throughout World War II when she expanded her objectives to include activities designed to help the American war effort.34 Unlike earlier attempts to found mothers’ clubs, Farabegoli met with comparatively little resistance from Italian husbands who sometimes resented the demands outside activities could make on a woman’s time. When the Chicago Commons settlement house started organizing Italian Mothers’ Clubs after the turn of the century, some men contended their wives’ proper place was at home. Just a few years before Farabegoli’s efforts began, Ware reported that one Italian man had informed a social worker he was forbidding his wife to attend a similar club. ‘‘I won’t have her go,’’ he had said, ‘‘because they learn her things there.’’ In contrast, Farabegoli reported that when her canvassing efforts found a husband at home, he often encouraged his wife to go to her meetings. Apparently, Farabegoli’s efforts were aided by a shift in attitude among Italian men. By the mid-thirties, they seemed more willing to allow their wives some outside activities.35 What sort of women joined Farabegoli’s clubs? One brochure stated that Italian Mothers’ Clubs were open to all women who desired to be ‘‘progressive and intellectual.’’ Mrs. Frattangelo might have been a typical member. She had come to America as a young girl and married another Italian immigrant at nineteen. She had spent the following fifteen years raising a family with little opportunity for a private life. Women like Mrs. Frattangelo joined Farabegoli’s first club at the Uptown YWCA, swelling the club’s membership from the original fourteen members to nearly one hundred by 1941. However, a subjective look at membership rolls reveals that membership never exceeded several hundred women.36 According to one report on their activities, the clubs offered lectures (often in Italian) and the sort of field trips that might interest women in their roles as wives and mothers. Many lectures dealt with aspects of hygiene, home economics, and child care. Italian mothers learned how to make the most of leftovers, promote dental hygiene, and practice birth control. Field trips included jaunts to Rockefeller Center, the office of the New York Times, and the Fordham Library, places that women preoccupied with housework and child care might never have visited. Other activities allowed women to learn more about other ethnic groups in America. The mothers listened to lectures about American Indians and Chinese immigrants followed by a field trip to Chinatown. Parties to celebrate Americanized holidays such as Valentine’s Day were also popular. Committees would be formed to organize entertainment, provide refreshments, and handle the cleanup. Those who served on those

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committees, no matter how humble their activities, had the honor of seeing their names printed on the program. English, first aid, and citizenship classes were also extremely popular.37 In 1937, working with the Italian Tourist Institute in New York, Farabegoli planned a low-cost trip to Italy for her club members. During the war, Italian mothers knitted sweaters and made ‘‘sailor bags’’ for the boys overseas. One club held a dinner at which the fare illustrated what might be done with foodstuffs that could be purchased with blue and orange stamps.38 Writing and staging plays, amateur hours, and pageants were favorite activities. Italians had long loved drama and music. The commedia dell’arte had been part of their heritage since the sixteenth century and so was Italian opera. Prior to World War I, Italian immigrants had established tiny theatres in their saloons and coffeehouses. Farabegoli’s club members dramatized their own experiences in plays like Why, It’s Mother. Sometimes a play extolled what they perceived to be their ancient heritage. A play entitled My Children Are My Jewels staged in 1944 had one Italian woman playing the part of Cornelia, the noble Roman mother of the Roman statesmen called the Gracchi. Skits might be performed in Italian. Folk songs, dances, and scenes from Italian opera allowed the women to celebrate their own roots together with their children.39 Though Farabegoli’s organizations were founded in a later period, they followed the pattern Batinich described when she spoke of club control shifting from organizers to members. Farabegoli served as ‘‘directress’’ of the first club she founded but was merely listed as ‘‘advisor’’ to later ones. By the time an Italian Mothers’ Club was established in Bushwick in 1943, a local woman named Louise Panzica was its leader while Farabegoli merely assisted.40 While other women took control of her clubs, in the 1940s Farabegoli chaired an effort to unite the various Italian Mothers’ Clubs under an umbrella organization to foster further growth. She attempted to establish a Council of Italian-American Mothers’ Clubs. Farabegoli prepared a brochure, solicited funds, and approached prominent Italians and New York political figures to sponsor the organization. To promote her council, she organized a ‘‘gala benefit’’ at which a New York City commissioner spoke and Italian opera singers from the Metropolitan Opera entertained. The event was covered in both the Italian and American press.41 Her effort came too late. Italian Mothers’ Clubs were about to begin fading from existence. Italian-American women were rapidly outgrowing their need for them. In the summer of 1942, the Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New

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‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York 43

York lost their founder and chief promoter when Elba Farabegoli left the city to become activities director for the YWCA’s International Institute in Philadelphia.42 The rest of the clubs’ history can be glimpsed in the correspondence Farabegoli maintained with a former club presidentessa, Maria Zito. Zito was older than Farabegoli and her letters were written in Italian in an affectionate and motherly tone. In 1949, she reported her club was having financial difficulties and that membership had dropped to about thirty members who were becoming less active. In 1956, she reported that the club still existed but that its atmosphere was nothing like the milieu of friendship and affection Farabegoli has fostered. Only a few of the original members were left and the newer women were just acquaintances. By 1962, original members like Zito were aging. Zito reported she no longer attended club meetings because she didn’t walk well, although she kept in touch with other older members by phone. She wrote Farabegoli, ‘‘I don’t belong, because as I said, it’s not a club anymore; I don’t know what it is.’’ It can be assumed that the clubs finally died when their first-generation members did.43 Italian Mothers’ Clubs functioned for a brief time in New York, but in that time Italian women completed their transformation into Italian-American women. It’s impossible to tell from surviving records exactly how many Italian women were influenced by the clubs, but they provided an apparently welcome opportunity to get out of the house in which the Italian family structure had isolated them. Gradually, these women learned to use the resources of the city. Classes improved the women’s English and helped them function more independently. The clubs also offered opportunities for Italian women to emerge as individuals and display their talents. The clubs also helped first-generation mothers bridge an estrangement with their second-generation children. A letter from a member’s son told Elba Farabegoli he was delighted his mother had joined her club and that Farabegoli was ‘‘encouraging and teaching them the joy that is America.’’ At the same time, the plays and pageants they staged allowed Italian women to celebrate a pride in their Italian heritage and their emerging place in American society.44 The final scene of Why, It’s Mother jumps ahead in time to 1942. Mrs. Passarella’s girls are now eager to spend time with their progressive mother, but she and her husband are busy. She tells them that their apartment building is organizing to establish procedures to deal with potential air raids. The president of their building association has asked all members to attend a meeting so that duties can be assigned.

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The girls are curious about who this president is, but Mrs. Passarella does not tell them. They find out only when Mr. Passarella enters, greeting his wife with the words, ‘‘Good evening, Madam President.’’ A stage direction instructs the girls to exclaim in surprise, ‘‘Why, It’s Mother!’’45 Notes 1. Unpublished play by the Italo-American Women’s Club of Williamsburg, Gurzau Collection, Manuscript Group 48, Box 12, Folder 10, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereafter abbreviated as ‘‘Gurzau’’). 2. Ibid. 3. Leonard Covello, The Social Background of the Italo-American Schoolchild (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), 152; Francis X. Femminella and Jule S. Quadagno, ‘‘The Italian American Family,’’ in Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations, ed. Charles H. Mindel and Robert W. Habenstein (New York: Elsevier, 1976), 65; Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood, the Dilemma of Italian-Americans (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 4; Lydio Tomasi, The Italian-American Family, the Southern Italian Family’s Process of Adjustment to Urban America (Staten Island, N.Y.: Center for Migration Studies, 1972), 10; Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1935), 172. 4. Covello, Italo-American Schoolchild, 149–52; L. Tomasi, Italian-American Family, 10, 14–15; Silvano Tomasi and Madeline H. Engel, The Italian Experience in the US (Staten Island, N.Y.: Center for Migration Studies, 1970), 89. 5. Covello, Italo-American Schoolchild, 187; Femminella and Quadagno, ‘‘Italian American Family,’’ 65–66; Gambino, Blood of My Blood, 26; L. Tomasi, ItalianAmerican Family, 13. 6. Richard D. Alba, Italian-Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 57; Covello, Italo-American Schoolchild, 172; Marie Hall Ets, Rosa, the Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 97–98; L. Tomasi, Italian-American Family, 12–13; Doris Weatherfield, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America 1840–1930 (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 214–15. 7. Covello, Italo-American Schoolchild, 154; Gambino, Blood of My Blood, 6, 237; Joseph Lopreato, Italian Americans (New York: Random House, 1970), 50–51; Andrew Rolle, The Italian Americans—Troubled Roots (New York: Free Press, 1980), 110, 112–13; L. Tomasi, Italian-American Family, 10–11. 8. Weatherfield, Foreign and Female, 240. 9. Ets, Rosa, 253. 10. Femminella and Quadagno, ‘‘Italian American Family,’’ 65; Gambino, Blood of My Blood, 7; Emiliana Noether, ‘‘The Silent Half: La contadina del Sud before the First World War,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, ed. Betty

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‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York 45 Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio Tomasi (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1987), 8–9; L. Tomasi, Italian American Family, 10–11; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ‘‘Italian Women and Work: Experience and Perception’’ in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 108. 11. Ets, Rosa, 253. 12. Program for a 1943 function of Italo-American Mothers of Bushwick, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 9. 13. Alba, Twilight of Ethnicity, 40; Femminella and Quadagno, ‘‘Italian American Family,’’ 61–63; Gambino, Blood of My Blood, 33. 14. Ets, Rosa, 209. 15. Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924, orig. pub. 1919), 398; George E. Pozzetta, ‘‘The Mulberry District of New York City: The Years before World War I,’’ in Little Italies in North America, ed. Robert F. Harney and Vicenza Scarpaci (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1981), 7–9, 18–19; Ware, Greenwich Village, 158–59. 16. Lopreato, Italian Americans, 47; Rolle, Troubled Roots, 63; Judith E. Smith, Family Connections— History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island: 1900–1940 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1985), 126–27; S. Tomasi and Engel, Italian Experience, 87–89. 17. Foerster, Italian Emigration, 393; Lopreato, Italian Americans, 106–7; Pozzetta, ‘‘Mulberry District,’’ 19–20; Tomasi and Engel, Italian Experience, 89, 91; Ware, Greenwich Village, 154. 18. Lopreato, Italian Americans, 106; Ware, Greenwich Village, 158, 161. 19. Femminella and Quadagno, ‘‘Italian American Family,’’ 69; Smith, Family Connections, 127–28. 20. Yans-McLaughlin, ‘‘Italian Women and Work,’’ 107, 110, 111–12. 21. Columba Marie Furio, ‘‘Immigrant Women and Industry: A Case Study. The Italian Immigrant Woman and the Garment Industry, 1880–1950,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1979, 131; Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘‘Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union,’’ in Class, Sex and the Woman Worker, ed. Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 150; Ware, Greenwich Village, 156. 22. Paul J. Campisi, ‘‘Ethnic Family Patterns: The Italian Family in the US,’’ American Journal of Sociology 53 (May 1948): 443; Foerster, Italian Emigration, 396; L. Tomasi, Italian-American Family, 24–26, 28. 23. Unpublished play by the Italo-American Women’s Club of Williamsburg, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 10. 24. Ware, Greenwich Village, 162, 175–76. 25. Ets, Rosa, 222–24; Ware, Greenwich Village, 175–76. 26. Mary Ellen Batinich, ‘‘The Interaction between Italian Immigrant Women and the Chicago Commons Settlement House 1909–1944,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the American

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46 Lorett Treese Italian Historical Association, ed. Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio Tomasi (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978), 161–64. 27. Maddelena Tirabassi, ‘‘Prima le Donne e i Bambini: Gli International Institutes e l’Americanizzazione degli Immigrati,’’ Quaderni Storici 17 (1982): 854–56. 28. Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1919), 7, 299, 308; Tirabassi, ‘‘Prima le Donne,’’ 854, 858, 870. 29. Clipping from Corriere d’America, 22 January 1941, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 17; Mrs. V. G. Simkhovitch to Elba Farabegoli, 17 October 1941, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 4. 30. Collection Notes for Gurzau Collection, 1–3. 31. Clipping from Corriere d’America, 22 January 1941, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 17. 32. Talk by Elba Farabegoli given 24 January 1943, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 1; Brochure from Henry Street Mothers’ Club, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 7; Clipping from Corriere d’America, 18 January 1942, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 11. 33. Booklet entitled ‘‘Why Italo-American Mothers’ Clubs,’’ Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 1; paper called ‘‘Why Work with Women of the More Recent Immigrations?’’ Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 2. 34. Quarterly Bulletin of the International Institutes, June 1938, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 13. 35. Talk by Elba Farabegoli given 24 January 1943, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 1; Batinich, ‘‘Italian Women and Chicago Commons,’’ 156; Smith, Family Connections, 143; Ware, Greenwich Village, 177. 36. Brochure from the Greenwich House Mothers’ Club, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 8; undated speech by Elba Farabegoli, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 1; Clipping from Corriere d’America, 22 January 1941, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 17. 37. Reports on Clubs’ Activities, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 3. 38. Account of the Founding of St. Joseph’s Italian Mothers’ Club in Bushwick and Program for a Dinner, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 9; Brochure for a Trip to Italy for Italian Mothers, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 6. 39. Program for Activities dated 26 January 1944, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 6; Pozzetta, ‘‘Mulberry District,’’ 25. 40. Account of the Founding of St. Joseph’s Italian Mothers’ Club in Bushwick, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 8; Activities Program for the Mothers’ Welfare Club in Harlem, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 9. 41. Elba Farabegoli to Mary Simkhovitch, 2 September 1942, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 4; Clipping from Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 21 January 1943, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 11. 42. Collection Notes for Gurzau Collection, 4. 43. Maria Zito to Elba Farabegoli, 16 December 1949, 1 May 1956, and 21 February 1962, Gurzau, Box 5, Folder 85. 44. John Frattangelo to Elba Farabegoli, 4 December 1939, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 4. 45. Unpublished play by the Italo-American Women’s Club of Williamsburg, Gurzau, Box 12, Folder 10.

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Connecting Spheres Women’s Work and Women’s Lives in Milwaukee’s Italian Third Ward diane c. vecchio 1995

In 1905 Mary Maglio opened a grocery store on Detroit Street in Milwaukee’s largely Italian Third Ward. She was an immigrant from Sicily and the first Italian-born female grocer in the city. Maglio was followed by many more immigrant women who became proprietors of home-based businesses as a pattern of female Italian entrepreneurial activity became increasingly evident into the 1920s and 1930s. This article examines the business lives of Italian immigrant women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. These women provided important services to first-generation Italians who settled within an ethnic enclave. In Milwaukee, the largest Italian enclave was defined by the boundaries of the Third Ward, where businesswomen worked as grocers, restaurateurs, saloon keepers, and purveyors of dry goods. Female entrepreneurs were motivated to earn an income through business enterprises while simultaneously continuing their familial and household responsibilities. The work histories of women who owned and operated grocery stores in particular reflect how gender and domestic values shaped their working lives and how intricately immigrant women’s lives were connected between the home and workplace. Indeed, for many of these women, their workplace was their home. The majority of Italian-born women living in Milwaukee’s Third Ward during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Sicilians. Many emigrated from the small towns and villages near Palermo (Porticello, Santa Flavia, Sant’Elia, Aspra, and Bagheria), while others came from the provinces of Messina, Trapani, Girgenti, and Siracusa. Similar to immigrant 47

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48 Diane C. Vecchio

women in other cities, Sicilian-born women in Milwaukee assumed multiple roles in the family, their household, and the local economy. In 1910, nearly 5,000 Italians resided in Milwaukee and many Italian females were gainfully employed as dressmakers and seamstresses, fruit dealers, peddlers, confectioners, milliners, office cleaners, natatorium matrons, midwives, textile factory workers, and cigar makers.1 Many immigrant women in Milwaukee worked because few immigrant men earned a family wage. While a considerable number of men had been tradesmen and artisans in Italy, most were now reduced to laboring with pick and shovel in the streets or on the railroad. Others found jobs in foundries or steel works, tanneries, or electric car lines. The typical Italian male worked nine months a year and earned an annual salary of about $300 to $400 compared to $539 earned by native-born males; thus, it was contingent upon wives and working-age children to supplement the meager wages of the head-of-household.2 In 1915, George LaPiana, a second-generation Italian who grew up in the Third Ward, published a study of Milwaukee’s Italians for the Associated Charities. In it he noted that ‘‘generally women attend to the light business, while their husbands are at work on the tracks or in the foundries.’’3 The ‘‘light business’’ LaPiana referred to were the many business operations, particularly grocery stores, that were owned or operated by Sicilian-born women. Several patterns characterize Italian women’s work in Milwaukee. While younger, single females often worked in factories and businesses located within walking distance of their Third Ward homes, married Sicilian women with families were likely to be the proprietors or managers of small family businesses or homeworkers, sewing garments for local clothing manufactories, occupations that did not always show up in the census. Analyses of the Milwaukee City Directories and the Wisconsin State Census for Milwaukee show many Italian women as business ‘‘proprietors’’ or ‘‘retail merchants’’ in the city as early as 1900. Theresa Balbi was one of the earliest Italian businesswomen recorded in the Milwaukee City Directory. In 1900, following her husband’s murder by the Black Hand, an organized crime group, Balbi opened a fruit stand at the Chamber of Commerce Building. By 1908, she had saved enough money to open a confectionery shop where her daughter Lillie worked as a clerk. Sicilian-born women were engaged in a variety of business activities: Jennie Ferraro owned a bakery. Anna DiMaggio worked as a seamstress while her husband was alive and took over his butcher shop after his death; Anna’s eldest son was employed as manager of the shop and her youngest son was a meat cutter. Jeanette Corti came to Milwaukee from Italy in 1905 and was the proprietor

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Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives 49

of a confectionery shop. One of the few ‘‘Trentini’’(people from Trent) to live in the Third Ward, Mrs. Jecone Rachici, owned and operated a cigar manufacturing company located within her home. She employed three Sicilian women whose occupations were listed in the city directory as ‘‘cigar makers.’’ Other women, such as Antonia Natoli, Julia Faganelli, and Anna Loffredo, owned and operated saloons while Mary DeFino was the proprietor of a restaurant. Between 1900 and 1920 at least fifteen Italian-born women were in business as dressmakers. Francesca Romano and Jennie Gallo employed their daughters in their dressmaking shops where they trained them in the skills they learned in Italy before emigrating. Perhaps the most notable Italian businesswoman in Milwaukee during this period was Mary Pastorino, whose husband Frank was one of the earliest commission merchants in the Third Ward. After emigrating from Narone, Italy, Frank and his family relocated to Milwaukee from Chicago in 1891 where he bought a wholesale produce business. With the business located on Commission Row, Milwaukee’s extensive wholesale produce center, Frank and his partner, Louis Schiappacasse, became successful wholesale dealers in domestic and foreign fruits, vegetables and nuts.4 When she was not pregnant, Mary accompanied her husband to Central and South America to advise him on purchases of fruits, dates, nuts, and other produce. While Frank conducted business on Commission Row, Mary started up a small confectionery shop called the ‘‘Flora Bon,’’ where she put most of her nine children to work dipping chocolates. In 1910 at the age of forty-four, Frank died and left controlling interest of the business to his wife. Sons Harry and Frank worked with their mother in the wholesale business until she sold her shares to Schiappacasse a few years later, giving him controlling interest in the business. But Mary Pastorino had not left the world of business forever. Several years later she opened a tea room where she employed several of her daughters.5 Between 1900 and 1920 there were nearly 130 Italian-owned grocery stores in the Third Ward. Many of these businesses were short lived. Some appeared only once in the city directory and never again. At least forty of these grocery stores (32.5%) were owned and operated by Italian women. Information derived from the Milwaukee City Directories for the years 1900 through 1920 record thirty-five Italian-born women listed as ‘‘retail merchants’’ or ‘‘proprietors’’ of family-owned grocery stores. Five more female grocers were identified through oral interviews. All forty (100%) of the women who ran grocery stores in this study were born in Italy, and the majority of them were from Sicily. Among them were women such as Mary

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Serio, who settled in Milwaukee in 1889. The wife of a fruit dealer, Mary ran a grocery store while she raised her nine children. Francesca Maglio, who immigrated to Milwaukee in 1902, operated a grocery store and was the mother of seven children. Italian women who owned grocery stores were either married or recently widowed. At least eight women (32%) were widows and took over the grocery business following their husbands’ death. Beniamino Tornabene was a grocer from 1904 through 1910. In 1911, at the age of thirty-two, his widow, Mary, became the proprietor of the business. Rosa D’Amore took over Agostino’s store when her husband died in 1906. Rosa, who came to Milwaukee in 1891, was able to support herself and her three children through the grocery business she continued to operate after her husband’s death.6 Most of the women who were proprietors of grocery stores (68%) were not widowed and were married to men gainfully employed. Francesca Maglio’s husband was a laborer and Theresa Sottili’s husband, a carpenter. Often, women who operated grocery stores were married to men who were also in business. Sarah Caravella’s and Theresa Corso’s husbands owned saloons, while Mary Serio’s and Angie Spicuzza’s husbands were fruit dealers. The work profiles of these women indicate how the family economy shaped immigrant women’s lives. Gender, however, helped shape these women’s decisions. In Milwaukee, as in every other community across America, a group of immigrant entrepreneurs emerged to provide the services that depended upon the support of the immigrant community. Limited by education and language, Italian women who recognized the needs of the immigrant community viewed business ownership as a means of achieving economic and familial goals within their own ethnic neighborhoods. These businesswomen closely linked their toil with the concerns and welfare of their families. All of the women in this study operated grocery stores at home. They utilized the front rooms of their homes and stocked them with olive oil, imported pasta, and tomatoes. This allowed enterprising women the opportunity to run a business while taking care of their homes and raising their children. Additionally, these small business enterprises located within the homes of immigrant women allowed other family members to get involved. John Bodnar observes that: Immigrant enterprise did not have to be solely an individual endeavor. Pervasive traditions of mutual assistance and household cooperation were

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Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives 51 not necessarily lost among entrepreneurs . . . their early business activity was not simply the result of individual quests but depended heavily on family association.7

Three case studies of Sicilian-born women who operated grocery stores in the Third Ward reveal how Italian women combined business and family life and how family enterprise often depended upon household cooperation. The first woman in this study is Catherine D’Acquisto, who was born in Porticello, Sicily in 1884. As a young girl she was sent to Palermo to help care for the children of a wealthy family. During her free time, she watched the cook prepare meals and thus began a lifelong love affair with food. In 1890, Catherine immigrated to America to live and work with her sister, who had a bakery in New York City. Several years later she joined another sister living in Milwaukee. There she met and married Joseph Dentice, a recent arrival from Sant’Elia, Sicily, who had worked as a fruit peddler in the Third Ward. While her children were young, Catherine earned extra income by cooking and baking in her home for weddings and baptisms. No longer a fruit peddler, but an employee of the city of Milwaukee, Joseph did not have sufficient income to provide for his family, so Catherine decided to start her own grocery store. Shelves loaded with macaroni and tomatoes, oranges, and bananas filled the front room of the family home. In addition, Catherine baked bread every morning and sold it to her customers for a nickel a loaf. While remaining at home and raising her children, Catherine was able, nonetheless, to turn her talents into income by cooking and baking for the immigrant community and operating a grocery store that specialized in ethnic food products.8 Scholars have noted that the Italian family economy was deeply tied to and dependent upon the family, and ‘‘all members including young children, were expected to contribute their labor to the family business, thereby maximizing operating hours and minimizing operating costs.’’9 This is exhibited in the life and work of Maria Latona, who immigrated to Milwaukee in 1909 from Bagheria, Sicily, with her husband Salvatore and their four children. Salvatore got a job at the Department of Public Works, while Maria contributed a little extra to the family economy by taking in boarders, newly arrived cugini (cousins) for whom she cooked meals and provided laundry services. Still, the couple could not comfortably support their family, which had grown since arriving in Milwaukee from four to six children. In addition to his job at the Public Works Department, and her job providing

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boarding services, Salvatore and Maria became small business owners. In 1914, Salvatore opened a tavern and Maria started a grocery store that she operated from six in the morning until eight at night. Maria’s work life was closely intertwined with the work lives of her two daughters, Domenica and Vincenza. Domenica, the eldest child, was thirteen when she arrived in Milwaukee from Sicily with her parents. A year later she married, and in another year gave birth to her first child when she was only fifteen years old. She and her husband and eventually their nine children lived upstairs over her parent’s grocery store and tavern. In order to help Domenica and her husband provide for their nine children, Maria turned the grocery store over to her daughter, who expanded the store’s inventory by carrying children’s clothing and jewelry. In 1932, Domenica’s husband died, leaving her a widow with nine children to support. The grocery store was not enough to sustain the large family and Domenica was forced to leave the grocery business and get a job working at Cohn Brothers textile factory, where she was employed sewing men’s garments. While Domenica worked outside of the home full-time, her mother Maria returned to the grocery store and turned most of the profits over to her daughter. This arrangement also allowed Maria to care for her nine grandchildren while her daughter worked in the factory. In the afternoons when they returned home from school, the children were expected to help their grandmother in the grocery store by stocking shelves and providing relief to their nonna while she prepared the evening meal and tended to the younger children. Several years later, Maria’s youngest daughter, Vincenza, got married. By this time, however, Maria and Salvatore were no longer running the tavern or grocery store. Their home, the grocery store and the tavern had been destroyed when the Black Hand planted a bomb in retribution for Salvatore refusing to comply with an extortion demand. Maria, Salvatore, and Domenica and her nine children were forced to move in with Vincenza and her husband. One year later, tragedy fell again when Vincenza’s husband died. Like her sister Domenica, Vincenza was widowed in her thirties and was left with six small children to support. With the help of her sister, Vincenza was hired at Cohn Brothers. Her mother Maria, still caring for the youngest of Domenica’s children, now had six more grandchildren to care for, the youngest only a year old.10 Maria Latona initially opened a grocery store to contribute to the family income while raising her own children. However, in her role as mother and

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Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives 53

businesswoman, Maria helped provide for her married children and their families. Maria’s eldest daughter expanded the grocery store in an effort to provide for herself and her children after her husband’s death. When they realized the business could not generate enough income, Maria and her daughter maximized their money-making potential. Maria went back into the grocery store which enabled her to take care of her grandchildren while her own daughters went out to work. A third case study similarly illustrates the influence of gender and family values on Italian immigrant households. In the late 1880s, Conchetta and Joseph Burgerino immigrated to Milwaukee’s Third Ward from Sicily with their young children and opened a grocery store on Detroit Street. The 1920 census lists Joseph as the proprietor of the store, but Conchetta ran the business while raising her six children. Unable to read or write, Conchetta was still able to keep charge accounts by creating symbols for her customers and marking ‘‘X’’ next to the symbol each time they paid on their accounts. When Conchetta got too old for the business, her eldest daughter, Anna Torretta (also born in Sicily), took it over, repeating the same work patterns as her mother, operating the store while raising her children. Anna walked several blocks to Commission Row every morning and picked out fresh produce daily for the grocery store. In the summer she made Italian ice and sold it on the street in front of her store. After operating one business successfully, Anna, whose husband was never employed more than seasonally, opened another grocery store on the south side of Milwaukee, where, according to her daughter, Josephine Rampolla, ‘‘she also did a great business making homemade wine.’’11 Anna took her eldest daughter, Josephine, into the grocery business while she proceeded to open two more stores in other locations. The original store was eventually closed and Josephine was sent to operate one of the stores with her brother-in-law. Anna expanded one of the groceries to include a butcher shop where she did almost all the butchering herself. A tavern was eventually opened adjacent to the grocery store and that, too, was run by Anna’s son-in-law. Josephine also helped out in the tavern by serving up fish fries on Friday night, chicken on Saturday, and potato pancakes on Wednesday. Anna had taken her daughter, Josephine, out of school at the age of sixteen to start her in the family business. Josephine did not marry until she was twenty-seven, explaining, ‘‘I kept working for my mother, and so I never got around to doing much. Still at twenty-seven she kept me quite tied to her strings.’’ Josephine proudly recalls her busy mother ‘‘running the grocery, making homemade wine, and raising four children. She was

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amazing.’’ Josephine kept working for her mother until her own marriage. Then when her youngest child was two and half years old, Josephine started her own business, a very successful catering operation that lasted for twentytwo years. She credits both her career and the business careers of her siblings to her mother, adding that ‘‘[we] all had this background from my mom.’’12 Small business operations that evolved within the homes of Sicilian women were often a means of upward mobility for themselves as well as their children. The case of Conchetta Burgerino exemplifies what historians have discovered about many small immigrant businesswomen. In the words of Andrew Sanchirico, ‘‘the spirit of entrepreneurship passed, without regard to gender, from one generation to the next’’ and ‘‘was not only a vehicle for personal mobility, but a springboard for children’s mobility as well.’’13 For Italian-born women, the motives for starting a business may have been similar to the entrepreneurial motives of Italian men: limited by education and language, they recognized the needs of the immigrant community and viewed business ownership as a means of achieving economic and familial goals within the boundaries of their ethnic neighborhoods. Gender, however, helped shape these women’s decisions. Operating a business in their home allowed them to combine economic activities with domestic responsibilities. Limited by the constraints of domestic life, Italian immigrant women used domestic life to their advantage. Moreover, small business operations that evolved within the homes of immigrant businesswomen often were a means for upward mobility for themselves as well as their children. Notes 1. Wright’s Milwaukee City Directories, 1900–1930, Milwaukee County Historical Society. 2. Immigrants in Cities, U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports, vol. 26. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), 738. 3. George LaPiana, The Italians in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (New York: Associated Charities, 1915), 10. 4. Paul Geib. ‘‘From Italian Peddler to Commission Row Wholesaler,’’ Milwaukee History (Winter 1990): 102–12:103. 5. Interview with Elizabeth Pastorino Turecek, 4 May 1993, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 6. Wright’s Milwaukee City Directories, 1900–1930; ‘‘Wisconsin Census of the Population,’’ manuscript for Milwaukee County, 1905. Both are available at the Milwaukee County Historical Society.

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Connecting Spheres: Women’s Work and Women’s Lives 55 7. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 131–34. 8. Interview with Catherine Balistreri, 23 March 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 9. Andrew Sanchirico, ‘‘Small Business and Social Mobility among Italian Americans,’’ in Italian Ethnics: Their Languages, Literature and Lives, Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, November 1987, 208. 10. Interview with Vincenza Bartolone, 20 March 1992, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; interview with Conchetta Crivello, 20 March 1992, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 11. Interview with Josephine Rampolla, 20 April 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 12. Ibid. 13. Sanchirico, ‘‘Small Business,’’ 209.

Works Cited Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Cetti, Luisa. ‘‘Work Experiences among Italian Women in New York, 1900–1930.’’ Rivesta di Studi Anglo Americani 3, nos. 4–5 (1984–85): 493–505. Cohen, Miriam. ‘‘Italian American Women in New York City, 1900–1950: Work and School.’’ In Class, Sex and the Woman Worker, ed. Canton Milton and Bruce Laurie, 120–143. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977. Di Leonardo, Micaela. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class and Gender among Italian Americans. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Gabaccia, Donna. ‘‘Immigrant Women: Nowhere at Home?’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 10, no. 4 (1991): 61–87. ———. ‘‘Italian Immigrant Women in Comparative Perspective.’’ Unpublished paper delivered at the Columbus Quincentenary Conference, New York City, May 1993. ———. ‘‘The Transplanted: Women and Family in Immigrant America.’’ Social Science History 12, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 243–52. Geib, Paul. ‘‘From Italian Peddler to Commission Row Wholesaler.’’ Milwaukee History 13 (Winter 1990): 102–12. Immigrants in Cities. U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports, vol. 26. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911. Iorizzo, Luciano J. ‘‘Italian American Merchants as Seen in the R. G. Dun Collection.’’ Unpublished paper presented at the American Italian Historical Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., November 1992. LaPiana, George. The Italians in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. New York: Associated Charities, 1915. Meloni, Alberto. ‘‘Italy Invades the Bloody Third: The Early History of Milwaukee’s Italians.’’ Milwaukee History (Summer 1987): 47–60. Sanchirico, Andrew. ‘‘Small Business and Social Mobility among Italian Americans.’’ In Italian Ethnics: Their Languages, Literature and Lives, Proceedings

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56 Diane C. Vecchio of the 20th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, November 1987. Simonson, Judith. ‘‘The Third Ward: Symbol of Ethnic Identity.’’ Milwaukee History (Summer 1987): 61–76. Smith, Judith. Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives, Providence, Rhode Island 1900–1940. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Vecchio, Diane. ‘‘Family, Community, Culture and Welfare Capitalism among Italian Women in Endicott, NY.’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, August 1991. ———. ‘‘Italian Women in Industry: The Shoeworkers of Endicott, New York, 1914–1935.’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 8, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 61–86. Vezzosi, Elisabetta. ‘‘The Dilemma of the Ethnic Community: The Italian Immigrant Woman between ‘Preservation’ and ‘Americanization.’ ’’ In Support and Struggle: Italians and Italian Americans in a Comparative Perspective, edited by J. Tropea et al. Staten Island: American Italian Historical Association, 1986. ‘‘Wisconsin Census of the Population.’’ Manuscript for Milwaukee County, 1905. Available at Milwaukee County Historical Society. Wright’s Milwaukee City Directories, 1900–1930. Available at Milwaukee County Historical Society.

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Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants maria parrino 1992

In 1912, an autobiographical work written by a Russian Jew pointed out the influence of American schools on young immigrants.1 In a highly apologetic tone, Mary Antin maintained that the ‘‘public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad that it is mine to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it—you born Americans.’’2 Antin had arrived in America in 1892, at the age of twelve. Thanks largely to the positive effects that the American school system had on her, she described contact with the New World as a ‘‘second birth.’’ The book, which according to Cecyle Neidle is ‘‘a dithyramb to everything in American life, schools, people, the language,’’3 was meant to show how teachers, social workers, and every person in charge of education devoted themselves to the not easy task of making a ‘‘good American’’ out of an immigrant. Enthusiasm for the American institutions, although not always as flattering as Antin’s, affected many of the Eastern and southern European immigrants who arrived in the New World between 1880 and 1924. As Neidle says, ‘‘Undreamed-of possibilities opened before those who were not too old or apathetic to satisfy their intellectual yearnings.’’4 The enormous expansion of formal schooling that coincided with—or was accelerated by—the arrival of the great wave of southern and Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century posed special problems for American educators.5 Public schools in the United States became responsible for the shaping of immigrants, both children and adults, into well-behaved American citizens. Fearing the social consequences of mass immigration, school represented a homogenizing agent that could break down immigrant cultures and traditions and replace them with more acceptable American habits, beliefs, 57

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and values.6 Often neglecting ethnic backgrounds, the American school became a melting pot in which all immigrant children were melted into a not always familiar structure.7 Those who maintain that immigrants ‘‘entered the life of the United States at a status equal to that of the older residents’’8 cannot deny that discrimination based on ethnic origins often placed the immigrant student in a position of inferiority to the native-born.9 How were Italian immigrants affected by the American educational system? Was their concern for schooling part of the social experience of migration? As with most historical questions, the answer is multifaceted. The controversy with respect to the value of education, particularly in regard to minority groups, is based on the different emphasis given to either the American educational establishment or the ethnic group background. To many scholars, the Italian immigrants’ documented limited presence—at times, absence—in the American schools was due to cultural heritage.10 In 1944, the Italian-born educator Leonard Covello who studied the social background of Italian-American children maintained that the ‘‘antagonism toward the school, which was manifested in Italy and which constituted a part of the cultural tradition, was carried over to America and paved the way for the still current lack of rapprochement between the American school and the Italian parents.’’11 The idea that Italians were far less likely than others to receive an extended education has been echoed by many scholars who stress the minimal school arrangements in rural southern Italy from which most Italian immigrants originally came, together with their propensity to return to their homeland.12 Nevertheless, other observers have argued these formulations and have proved that Italian families not only did not object to schooling but even encouraged and supported their children, whose school achievement was not much different from that of other working-class children. Italians’ reluctance to invest in schooling did not depend on a value system that discouraged education, ‘‘since these values themselves only reflect the operation of social class factors and the unfavorable structure of educational opportunity that confronts the lower classes generally.’’13 Many factors should be taken into consideration when investigating an Italian attitude toward schooling. Explanations can be found in the nature of the rural social and economic structure from which the immigrants came; religious sources of behavior (depicting the tradition of literacy in Protestant societies as opposed to Catholic ones);14 and the quality of the curricula offered by American schools, which implicitly sought to assimilate the foreign-born but provided no specific programs aimed at resocializing them.15

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Timothy Smith, writing on immigrants’ social aspirations and American education, maintains that immigrant families’ attitudes toward education did not differ from those of native-born American parents, for they displayed the same remarkable commitment on education.16 ‘‘Those who campaigned to restrict immigration on the argument that newcomers were illiterate cited statistics only for the foreign-born themselves, ignoring the achievements of their children.’’17 Within this framework, what place did the women occupy? Did an immigrant daughter attend school as well as her brother? Was she offered the same ‘‘undreamed-of ’’ opportunities both from her family and the American establishment? Only recently have scholars started to collect—and evaluate—information on this topic directly from the women themselves. The life stories of Rosa Cavalleri, Bruna Pieracci, Grace Spinelli, and Clara Grillo, four Italian women who lived the immigrant experience and left written records in English, are personal narratives that contribute to better understanding the complex phenomenon of ethnicity.18 In the last decades, the historical value of this kind of material has been widely discussed and eventually given some recognition. Many historians now argue that oral history or autobiography is a central source in recreating the social fabric of everyday life. Moreover, the authentic expression of the immigrant experience as told by a woman has been given an enhanced value for, as Vecoli maintains, ‘‘certainly it has been the male immigrant who has dominated the pages of histories of immigration.’’19 Since memory is directly influenced by perception, readers of autobiographical texts are now willing to recognize that besides a narrator’s race, class, and ethnicity, gender is also inevitably responsible for shaping personal narratives.20 Obviously, the autobiographies of these four women cannot be considered conclusive, but they certainly disclose attitudes and patterns that are revealing when compared with those of other studies and the stereotypes of immigrants’ experiences.21 The ‘‘revealing’’ picture is not so much a consequence of the nature of autobiography itself, which is considered the product of exceptional selves, for women’s autobiographical texts are not necessarily the expression of ‘‘isolated beings.’’22 As Susan Stanford Friedman maintains, the model of separate and unique selfhood and the emphasis on individualism as the necessary precondition for autobiography does not consider the importance of a culturally imposed group identity for women and ignores the differences in socialization in the construction of male and female gender identity. Women’s autobiographies ‘‘project onto history an

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identity that is not purely individualistic. Nor is it purely collective. Instead, this new identity merges the shared and the unique.’’23 The four texts used in this study were written by ‘‘ordinary’’ first- and second-generation Italian-American women who belong to that mass of one million women who entered the United States between 1876 and 1924.24 Their personal narratives provide not only a retrospective view of Italian immigration to America but also a close-up of immigrants’ everyday life. We are given pictures of the Italian-American family as seen by women who played the roles of wives, mothers, and daughters. In addition, the narratives present insights on parent-child relations, rapport between the sexes, and experiences outside the family structure, which offer important remarks on women’s social life, education, and occupations in the American world. My focus here is on an analysis of the narrative material that deals with women’s attitude toward education.25 We will explore areas that have often been neglected, such as the cultural and educational background that Italian immigrant families carried with them when they left for America, the educational opportunities offered by American society, and the way women reacted to these offers, accepting or refusing to educate and ‘‘Americanize’’ themselves. The educational interests that these immigrant women expressed in both Italy and the United States were inevitably diverse but certainly remarkable. In spite of the stereotype that depicted immigrant women as backward, ignorant, and degraded, these women all shared a great deal of common passion in broadening their cultural background. They managed to combine their ethnic heritage with the American culture.

Clara Corica Grillo The autobiography of Clara Corica Grillo depicts the immigrant daughter’s demand for education as a conflict. ‘‘My father had no respect for education, especially for women. I went to school in spite of him and his threats’’ (Grillo, ‘‘Little Italy,’’ 3). Strongly convinced that a woman’s place was in the home as housewife and domestic organizer, Clara’s family represented the Italian attitude toward education with which we are most familiar: It was unnecessary to make economic sacrifices to educate the children, least of all daughters, for women did not need a high level of education. As the father said: ‘‘What good is your education? You still have to wash dishes and diapers’’ (3).26

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However, despite her father’s objections, at the age of sixteen, Clara ‘‘left home . . . to work my way through school’’ (24). In other words, Clara did not conform to her parents’ tradition. Unlike most of the immigrant women who remained at home until they married, she made a decision which surprised everybody. ‘‘I was a bookish ‘nut’ from their point of view. . . . I steered clear of them and, to the amazement and derision of the community and the abhorrence of my father, went off to get my formal education’’ (122). In many immigrant families, the desire to study was seen as a derangement. As Helen Barolini notes in her book on the writings of Italian-American women, ‘‘Reading was ridiculed as too private, too unproductive, too exclusive an enjoyment—free time should be spent with the family group. Learning gave one ideas, made one different: all the family wanted was cohesion.’’27 Clara’s schooling started to be accepted when it turned out to be useful for the family. As a child, she was the only one who could write, and for this reason, was asked to help the numerous boarders in her house write letters to their families in Italy.28 Often they dictated them to me (I was about eleven years old). The message was always the same. It went like this: ‘‘Dear Mother, I take my pen in hand to let you know I am in good health and hope to hear the same from you. Many regards and big kisses to. . . .’’ Then followed a traditional roll call. (1)

We are not told how and where this young girl learned how to write in Italian (for the letters were necessarily written in that language).29 Clara only tells us that for each letter she ‘‘charged ten cents’’ and that this activity became so profitable that added to the money she earned by buying beer for boarders in the saloon: ‘‘I hoarded from the few pennies $117.00, funding my college education’’ (1). Actually, Clara was one of the few daughters of first-generation Italian immigrants who went to college: Of my own group very few women went. Those few often became elementary school teachers. I don’t recall from the ‘‘Little Italy’’ where I lived, any female getting beyond that. (8)

It seems that the professional opportunities available for immigrant women were limited and generally required more ‘‘feminine’’ qualifications than educational experience. As Virginia McLaughlin suggests, the fact that most of the Italian-American daughters entered the professional world as teachers

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proved their dialectical rather than conflicting relation with ethnic tradition, for they essentially performed what was considered by their families an acceptable ‘‘feminine’’ role.30 Actually, when Clara became a teacher and social worker,31 she not only combined the values of her cultural heritage with those of American culture but also more specifically challenged the expectations of the middle-class American society of that era, which mainly gave men the opportunity to choose among various professions.32 The tone of Clara Grillo’s narrative is one of a self-confident woman who was always aware of her nonconformity, sure of her decisions, and able to evaluate the opportunities and restrictions that the American establishment put on women. She recalls facing discrimination both as an immigrant and as a woman, but she underlines her determination and her constant refusal to accept her role passively. The overall positive picture of her school experience points out the professional and human qualities of the American teachers who ‘‘gave unstintingly to our Little Italy’’ (6) even if they used strict methods of punishment.33 ‘‘When we played school, I always wanted to be a teacher because Miss Murney was stereotyped as the person who gave out punishments’’ (6). Regrettably, Clara’s parents, who were against education, approved the methods used by the American school system. One day, when the young girl ran home looking for comfort and protection after having been beaten by her teacher, she was surprised by her mother’s reaction: ‘‘She gave me a licking with a strap because, she said, ‘Remember the teacher is always right’ ’’ (6). Clara’s mother was one of the many illiterate women who did not take advantage of the educational opportunities offered by American institutions. She did not attend the courses organized by social workers at the settlements in Cleveland, such as Alta House. Her daughter remembers her being ‘‘obsessed with work’’ (118), and certainly she did not have much spare time since she had to take care of the twenty-six boarders she housed.34 Nevertheless, she was able to cope with her domestic work and established a highly qualified organization, which included being ‘‘the banker’’ for her boarders. ‘‘Although she had never gone to school, she kept straight in her head all the accounts. She often reminded boarders they had not sent money to Sicily for their wives or parents’’ (30). Her busy life at home did not exempt her from contacts with American institutions and, like other immigrant women, she was ‘‘provided with interpreters when applying for charity specialized clinics for eye care and rare diseases or for welfare’’ (119).

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The social workers’ approach to immigrants and their tendency to ‘‘Americanize’’ recent arrivals has been widely discussed by many observers.35 In Clara’s personal narrative they are recognized as a significant educational influence in the immigrant communities. In Alta House women learned to sew, embroider and care for themselves when pregnant in prenatal clinics after which they later attended the baby clinics there. For school children the settlement house provided tonsil clipping clinics, sports, swings and baseball. Dancing parties and even citizenship preparation classes and English classes met there. (118)

But their attempt to ‘‘Americanize’’ immigrants was also openly criticized: All tended to ‘‘Americanize’’ recent arrivals—the vogue of social workers then . . . Americanization was intended to make us forget our Italian roots since anything ‘‘foreign’’ was suspect. (118–19)

Rosa Cavalleri A different picture of the American settlement house policy is given by Rosa Cavalleri, a first-generation Italian immigrant, born in 1866 in a small town in the north of Italy. Cavalleri arrived in the United States at the age of sixteen, already mother of a child and married to a man who maltreated her. Perhaps because the difficulties with her first husband far surpassed those present in the New World, the economic and psychological support offered by American social workers was highly appreciated and praised. The story of her life—largely devoted to the period in Italy—includes a picture of the education provided in her homeland. Rosa had a limited, atypical school experience. By the age of nine, the only schooling she had received was Sunday school ‘‘to learn the catechism for first communion’’ (Ets, Rosa, 86). Only one of her Sunday schoolmates had received a formal education, and this was due to his family’s economic status. He ‘‘had gone to school like the rich when he was young. He could read and write and everything’’ (86). Notwithstanding the national law on education,36 school was largely a privilege of the upper classes and of boys. Rosa’s first contact with school occurred at the age of eleven, when she entered a convent for young girls.37 The opportunity offered was welcomed with enthusiasm: ‘‘It was almost too good to believe that me, a poor girl, was going to school to learn reading and writing and counting and geography’’ (95).

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Her first experience with school was so exciting because of an exemplary teacher: Every day as I worked I kept thinking of those two hours in the afternoon when I could come out from the mill and go into the classroom with the other girls and have Sister Vincenza to teach me. Sister Vincenza made us learn good, but she was always kind. And me, I could never get enough of the learning. (95)

The memory of her ‘‘wonderful’’ teacher’s friendly attitude remained impressed in the narrator’s mind. Rosa deeply admired Sister Vincenza, who was always there when she needed help and never failed to understand her students’ wishes. She ‘‘could read my heart like a book’’ (95). Significantly, in the personal narrative of this Italian woman, teachers are always described as understanding and generous characters, both in Italy and America. Many years after her arrival in America, when as an immigrant woman she attended the English lessons at the Commons House in Chicago, Rosa revealed the same enthusiasm and religious devotion toward her teachers as she had in her hometown.38 Pretty soon they started the classes to teach us poor people to talk and to write in English. The talk in the settlement house was different entirely than what I used to hear. I used to love those American people, and I was listening and listening how they talked. That’s how I learned to talk such good English. (224)39

Rosa’s enthusiasm about the education received at the Commons House does not hide the fact that immigrants dealt with other educational influences besides those offered by American institutions. Like most of the other immigrant women, even Rosa did not learn to speak English at the courses organized by the settlement house. A short time after her arrival in 1886 at the mining camps of Missouri, she was already able to use a certain amount of English words, which, however limited, enabled her to communicate with people other than those from her own ethnic community. In fact, once she realized she had to speak English, she managed to make herself understood, especially when she had to address herself to the owner of the food store or the clerk at the post office where she used to go to send her letters to Italy.40 Besides the support of the community, what emerges is that the language difficulties did not represent a traumatic impact to this immigrant woman, who instead of feeling discriminated against, recalls she was offered

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help and support by many Americans. ‘‘When they saw how much I wanted to speak English they were helping me’’ (176). The much-praised social workers, who put all their efforts into educating the foreign-born (and women especially), sometimes failed to understand that, for most immigrants, learning was compromised by the intensive rhythm of work which precluded regular and constant attendance. Nevertheless, instead of criticizing the short-sightedness of her American teachers, Rosa was more concerned about justifying her absence from English-writing classes. I never learned to do the writing in English. I all the time used to come to that class so tired and so sleepy after scrubbing and washing the whole day—I went to sleep when they started the writing. I couldn’t learn it. (224)41

Rosa was one of many women who worked so hard earning a living and rearing children that they had no time or energy left for schooling.42 But she was there when the social workers used to teach that ‘‘it’s not nice to drink the beer, and we must let the baby do this, and this’’ (223). Undoubtedly, the educational program of the settlement house underrated the economic pressure that affected immigrant women, but the program itself caused difficulties. This point emerges from the short story of another immigrant woman, Anzia Yezierska, who lamented the devastating effects of the social workers’ attempt to ‘‘help’’ immigrant women.43 Emphasis upon Americanization at the expense of ethnic traditions alienated some immigrant women who, like Clara’s mother, were not ready or could not abandon their distinctive lifestyles. Others, however, did not perceive the conflicting aspects of American and ethnic behavior and put the emphasis on the advantages of such cultural interaction. Instead of causing alienation, the Americanization process introduced at the settlement house made Rosa feel good to the extent that she ‘‘loved those American people.’’ It is true that it did not take long for American-born social workers to admit that the furor of Americanization was dangerous and that it was better to approach the immigrants according to non-American standards. They recognized that ‘‘with European families it was necessary to consider woman in relation to her family setting, since the family unit is so closely knit.’’44 Making the immigrant women feel they were being regarded as subjects and not merely as objects was certainly successful.45 The psychological rewards were certainly responsible for so much enthusiasm in being ‘‘educated,’’ evident in the experience of Rosa. Her strong will to gain an education of some kind was perhaps also supported

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by a sort of ‘‘patron-like’’ relationship to the female social workers of the settlement house, who compensated for her difficult marital and familial situation.46 Notwithstanding her lack of spare time, Rosa participated actively in the singing societies and drama clubs that were being organized at the settlement house.47 This experience, recounted in passionate and extensive parts of her narrative, certainly contributed to improvement of her language skills.48 Besides becoming one of the promoters of the women’s clubs,49 Rosa even went so far as lecturing herself. ‘‘Sometimes when they had the big meetings in Hull House they would tell me to come there. One time that university in Evanston made me come there and tell stories to those teachers who were going to school to learn the storytelling’’ (235). Maxine Seller says that ‘‘immigrant autobiographies tell of women of all ages attending innumerable poetry readings, plays, concerts and lectures (on anything from Darwin to anarchism to the history of Ancient Greece).’’50 Educational work among immigrants was multifaceted and included social service agencies that rejected rigid Americanization and promoted an early, distinctive policy of cultural pluralism.51 This was made easier by the policy of staffing the local agencies with the immigrants themselves. Foreign-born or second-generation social workers added a familiarity with immigrant languages and traditions to their professional training in social work.

Grace Billotti Spinelli The positive influence of social workers affected the professional choice of Grace Billotti Spinelli, who became a social worker ‘‘probably because I was guided by a woman who was and is dedicated to social welfare as Florence Nightingale to nursing’’ (Spinelli, Roots and Wings, 99–100). In other words, Grace was ‘‘educated’’ to the acceptance of her ethnic origin by an American social worker, who certainly personified one of the most typical roles of the progressive ideology of the New World. ‘‘It was she who nursed and strengthened my appreciation of my dual background—until the day when I felt fully and peacefully at home in either’’ (100). Indeed, Grace’s attitude toward American educational institutions had always been one of gratitude since the early days of her arrival from Italy. The school experience of Grace Spinelli is recalled in her autobiography in the same apologetic and enthusiastic tone that reminds us of Mary Antin’s narration. As a daughter of first-generation Sicilian immigrants, she arrived in the United States in 1916 at the age of ten, young enough to receive an

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American education.52 She had already attended elementary school in Italy, which certainly smoothed the transition to the American educational system.53 For her, ‘‘with the exception of English, a lot of the other work was repetitious’’ (94). On another note, she recalls her American school neglecting ethnic backgrounds: The teachers at the school I was attending had no experience with the children born abroad because the bulk of immigration had come in the beginning of the 20th century. (94)54

Because of this ignorance of the teacher, not all went smoothly for the immigrant children. Teachers made educational mistakes, one of which was to place the newly arrived in the lower classes, no matter what their age. It happened to Grace. ‘‘I was very small however, and the teachers evidently did not realize that I was ten years old, unless they were to be reminded by my record’’ (94). Surprisingly, Grace’s statement denies any responsibility on the part of the teachers and reveals a rather superficial, if not insensitive attitude on the part of the American teaching personnel. Grace, however, never criticizes this aspect of the American school system. On the contrary, she stresses the satisfaction with the way she was treated at school. Thanks to an unexpected minor incident that occurred a couple of days after her arrival, the young immigrant was made to feel at ease in her school. The episode about her simple white coat, sewn by her mother and much admired by her schoolmates, and being ‘‘selected’’ by her teacher to be shared with another young girl of the class, helped Grace gain self-confidence and ‘‘all the emotional security I needed’’ (78). Looking back, she could say: ‘‘From that day I was on solid ground’’ (78). Stress on the positive impact of the American school is recurrent throughout her narration: I was happy for I did many things for the teachers from checking bridge tickets to marking school papers. I also took the attendance. Then too, acted as an interpreter for the foreign parents who had been asked to come to school because of their problem children. I believe I spent more time in the principal’s office than I did in my own class room. (94)

Similar to the experience of Mary Antin, the American school provided for Grace a public recognition that was psychologically rewarding. ‘‘Of course I loved it. I was only too eager to help in any way I could or run errands’’ (94). Even when this idyllic rapport with the American system started to fade, she did not lose her faith in the institution. ‘‘Changed from the first school where I had been the teacher’s pet, I found myself in a school

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where I no longer counted’’ (95). The new situation moved her away from focusing on emotional security and made her aware of her true scholastic level: ‘‘Then I began to think of the higher grade I should have been in’’ (95). Convinced that she had been erroneously evaluated, that first week I told my problem to the teachers. . . . She was most understanding and helpful. With a little extra tutoring every afternoon, in a couple of weeks I skipped two grades. From then on I made up for the lost time. (95)

Her schooling proceeded without difficulties and left no memories of intolerance or discrimination. Grace’s teachers were always ready to help her, and her schoolmates never made her feel ‘‘like an outsider’’ (100). Such a rewarding experience at school was reinforced by a rather ‘‘revealing’’ source of support from her Italian-American family. Grace’s parents did not obstruct their daughter’s school career.55 Although they did not understand the language and were not always able to evaluate her progress, we are told that everybody in the family was convinced that ‘‘there was no question that I was to stay in school until I became a teacher’’ (95). Furthermore, for the Billottis, to study was ‘‘the only thing for their daughter to do in their desire to acquire a higher social status’’ (95). Unquestionably, some first-generation immigrant parents understood that education was a means to better one’s social status. As a matter of fact, this Sicilian immigrant family decided not only to invest its money in an ‘‘American education’’ but also to encourage both sons and daughters to achieve professional status through education. Did this mean uprooting ethnic traditions regarding women’s roles? Most likely, in this case American education was appreciated because it offered opportunities that did not threaten immigrant parents’ idea of a typical feminine role.56 Grace became a social worker, which was an occupation—just like teaching—that somehow fulfilled Italian ethnic expectations for women. Perhaps, the absence of inner conflicts in the narrative of this Italian-American daughter is due to the fact that she did not have to struggle for her professional aims. Moreover, what emerges is that ‘‘Italians were pragmatic’’ in their attempts to adapt to American life. Whenever Italian-American women needed education to qualify for better jobs, the traditional attitudes toward schooling appeared less deeply rooted.57

Bruna Pieracci If it is true that most of the first-generation Italian-American families showed a negative attitude toward their children’s education, the narratives

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of Grace Spinelli and another Italian-American woman, Bruna Pieracci, throw a different light on that picture.58 Bruna, who emigrated from the northern Italian region of Emilia Romagna as a child at the beginning of the century, remembers that, for her father, education ‘‘was almost an obsession. Like the father of Fannie Hurst, the famous Jewish novelist, ‘education was all’ ’’ (Pieracci, ‘‘Bruna Pieracci,’’ 40). He also considered it ‘‘almost a sin’’ to be late to school or to be absent for even one day. The narrator admits that her father’s attitude was more advanced than that of other immigrant fathers, due to his having had the chance to be educated while living in Scotland.59 She also recognizes that other immigrants were less obsessed by the wish to provide their children with some sort of education. Yet she maintains that ‘‘the parents desired an education for their children, and they knew that with an education their children would not have to labor in the dark tunnels of a coal mine’’ (38). In other words, for these immigrants, schooling meant one of the possible routes to upward mobility for which they had emigrated from Italy.60 ‘‘A better way of life had been their dream in the old country and they knew it would be realized here in America’’ (38). It seems that for these immigrant parents who worked in the coal mines in Iowa, the possibility of being bettered socially by their children was not a problem.61 Moreover, they worked and sacrificed themselves, convinced—or at least hoping—that their children and their children’s children would probably never know as the parents had, hunger and oppression, and best of all, they would have the opportunity to learn. (38)62

For the Pieraccis, education was not considered dangerous nor did it threaten the parent-child relationship. In fact, education was a priority that, instead of causing a gap, brought the children closer to their parents.63 The intellectual enthusiasm of Bruna’s father, supported further by his knowledge of the English language, encouraged an interest at home in books that became a real passion for all the members, despite their limited economic situation: We had little to read except textbooks and the Miners Journal and since my father read English, we did take an English newspaper which we literally devoured. (43)

Memories of the narrator’s early years at school in the mining camps near Des Moines include ‘‘a little gray schoolhouse so crowded with children and so poorly equipped. Here, one teacher taught all subjects to eight

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grades’’ (43). This situation did not make study easy: ‘‘It was amazing how much the children ever learned under such circumstances’’ (43). In Bruna’s short narration, we are frequently told that the family had to face serious economic problems in order to permit the children to attend school (40– 43). But interest in school was so great that the family accepted even the most difficult conditions. All of this was compensated for by the fact that all four children completed grade school, marking the first of a series of educational successes: We all finished grade school . . . which was quite an accomplishment considering the turmoil of our family and the dim lighting of the kerosene light. (43)

Not only did the children attend school regularly, but they also obtained results better than their native-born schoolmates. Bruna comments, ‘‘I often wonder now, how one of us became the school’s spelling champion’’ (43).64 Each scholastic success was a reason for satisfaction. It was with great pride my father accompanied that child, his only son, to the county spelling match. Even if he did not win the first prize, it was honor enough for us. (43–44)

Mentioning the only male child—and later that the accomplishments of the son gave the father a special feeling—might suggest an inferior evaluation of the daughters as compared to the sons. But Bruna seems more concerned about pointing out the similarities rather than the differences between the sexes. She underlines that all the children were sent to high school despite economic problems and transportation difficulties. As we graduated one by one, from the small mining camp, we attended high school in a small town several miles away. We reached it by going on an interurban train, that passed only a few blocks from our home. When my father had three children in high school at once, often there was not enough car fare for all so they walked the distance of two miles to high school. (44)

Although the sacrifices required to send his children to school increased, the desire to give them proper schooling never diminished. The pride of this Italian-American miner and his strong belief in education became a stimulus and gave encouragement to his children whose school accomplishment represented ‘‘a great achievement for all’’ (44). The narrator recounts that the expected social and economic advancement which schooling was supposed to guarantee to these immigrant parents was not always obtained. Many fathers were disappointed when they

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realized that their educated children could not easily find a job. Even worse was the fact that for many of the immigrants who worked in Des Moines, the only alternative to unemployment remained the mines from which the immigrant fathers had desperately tried to remove their sons. On the other hand, the prospects for educated daughters were less dramatic, for many of them ‘‘married early or had, as their ancestors, gone to the city to work as domestics or in the small factories in the area’’ (45).65 Contrary to this trend, Bruna did not get married after high school but decided to stay at home and take care of her sick mother.66 She notes that it was her free choice: ‘‘While I chose to stay home and care for my mother whom we had returned to the home, the other children chose to go on to college’’ (45). What could be considered an Old World value of women having to care for the sick and elderly of the family does not seem to have caused any conflict or limitation for this Italian-American woman. Her sacrifice is compensated by her sincere interest in her brother and sisters’ scholastic career. Their strong sense of responsibility remained unaltered even ‘‘under the most adverse conditions’’ (45). The merits of Bruna’s siblings appeared even more praiseworthy when compared with the results of the other American students: ‘‘The children who went to college did not drop out. To their everlasting credit they remained and in due time they graduated’’ (45). Bruna explains further that when the immigrant parents saw that their own children could go to college, they knew that the better way of life had finally been realized. As each one went out into the world and achieved various degrees of success, they basked in reflected glory. (45)

For the Pieraccis, education proved to be a route to upward mobility. Each immigrant child started a professional career after graduation. ‘‘My father saw his son become an electrical engineer and later acquire more college credit and degrees. Two daughters became school teachers’’ (45). Once again, we can say that the daughters’ choice was such that permitted minimal strain upon accustomed family arrangements.67 Furthermore, the ‘‘choice’’ mirrored the societal expectations for women of that time. As Seller says in her essays, when studying the immigrant women we should go ‘‘beyond the stereotype’’ that pictures them as ignorant and incompetent. In this way we will not be surprised to discover that many immigrant women had interests and commitments that were not limited to their homes and families. But even those who did not enter this category— such as the very traditional wife and mother who did not have the time,

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energy, self-assurance, or perhaps even the desire to participate in public life—should be freed of the negative stereotypes. Illiteracy should not be confused with ignorance nor should poverty be synonymous with personal degradation. The woman who fed and clothed a large family on five dollars a week—to the astonishment of the social worker trained in home economics—may have been illiterate, but she was certainly not ignorant.68

The personal narratives of the four Italian-American women analyzed are not to be viewed as successful stories of exceptional selves. Rather, they witness some of the possible statuses that women gained after a satisfying educational experience. The significant value attributed to the education received in America helped them face their immigrant experience. They gained confidence in the English language and used it effectively to represent themselves. A scholastic career, which led two of them into the American professional world, represented a double-faceted reflection of their ethnic background: their becoming teachers and social workers set them firmly in the American professional world and simultaneously fulfilled the feminine requirements their immigrant families expected them to maintain. As Corinne Krause says in her essay on the transition from European small towns to American industrial urban areas, immigrant women adjusted positively. They succeeded in finding a ‘‘niche for themselves and achieved a degree of self-esteem without transforming themselves into any single ‘American’ model.’’69 Although the stories of these lives can not be generalized, they may be used to widen the narrow picture of immigrant women in America. Notes I thank Professor John Paul Russo of the University of Miami and the late Professor Rudolph Vecoli and the staff of the Immigration History Research Center (University of Minnesota) for their helpful suggestions for this article. 1. Mary Antin, The Promised Land. (Boston: Houghton, 1912). 2. Ibid., 222. On Mary Antin see Cecyle Neidle, America’s Immigrant Women (New York: Hippocrene, 1975). 3. Cecyle Neidle, ‘‘The Foreign-Born View America: A Study of Autobiographies Written by Immigrants to the United States,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1962, 156. 4. Ibid., 122. In her analysis of over ninety immigrant autobiographies, Neidle says that ‘‘remarks about the chicanery of teachers or school authorities are very few

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Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants 73 in comparison to the expressions of praise and appreciation one finds specifically for teachers’’ (ibid., 125). 5. ‘‘This influx of foreign children had great impact on the schools, providing the impetus for changes that transformed a corrupt, inefficient, and conservative system into a modern and progressive one.’’; Selma Berrol, ‘‘School Days on the Old East Side: The Italian and Jewish Experience,’’ New York History 57, no. 2 (April 1976): 202. 6. On the assumption that the expanded public education was a response to a fear of the newcomers, see Colin Greer, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education (New York: Basic Books, 1972); and Michael Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971). 7. On the Italian educational system see Ida Zambaldi, Storia della scuola elementare in Italia (Rome: Las, 1975); and Dina Bertoni Jovine, Storia dell’educazione popolare in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1965). 8. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 5. 9. See John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1955); John Higham, Send These to Me (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Amy Bernardy, Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, 1909, n.1 e Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, 1911, n. 1. Reports of the U.S. Immigration Commission, published in 1911, devoted five of its forty-one volumes to ‘‘The Children of Immigrants in Schools’’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office). 10. On the controversy with respect to the value of education and immigrants, see B. Weiss, ed., American Education and the European Immigrant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 11. Leonard Covello, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child (Leiden: Brill, 1967). 12. On the comparison between Italian and other ethnic groups’ attitudes toward education, see Berrol, ‘‘School Days on the Old East Side,’’ 201–13; Virginia YansMcLaughlin, Family and Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977); Reports of the U.S. Immigration Commission. 13. Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, 144). 14. Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 83–121. 15. Sr. Mary Fabian Matthews, ‘‘The Role of the Public School in the Assimilation of the Italian Immigrant Child in New York City, 1900–1914,’’ in S. M. Tomasi and M. H. Engel, eds., The Italian Experience in the United States (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), 125–41; Joseph Lopreato, Peasants No More: Social Class and Social Change in an Underdeveloped Society (San Francisco: n.p.,1967); and Joseph Lopreato Italian Americans (New York: Random House, 1970); Phyllis Williams, South Italian Folkways in Europe and America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938); Stephen Aiello, ‘‘Italian Americans and Education,’’ Italian Americana 5, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1979): 224–31; Maxine Seller, ‘‘The Education

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74 Maria Parrino of Immigrant Children in Buffalo, New York 1890–1916,’’ New York History 57, no. 2 (April 1976): 183–99. 16. ‘‘The high priority accorded education in the great American democratic experiment is a truth few would deny’’; Salvatore LaGumina, ‘‘American Education and the Italian Immigrant Response,’’ in Weiss, American Education and the European Immigrant, 61. 17. Timothy Smith, ‘‘Immigrant Social Aspirations and American Education, 1880–1930,’’ American Quarterly 21, no. 3 (Fall 1969): 523. 18. M. Hall Ets, Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1970; Bruna Pieracci, ‘‘Bruna Pieracci,’’ in The Immigrants Speak, ed. S. LaGumina (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), 33–47; Grace Billotti Spinelli, Roots and Wings, manuscript deposited at the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC), St. Paul, Minnesota; Clara Corica Grillo, ‘‘Clara Corica Grillo,’’ in The Immigrants Speak, 113–23; and Clara Corica Grillo, ‘‘Little Italy— Cleveland Ohio,’’ n.d., based on tape-recorded lecture by Mrs. Clara C. Grillo, deposited at the IHRC of St. Paul, Minnesota, 1–33. All further references to these texts will be indicated by page numbers in the text. 19. Rudolph Vecoli, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in Ets, Rosa, vi. 20. Corinne Azen Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters, Oral Histories of Three Generations of Ethnic American Women (Boston: Twayne, 1991), vii. 21. On this topic see Maxine Seller, ‘‘Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman, 1880–1924,’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 59–71; Micaela Di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 22. Georges Gusdorf, ‘‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,’’ in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28–48. 23. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘‘Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice,’’ in The Private Self, ed. Shari Benstock (London: Routledge, 1988), 40. 24. Four million Italians entered the United States between 1876 and 1924. One third of them were women. See Ercole Sori, L’emigrazione italiana dall’Unit . . . alla seconda Guerra Mondiale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979). 25. For a more complete analysis of these texts see my doctoral thesis, ‘‘Il luogo della memoria e il luogo dell’identit . . . : narrazioni autobiografiche di donne dell’immigrazione italo-americana,’’ University of Genova, Italy, 1989. 26. Harriet Perry, ‘‘The Metonymic Definition of the Female Concept of Honour among Italian American Families in Toronto,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, ed. B. Caroli, R. Harney, and L. Tomasi (Toronto: Multicultural Society of Ontario, 1978). 27. Helen Barolini, The Dream Book (New York: Schocken, 1985), 8. 28. On immigrant women and boarders, see Amy Bernardy, Italia Randagia (Turin: Bocca, 1913); Robert Harney, ‘‘Men without Women,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, ed. Caroli, Harney, and Tomasi; Elisabetta Vezzosi, ‘‘The Dilemma of the Ethnic Community: The Italian Immigrant Woman between

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Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants 75 ‘Preservation’ and ‘Americanization’ in America of the Early Twentieth Century,’’ in Support and Struggle: Italians and Italian Americans in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Joseph L. Tropea, James Edward Miller, and Cheryl Beattie-Ripetti (New York: American Italian Historical Association, 1986). 29. On the teaching of the Italian language, see Bernardy, Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, n. 1, 114–15; Maxine Schwartz Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), chap. 6, ‘‘Education,’’ 197–239; Raymond Mohl, ‘‘The International Institutes and Immigrant Education,’’ in Weiss, American Education, 117–41; Maddalena Tirabassi, ‘‘Prima le donne e i bambini: gli International Institutes e l’Americanizzazione degli immigrati,’’ in Quaderni Storici 51 (December 1982): 853–80. 30. Virginia McLaughlin, ‘‘A Flexible Tradition: South Italian Immigrants Confront a New Work Experience,’’ in Immigrants in Industrial America 1850–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 67–84. See also Bernardy, Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, 96. 31. On Clara Grillo, see Maddalena Tirabassi, Il Faro di Beacon Street: Social workers e immigrate negli Stati Uniti (1910–1939) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990), 126. 32. The autobiographer explains that most of the first-generation immigrant sons became attorneys, whereas the second and the third generation ‘‘had everything: attorneys, doctors, personnel managers, psychiatrists, stockbrokers, ranchers, politicians and authors’’ (Grillo, ‘‘Little Italy,’’ 8). 33. For a different opinion on this subject, see Nathan Glazer and Pat Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963), 199. 34. On women and boarders see Bernardy, Italia Randagia, 210–15. 35. On social workers and immigrant women see, among the others, M. Tirabassi, Il Faro di Beacon Street: scholars’ position. 36. In 1859 Italy approved a national law on education, called the Casati Law. It created a highly centralized system that made very slow progress in the south. The Coppino Law of 1877 mandated compulsory education but produced little improvement. See Jovine, Storia dell’educazione popolare; LaGumina, ‘‘American Education and the Italian Immigrant Response,’’ 63. 37. As the autobiographer explains: ‘‘It was not a convent, it was an institution for orphan girls. A rich man in Milan had a silk mill on Lago Maggiore near Canaletto and the girls that made the silk for him were the girls of the istituto. He didn’t pay the girls but he let them live at the istituto and he paid for the food and for the sisters to teach them and take care of them’’ (Ets, Rosa, 87). 38. Rosa’s narration is an invaluable source on the life within the Commons House, one of the most famous settlement houses in Chicago. The spreading of these organizations in American cities was the result of social and ideological factors, including the most evident ones: industrial growth, the mass of European immigrants, a deeper understanding of social problems, and the image of America as a nation of equality and opportunities. See Richard Juliani, ‘‘The Settlement House and the Italian Family,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 103–23.

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76 Maria Parrino 39. A kind of educational work among immigrants was carried on by the International Institutes. See Mohl, ‘‘The International Institutes and Immigrant Education, 1910–1940.’’ 40. Significantly, the two places mentioned represented for Rosa as for most of the immigrant women the first—and sometimes only—two social environments of the New World in which they inevitably had to ‘‘expose’’ themselves. ‘‘La grande maggioranza delle donne italiane di una certa et . . . si trova dunque agli Stati Uniti nelle stesse condizioni di analfabetismo, o quasi, in cui era in Italia, riguardo all’italiano, e in condizioni di ignoranza completa, o quasi riguardo all’inglese.’’ Bernardy, Bollettino dell’Emigrazione, n. 1, 94. 41. This is the only reference in the book that alludes to a ‘‘ghost writer.’’ Marie Hall Ets, a social worker who met Rosa at Chicago Commons, actually wrote the story of her life. On Marie Hall Ets, see Andreina De Clementi, ‘‘L’America di Rosa,’’ in Il racconto delle donne, ed. A. Arru and M. T. Chialant (Naples: Liguori, 1990). 42. Maxine Seller, ‘‘The Education of the Immigrant Woman, 1900–1935,’’ Journal of Urban History 4, no. 3 (May 1978): 307–27. 43. Anzia Yezierska, ‘‘The Free Vacation House,’’ in Hungry Hearts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920); as quoted in Seller, Immigrant Women, 188. 44. Mohl, ‘‘The International Institutes and Immigrant Education,’’ 121. 45. Tirabassi, Il Faro di Beacon Street. 46. Rosa escaped from her first husband when he started to beat her. She moved to Chicago thanks to the help of a friend, Gionin, who later became her second husband. After this she devoted herself to the settlement house. 47. On drama clubs and other activities organized at the settlement houses, see Mary Ellen Mancina Batinich, ‘‘The Interaction between Italian Immigrant Women and the Chicago Commons Settlement House, 1900–1944,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. 48. Since the beginning, Rosa’s relation with the settlement house in Chicago was enthusiastic. More than the language, the social world of the Commons offered this Italian immigrant woman a special kind of education that made her overcome her fear of authority; for this, she was grateful to the whole nation. In the last pages of her autobiography, she maintains that living in Italy would not have permitted her to achieve what she did: ‘‘That’s what I learned in America: not to be afraid.’’ Ets, Rosa, 254. 49. On women’s clubs see Lorett Treese, ‘‘ ‘Why, It’s Mother,’ ’’ in this volume. 50. Seller, Journal of Urban History, 324. 51. See Tirabassi, ‘‘Prima le donne e i bambini: gli International Institutes.’’ 52. On the terms ‘‘first-generation girls’’ and ‘‘first-generation Americans,’’ see ‘‘The Extent and Nature of the So-called Second Generation Problem,’’ as quoted in ibid., 869. 53. David Cohen, ‘‘Immigrants and the Schools,’’ Review of Educational Research 40, no. 1 (February 1970):13–27.

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Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants 77 54. On the different waves of American immigration, see Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 33. On the relation between modernity and tradition, see McLaughlin, ‘‘A Flexible Tradition. ’’ 55. Miriam Cohen, ‘‘Changing Educational Strategies among Immigrant Generations: New York Italians in Comparative Perspective,’’ Journal of Social History 15 (Spring 1982): 3. 56. McLaughlin, ‘‘A Flexible Tradition.’’ 57. Cohen, ‘‘Changing Education Strategies,’’446. 58. See also Krause, Grandmothers; and Edith Blicksilver, ed., The Ethnic American Woman (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall, Hunt, 1978). 59. Bruna’s father had emigrated to Scotland before he went to America. He lived there fourteen years and became the owner of a fish and chips shop. ‘‘He worked hard and dutifully sent money home to help support his parents, several brothers and a sister. After such a long absence from his family and native village, he was persuaded to return to Italy’’ (Pieracci, ‘‘Bruna Pieracci,’’34). On Italian emigration to European countries, see Sori, L’emigrazione italiana dall’Unit. 60. On this subject see Milton Gordon, Human Nature, Class, and Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 61. Weiss, American Education; Briggs, An Italian Passage. 62. The autobiographer’s present work proves that the children not only learned the language but also learned how to manifest their gratitude to their parents through using English language in their written text. For a completely different opinion on this matter, see McLaughlin, Family and Community, who maintains that ‘‘those who could save, for example, chose to invest their money in homes rather than education, so reducing the likelihood that sons would excel their fathers’’ (178). 63. John Briggs’s An Italian Passage has questioned the conception of Italian immigrants’ hostility to education and the consequent gap between parents and children. 64. Another Italian immigrant student underlined in his autobiography the meaning of a spelling competition; Angelo Pellegrini, Immigrant’s Return (New York: Macmillan, 1953), on whom see Neidle, ‘‘The Foreign-Born View America.’’ See also A. Pellegrini, Americans by Choice (New York: Macmillan, 1956). 65. On Italian women’s jobs see Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 66. According to the narrator, the mother was ‘‘emotionally . . . troubled’’ for she had been shocked by surgery required for a tubal pregnancy and by the constant grief for her native land. 67. McLaughlin, ‘‘A Flexible Tradition, ’’ 69. 68. Seller, ‘‘Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman, 1880–1924,’’ 67. 69. Corinne Krause, ‘‘Urbanization without Breakdown: Italian, Jewish, and Slavic Immigrant Women in Pittsburgh, 1900 to 1945,’’ Journal of Urban History 4, no. 3 (May 1978): 293.

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Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns Italian-American Women in New York City william egelman 2000

Traditional Italian society long followed gender-based societal patterns. Male and female roles were clearly delineated and integral to the entire family matrix. Southern Italian folk culture—important because approximately 80 percent of all Italian immigrants to the United States came from southern Italy—was, at least on the surface, patriarchal with men, capa della famiglia, head of the family. Johnson (1985, 108) notes that ‘‘at least nominally (the husband) was considered to be the supreme authority over the wife, children, unmarried sisters, and younger brothers. He was respected, feared, and revered.’’ Wives were to give their husbands due respect. When a husband returned home from work he expected his wife to ‘‘present a clean house, orderly children, a hot dinner and clean clothes’’ (Cronin 1970, 69). Such gender roles became part of the cultural baggage the Italian immigrants brought with them. Most Italian immigrants, arriving at the turn of the century landed and remained in New York City. The New York they came to was the most urban, and one might add, urbane city in the world. While the old way emphasized family, community, and tradition, New York City was emerging as a ‘‘modern metropolis,’’ with its emphasis on individualism, personal achievement, and change. In this new environment there was great concern that young women should be raised in the right way, in the manner of traditional southern Italian culture. But New York City, where many of them resided, and the larger society underwent substantial change during the twentieth century. Obviously, these changes would also alter the lives of Italian-American women. One example of this change was the emergence of modern urban culture. In 1986, Kathy Peiss pointed out that at the turn of the century the 78

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Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns 79

nature of women’s work changed. In part because of the development of department stores, there was an increase in the number of white-collar jobs. Demand increased for salespersons, stenographers, typists, and other jobs that came to be seen as ‘‘women’s jobs.’’ Immigration helped to fuel the expansion of the American workforce and, to some degree, the sons and daughters of the immigrants filled the increasing number of job slots. Clearly, by providing work outside the home, these workplace experiences freed a number of young women from traditional parental constraints. It is in this expanding work environment that the daughters of immigrant women became members of the urban working class. A number of them entered the needle trades as sewing machine operators. While perhaps not as physically straining as other types of work, the women often worked long hours for relatively little pay and no real work benefits. In Mary Jane Capozzoli’s study of three generations of women in Nassau County (1990), she found about three-fourths of the first-generation women were working in blue-collar occupations. They were sewing machine operators, seamstresses, and dressmakers. As she notes in her study, ‘‘the jobs that Italian women got were mostly low-income, low-status, and sexually segregated’’ (Capozzolli 1990, 85). It is this pattern of work among Italian-American women to which we now turn our attention. As we shall see, increases in educational levels will affect vocational attainments. Utilizing 1980 and 1990 census data we can compare Italian-American women in New York City over time, and to the total female population of the city.* Table 1 presents data comparing Italian-American women with all women in New York City. Italian-American women appear to follow the same overall employment pattern as all women in New York City. The slight differences in percentages for employed and unemployed are not significant given the different population bases. One key variable related to employment is education. Table 2 presents data on education for all females in New York City, and for Italian-American females in 1980 and in 1990. This allows for two types of analyses: comparing Italian and non-Italian women in 1990; and comparing Italian women in 1980 and 1990 for internal changes in educational patterns. Italian-American women have lower levels of higher education when compared to all females in New York City. For example, 15.2 percent of all * This chapter, published in 2000, focuses on the ten-year period noted—a snapshot of a significant moment for Italian-American women. Later related research findings can be found in other articles in this volume. [Author’s note, 2010]

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80 William Egelman Table 1. Female labor force participation, 1990, New York City. All females

Labor force Activity Employed Unemployed Armed forces Not in labor force Total

Italian-American females

Number

Percent

Number

Percent

1,468,177 135,929 1,502 848,468 2,454,076

59.8 5.5 0.06 34.6 100.0

165,500 10.179 43 93,284 269,006

61.5 3.8 0.02 34.7 100.0

Source: 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample (five percent).

Italian Americans are college graduates as compared to 20.7 percent of all females. Nearly 40 percent of New York females have had at least some college as compared to only 30 percent of the Italian category. Examining the data for Italian-American women over time, however, indicates some dramatic changes in educational achievement. The percentage of college graduates has doubled in the past ten years (from 7.1 in 1980 to 15.2 in 1990). Italian-American women with at least some college has increased from 14 percent to almost 30 percent. These changes in levels of educational attainment impact on labor patterns. Table 3 offers a similar analysis as Table 2. Italian-American females

Table 2. Years of school completed for females ages twenty-five and over, New York City, 1980 and 1990. Educational attainment Total Not high school graduate Less than ninth grade Some high school High school graduate High school graduate only Some college College graduate

All females (1990)

Italian Americans (1990)

Italian Americans (1980)

100.0 (2,666,626) 32.2 14.9 17.3 67.8 28.4 18.7 20.7

100.0 (318,568) 32.6 16.1 16.5 67.4 37.5 14.7 15.2

100.0 (346,720) 49.2 30.3 18.9 50.8 36.7 7.0 7.1

Source: 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample (five percent); 1980 census summary tape file 4; Egelman and Salvo (1994).

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Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns 81 Table 3. Occupations of employed females, aged 18–64, New York City, 1990 and 1980. Occupation group Total Executive and managerial Professional specialty Technicians and related support Sales Adm. support, clerical Private household Protective service Other services Farming, forestry, fishing Blue collar Precision production Machine operators and assemblers Transportation and material moving Handlers and helpers

All females (1990)

Italian Americans (1990)

Italian Americans (1980)

100.0 (1,468,177) 13.5 20.2

100.0 (165,500) 16.1 16.6

100.0 (164,360) 8.7 10.7

3.1 9.2 30.2 1.4 1.0 13.1 0.1 8.3 1.7

2.6 10.8 39.6 0.2 1.0 7.6 0.1 5.4 1.4

2.1 9.3 47.8 0.2 0.6 8.7 0.1 11.9 1.9

5.1

3.0

8.6

0.5 1.0

0.4 0.6

0.3 1.1

Source: 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample (five percent); 1980 census summary tape file 4; Egelman and Salvo (1994).

may be compared to all females in 1990; and a comparison of Italian-American females over time may be made by comparing the data for 1980 and 1990. When compared to all females, Italian Americans do not appear to have a significantly different pattern of employment. They are slightly higher in the executive and managerial category and slightly lower in the professional specialty category. Again, what appears to be of greater interest is the difference in Italian-American patterns over time. Since 1980, there has been a dramatic increase into the higher employment categories. The percentage of Italian-American women in the highest category has doubled since 1980. The professional category has increased by some 60 percent. These increases have been countered by decreases in the lower-level whitecollar category (administrative support and clerical) and a reduction by onehalf in the overall blue-collar category.

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82 William Egelman

To get a better sense of these generational changes, it is helpful to draw upon some previous research. Egelman and Salvo (1997) examined variations within the larger Italian-American community. Two New York City communities, predominantly Italian American, were selected for study. Bensonhurst is an older community with a substantially older population. The median age for Italian Americans is 39.6 years, with 20 percent of the population sixty-five years and over. Almost one-third of the population is fiftyfive years of age and over. In some ways it resembles an almost stereotypical Italian blue-collar urban ethnic neighborhood. South Richmond, on the other hand, resembles a ‘‘typical’’ suburban community even though it is located within New York City on Staten Island. It has a median age of 30.7 years with 7.9 percent of the population sixty-five years of age or over. Less than 15 percent of the population is fifty-five years and over. Two points appear to reinforce the generational change discussed previously. In examining Table 4 it is clear that South Richmond has a higher rate of females in the professional category. Perhaps of even greater interest

Table 4. Occupation of employed Italian-American females in Bensonhurst and South Richmond, 1990. Occupation group Total Executive and managerial Professional specialty Technicians and related support Sales Adm. support, clerical Private household Protective service Other services Farming, forestry, fishing Blue collar Precision production Machine operators and assemblers Transportation and material moving Handlers and helpers

Bensonhurst

South Richmond

100.0 (12,954) 13.0 10.3 1.9 10.9 44.9 0.5 1.1 6.8 0.5 10.2 1.6

100.0 (12,270) 14.0 15.1 2.2 14.5 42.9 0.0 1.3 7.8 0.3 1.8 0.3

6.7

0.6

1.4 0.5

0.2 0.7

Source: 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample (five percent); 1980 summary census tape file 4; Egelman and Salvo (1994).

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Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns 83

is the difference in the blue-collar category. In Bensonhurst, 10.2 percent of the females are in the blue-collar category, and in South Richmond, the figure is 1.8 percent. The data indicate substantial changes are taking place within the ItalianAmerican community. Italian-American women experienced dramatic increases in levels of educational attainment with the percentage of women college graduates doubling in ten years (7.1 percent in 1980 to 15.2 percent in 1990). Not surprisingly, these changes are accompanied by changes in work patterns. The traditional notion of the female staying at home appears to be fading. Italian-American women are in the labor force at approximately the same rate for all females in New York City. Table 3 demonstrates that their representation at the highest work categories (executive and managerial; professional specialty) has almost doubled. The proportion of women working in blue-collar occupations has been cut in half from 1980 to 1990 (11.9 percent to 5.4 percent). In addition to changes in education and occupation, another variable may impact on traditional gender roles in Italian-American culture. Jessica Cohen (1980) reports that Italian-American women tend to be much more traditional than Jewish-American women. More specifically, when compared to Jewish-American women, Italian-American women were more likely to have higher fertility rates and they were less likely to be in the labor force. Italian-American women were more likely to express the attitude that ‘‘a woman’s place is in the home.’’ They were also more likely to treat their children differently with sons clearly getting preferential treatment. Her research indicates that this difference holds even when the level of educational achievement is controlled. She writes that ‘‘the traditional feminine role in the Italian-American subculture will most likely continue to be maintained as long as high levels of ethnic group contact are maintained’’ (Cohen 1980, 245). With respect to ethnic group contact, Italian-American neighborhoods are still a real part of the urban landscape in New York City. For example, South Richmond, discussed earlier, is a neighborhood that emerged after World War II largely as a result of the construction of the Verrazano Bridge (Egelman and Salvo 1997). In spite of its recent development, it still in some ways represents an urban ethnic neighborhood. Over one-half of its population is Italian American. In their recent study of white ethnic neighborhoods, Alba et al. (1997) note that while a number of sizable Italian neighborhoods still exist in the New York City area, a process of spatial

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84 William Egelman

assimilation may also be occurring. There appears to be a dispersion of Italian Americans to the suburbs, with growing numbers moving to outer suburban areas that have the least ethnic concentrations. This change is significant because a key to the continuity of ethnic traditions is the ethnic neighborhood. As Cohen (1980) noted, if ethnic contacts remain high, traditional roles will persist over time. If ethnic contacts are weakened, traditional gender roles may change. What then are the implications of these changes on the Italian-American community, and on the women of this community? It is somewhat difficult to assess micro-level issues based upon an analysis of macro-level demographic data. Therefore, what follows should be viewed as possibilities or hypotheses for future research.† First, and perhaps most dramatically, the perception of the ‘‘woman’s place’’ in the culture will be altered. As more women achieve higher levels of education, and with it, higher positions in the occupational structure, it will be more difficult to maintain the psychological linkages to the more traditional notions of what it means to be a woman. Elizabeth Messina (1994) makes a similar point when she writes: Today Italian-American women are in the midst of a powerful psychological transition: they are being challenged to achieve a level of development and integration in their feminine identities that may ultimately require them to transform many unconscious aspects of their psychological functioning. As they avail themselves of opportunities to achieve levels of educational and professional success historically denied to their mothers and grandmothers, they are confronted with the developmental challenge of becoming conscious of many of their hidden emotional needs, feelings, and sexual desires that may conflict with the culture’s traditional ideals of femininity. (Messina 1994, 83)

The stereotypic notion of ‘‘mamma’’ may come to have symbolic significance in the sense of romantic nostalgia, but will likely have little to do with the real lives of contemporary Italian-American women. For daughters this may result in being pulled in two different directions simultaneously. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick (1994) perhaps sums this up best when she writes: Such research possibilities still pertain today since processes of change occur over time. The ten-year period that I looked at in this study was a significant marker of change for Italian-American women and can be described as dramatic. My current research indicates the same general patterns of change reflected in this article. [Author’s note, 2010]

†

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Traditional Roles and Modern Work Patterns 85 When Italian American daughters rebel, their ‘‘I-ness’’ comes through loud and strong—but so too does their remembrance of the ‘‘we.’’ They feel the lure of family and community—the thrill of self-sacrifice. The ‘‘I’’ is a heady release conflicted by a potent nostalgia. I want the ‘‘I’’ with its hunger for difference and freedom. But I want the ‘‘I’’ to linger along with the ‘‘we’’—to be part, somehow, of our collective memory. (Torgovnick 1994, 153)

Second, as women achieve higher levels of educational attainment, more career opportunities will develop. A type of social momentum is at work: as more Italian-American women achieve educationally and enter higher levels in the occupational structure, more Italian-American women will do so due to alterations in the transmission of cultural values. No less significant is the role of modeling. As more and more daughters see their mothers in these new roles, more daughters will follow in their mothers’ footsteps. Third, the nature of husband–wife relations is likely to change. Given the increasing social and economic resources of these women, one would expect a movement toward more egalitarian marriages, at least for those who decide to marry. Fourth, a number of traditional family patterns may change. When one thinks of the Italian-American family, the typical stereotypic notion is that the family is close-knit, interacts on a regular basis, and is entwined in a set of reciprocal obligations. Given the changes in education and occupation, residential patterns of Italian Americans may change. As noted previously, Italian Americans tended to remain in ethnic neighborhoods, and for longer periods of time, than did other ethnic groups. Educational and occupational mobility is associated with residential mobility. It may become more difficult to have Sunday dinner with the family if the parents live in New York City and the Italian-American daughter teaches at the University of Oregon. Does all this mean that the traditional Italian-American family and the larger ethnic culture are disappearing? It would seem to be premature to make such a judgment.‡ There is little question that change is occurring. The data strongly support this conclusion. It may be, however, that Italian-American women, as are other women, are trying to straddle two worlds: the world of traditional ethnic culture and the world of modern urban America. Many Italian-American women have internalized the values and beliefs they learned in their childhood. Caring for the children, maintaining a good home, tending to one’s husband are all part of the cultural baggage derived from their ‡

Even today, this still seems the case. [Author’s note, 2010]

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86 William Egelman

youth. At the same time, they pursue careers and meet the challenges of the contemporary workplace. While many of these women may be carrying the traditional values of the Italian-American subculture, the behavioral expectations associated with their new emerging statuses and roles are in direct conflict with the traditional values (see Orthner 1990). The current generation of women will develop strategies to negotiate their new emerging reality, which may serve as a model for future generations. Works Cited Alba, Richard, et al. 1997 ’’White Ethnic Neighborhoods and Assimilation: The Greater New York Region, 1989–1990.’’ Social Forces 75:883–912. Capozzoli, Mary Jane. 1990. Three Generations of Italian American Women in Nassau County, 1925–1981. New York: Garland Publishing. Cohen, Jessica. 1980. ‘‘Sex Roles in a Comparative Context: Some Observations on Jewish and Italian American Women.’’ Journal of Comparative Family Studies 11:233–48. Cronin, Constance. 1970. The Sting of Change: Sicilians in Sicily and Australia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DeSena, Judith N. 1987. ‘‘Involved and ‘There’: the Activities of Italian American Women in Urban Neighborhoods.’’ In The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000, edited by Jerome Krase and William Egelman, 239–47. Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association. Egelman, William, and Joseph Salvo. 1994. ‘‘Italian Americans in New York City, 1990: A Demographic Overview.’’ In Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, edited by Jerome Krase and Judith DeSena, 99, 114–26. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum. ———. 1997 ‘‘Italian American Labor Force Participation in New York City, 1990: An Emerging Diversity.’’ In Industry, Technology, Labor and The Italian American Communities, edited by Mario Aste et. al, 128–46. Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association. Johnson, Colleen. 1985. Growing Up and Growing Old in Italian American Families. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Messina, Elizabeth. 1994. ‘‘Life Span Development and Italian-American Women: A Review.’’ In Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, edited by Jerome Krase and Judith DeSena, 74–87. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum. Orthner, Dennis K. 1990. ‘‘The Family in Transition.’’ In Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family, edited by David Blankenhorn, Steven Bayme, and Jean Elshtain, 94–105. Milwaukee: Family Sevice America. Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Torgovnick, Marianna De Marco. 1994. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000 A Demographic Analysis of National Data william egelman 2005

This paper presents a demographic analysis of the Italian-American population. Utilizing data drawn from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, a number of key variables will be analyzed. Among the variables will be age distribution, regional distribution, migration, marital status, educational and occupational variables, and an analysis of income distribution. Several specific family variables also will be examined. The analysis will be twofold: first, changes within the Italian-American population between the census years; and second, comparisons will be drawn between the Italian-American population and the total United States population. Based upon the analysis of these data, discussion of future trends will be offered.

Age According to the 2000 Census the total population of the United States was 281,421,906 persons. Of this total there were 15,723,406 Americans who claimed to be of Italian ancestry. Italian Americans made up 5.6 percent of the total United States population. In 1990 Italian Americans made up almost 5.9 percent of the total population. With respect to the age distribution of Italian Americans, relatively little change in the overall age distribution profile has occurred. There has been a 2.8 percent decrease in the under twenty population and a 2.5 percent decrease in the sixty-five years and over population. The median age of the population has remained the same. There appears to be no significant difference in the Italian-American population age profile when compared to that of all persons in the United States. The data suggest that many Italian Americans are part of the 87

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88 William Egelman

larger baby boom generation of persons born during the post–World War II period of 1946–1964. Almost one-third of all Italian Americans are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four years (29.6 percent). This is almost identical to the age profile of the entire population (29.7 percent). As with the larger population, issues related to the aging process, such as special health care needs, may become more pronounced in the coming decades.

Regional Distribution and Migration Historically, Italian Americans’ area of residence was in the northeast region. This was due largely to the influence of the very large New York City settlement pattern of the earlier Italian immigrants. The population is still predominantly located in the northeast region with a slight increase (2.1 percent) of residents now living in the south. The data indicate a similar pattern of residence with that of the nation overall with declines in the northeast and Midwest, and increases in the south and west. This is representative of the larger Frostbelt to Sunbelt migration pattern occurring in the United States. It should be noted, however, that almost one out of two Italian Americans still resides in the northeast region. The 3 percent decline in the northeast share of the population may be related to changes in educational and occupational patterns that will be explored further in Tables 3, 3A, and 4. The census allows us to examine migration over a five-year period. Respondents are asked to compare their current residence with where they

Table 1. United States population distribution by age and ancestry, 1990–2000. All persons

Total population Under 20 years 20–64 years 65 years and older Median

Italian ancestry

2000

1990

2000

1990

281,421,906 28.5 59.2 12.5 35.4

248,791 28.9 58.7 12.5 32.8

15,723,406 30.6 58.1 11.3 33.8

11,286,815 33.4 52.8 13.8 33.8

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4, sample data; Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001; 1990 census: ‘‘Ancestry of the Population of the United States’’ (1990, CP-3–2).

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis 89

lived in the year 1995. The questions applied to all persons five years and over. Table 2A compares all persons with Italian Americans. There appear to be no significant differences between all persons and persons of Italian ancestry. Italian Americans were more likely to be in the same house in 2000 as they were in 1995 but the difference is less than 3 percent. A little more than two out of five Italian Americans (42 percent) did change their residence in the five-year period included in the data. These data seem to contradict the traditional notion that Italian Americans do not move as frequently as other Americans. Although the differences are not significant, Italian Americans, when they do move, are slightly more likely to move to a different county and a different state. These small changes may be explained in part by some of the regional shifts noted in Table 2.

Education Italian Americans have shown substantial increases in the level of education. There has been a dramatic decrease in the percent of ‘‘not a high school graduate’’ with percentages in this category almost reduced by half in the ten-year period included in this analysis. At the same time, the highest educational category shown has increased by 38 percent from 21 percent college graduate or higher in 1990, to 28.9 percent in 2000. This change is even more significant given the fact that the time period covers only ten years. In 1990 Italian-Americans’ educational pattern was not significantly different from that of all persons. In 2000, the differences appear to be significant in all educational categories. For example, in 1990 the percent difference between Italian Americans and ‘‘all persons’’ with bachelor’s degree or

Table 2. Regional distribution of the population, 1990–2000. All persons

Total population Northeast Midwest South West

Italian ancestry

2000

1990

2000

1990

281,422,000 19.0 22.9 35.6 22.5

248,718,000 20.4 24.0 34.4 21.2

15,556,079 48.0 16.7 19.1 16.0

14,553,000 51.0 17.0 17.0 15.0

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001; 2000 census survey file 3 (SF 3), sample data.

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90 William Egelman Table 2A. Migration of all persons and persons of Italian ancestry, 5 years and over, 1995–2000. Residence in 2000 Population 5 years and over Same house as in 1995 Different house in the U.S. Same county Different county Same state Different state Elsewhere in 1995

All persons

Italian ancestry

262,375,152 54.1 43.0 24.9 18.1 9.7 8.4 2.9

14,538,472 57.2 42.0 23.4 18.6 9.5 9.1 0.7

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

higher was less than one percentage point (0.7); in 2000 the difference increased to 4.5 percent. While there may be a number of factors that contributed to the slower rate of increase for all persons (such as age structure and recent immigration patterns), this does not detract from the 38 percent increase in Italian-American college graduate figures noted above. Another way to examine these data is to break out the numbers from the 2000 census and analyze educational attainment by gender. Table 3A presents data on these gender differences in educational attainment. Italian Americans have significantly lower percentages of ‘‘not a high school graduate’’ and significantly higher percentages of high school graduates and bachelor’s degree or higher for both gender groups. As of the year 2000, a little

Table 3. Years of school completed for persons 25 and over, 1990–2000. All persons 2000 Total Not a high school graduate High school graduate Bachelor’s degree or higher

Italian ancestry 1990

2000

1990

(182,211,639) (158,868,436) (9,852,875) (7,516,642) 19.6 24.8 13.0 22.7 80.4 75.2 87.0 77.3 24.4 20.3 28.9 21.0

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 census summary tape file 3 (STF 3), sample data; www.census .gov/population/socdemo/ancestry/Italian.txt; 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis 91 Table 3A. Years of school completed for persons 25 and over by sex, 2000. All persons

Total Not a high school graduate High school graduate Bachelor’s degree or higher

Italian ancestry

Male

Female

Male

Female

(87,077,686) 19.9 80.1 26.1

(95,133,953) 19.3 80.7 22.8

(4,795,829) 12.6 87.4 31.5

(5,057,046) 13.3 86.7 26.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau: 2000 census summary file 4, matrices PCT64 and PCT65.

over one out of four Italian-American females have achieved at least a bachelor’s degree, and almost one out of three males have achieved at least a bachelor’s degree.

Occupation Given the changes in educational attainment, it is not surprising to find concomitant changes in occupational structure. Most prominently, this has occurred in the managerial and professional categories with an almost 30 percent increase in the Italian-American representation in this occupational level. Italian Americans have an almost 5 percent higher representation in this category when compared to all persons in the United States. Another change worthy of note is the continuing decline in the numbers of Italian Americans in the ‘‘blue-collar’’ category. Historically, Italian Americans were overrepresented in this general occupational category, especially in the construction trades. In 1990, for example, for every three persons in the managerial and professional category, two persons were in blue-collar work. In 2000, the ratio is now slightly greater than two persons to one person. Proportionately, Italian Americans now have greater presence in the highest occupational category. Another way to analyze occupational status is to look at specific occupational categories. Three of the higher status categories are: accountants and auditors, lawyers, and physicians and surgeons. Table 4A compares all persons and Italian Americans by sex for each of these occupations. ItalianAmerican males and females have slightly higher representation in these occupations than the ‘‘all persons’’ category. What is perhaps the more interesting finding is that Italian-American males and females have closer levels

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92 William Egelman Table 4. Occupation of employed persons, 16 years and over for selected occupational groups, 1990–2000. All persons 2000

Italian ancestry 1990

2000

1990

Occupation groupa (129,721,512) (115,681,202) (7,692,307) (5,693,696) Managerial and professional 33.6 26.4 38.3 29.6 Technical, sales, and administrative 26.7 31.7 29.5 35.7 Service occupations 14.9 13.2 13.8 12.0 Farming, forestry, and fishing 0.7 2.5 0.2 1.0 24.0 26.2 18.2 21.8 Blue collarb Some categories were merged to create homogeneous groups for the time periods covered. Blue collar includes the following occupational groups: construction, extraction, and maintenance; and production, transportation, and material moving. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 summary tape file 3 (STF 3), sample data; www.census.gov/ population/socdemo/ancestry/Italian.txt; 2000 Census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data. a

b

of representation than do all males and females. For both accountants and auditors, and physicians and surgeons, gender differences for Italian Americans are 0.2 percent.

Income The changes in education and occupation impact on income measures. In both years shown, Italian Americans had higher median incomes for both household and family income measures. The rate of increase has also been greater for Italian Americans as compared to all persons. Between 1990 and 2000, median household income increased by 39.7 percent for all persons.

Table 4A. Selected occupations by ancestry and sex, 2000. Males

Accountants and auditors Lawyers Physicians and surgeons

Females

All persons

Italian ancestry

All persons

Italian ancestry

1.1 0.9 0.7

1.5 1.2 0.8

1.6 0.4 0.3

1.7 1.7 0.6

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis 93

For Italian Americans, the figure was 42.1 percent. A similar pattern occurs when examining median family income. For all persons, the increase was 43.1 percent, and for Italian Americans it was 45.1 percent. Another example of the relative position of Italian Americans with respect to income is to examine the percentage at the highest family income category: $200,000 or more. For the entire population, 2.9 percent were in this category; while for Italian Americans it was 4.1 percent of this ethnic population. If we look at data on poverty a similar pattern emerges. For all families, 9.2 percent were living below the poverty level in 1999. For Italian-American families the figure was 4.8 percent. For all individuals, 12.4 percent were living below the poverty level, while for Italian-American individuals the comparative figure was 6.7 percent. In both cases, Italian Americans had significantly lower percentages living below the poverty line.

Marital Status Italian Americans have a very similar pattern of marital status when compared to the general population. In the year 2000 there appears to be no significant difference in the percent distribution by marital status. This may be somewhat surprising given the central focus of family in traditional Italian-American life. From the data for ‘‘never married’’ and ‘‘divorced’’ it may be inferred that much has happened to the traditional behavior patterns in Italian-American family life. If we examine the same data and include gender differences, there is still a similar pattern for both Italian Americans and the general population. The biggest difference is for never married females, in which Italian-American

Table 5. Household and family median income and percent of families living in poverty, 1990–2000. All persons

Median household income Median family income Percent of families in poverty

Italian ancestry

2000

1990

2000

1990

$41,994 $50,406 9.2

$30,056 $35,225 10.0

$51,246 $61,297 4.8

$36,060 $42,242 4.9

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 census summary tape file 3 (STF 3), sample data; selected characteristics for persons of italian ancestry: 1990 (CPH-L-149); www.census.gov/population/ socdemo/ancestry/table_04.txt; 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

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94 William Egelman Table 6. Marital status for persons 15 years and over, 1990–2000. All persons

Number Never married Now married Separated Widowed Divorced

Italian ancestry

2000

1990

2000

1990

221,148,671 27.1 54.4 2.2 6.6 9.7

186,818,528 27.6 53.5 2.4 7.7 8.7

12,038,967 29.7 53.9 1.5 5.6 9.1

9,163,711 27.2 57.2 1.6 6.9 7.1

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 summary tape file 3 (STF 3), sample data; www.census.gov/ population/socdemo/ancestry/Italian.txt; 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

females are 3 percent more likely to have never married than the total population. Changes in family life may be examined further by analyzing the data presented in Table 7 on never married persons. In all traditional family systems, all adults are expected to marry. In fact, marriage is seen as one of the rites of passage into adulthood. The data in Table 7 clearly illustrate that at the very least there is a process of deferring marriage to a later age. A little over four out of five Italian Americans had not yet married by the time they were twenty-four years of age. Over one out of three had not yet married by the time they were in their early thirties. This pattern reflects the overall pattern that is occurring in the larger society. As compared to the general population, Italian Americans had an even higher percentage never married.

Table 6A. Marital status for persons 15 years and over by sex, 2000. All persons

Number Never married Now married Separated Widowed Divorced

Italian ancestry

Male

Female

Male

Female

107,027,405 30.3 56.6 1.8 2.5 8.6

114,121,266 24.1 52.1 2.5 10.5 10.8

5,898,498 32.5 55.9 1.3 2.4 7.9

6,140,469 27.1 51.9 1.8 9.1 10.1

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4, matrices PCT21, PCT35, and PCT36.

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis 95 Table 7. Never married persons by age, 2000. All persons

20–24 years 25–34 years 35–44 years

Italian ancestry

Total No.

Never married

Percent

Total No.

Never married

Percent

19,025,357 39,577,357 45,905,471

14,085,200 13,642,019 7,167,650

74.0 34.5 15.6

1,047,558 2,282,502 2,636,778

875,390 858,983 400,302

83.6 37.6 15.2

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

The never married pattern may be explored further by examining gender differences. Tables 7A and 7B present data on these differences. ItalianAmerican males are much less likely to marry when they are in their early twenties. Almost nine out of ten males have yet to marry in the twenty- to twenty-four-year category. For males twenty-five to thirty-four years of

Table 7A. Never married males by age, 2000. Males All persons

20–24 years 25–34 years 35–44 years

Italian ancestry

Total no.

Never married

Percent

Total no.

Never married

Percent

9,705,979 19.902,737 22,797,615

7,643,554 7,791,629 4,071,894

78.8 39.1 17.9

524,249 1,136,815 1,313,372

456,988 490,385 233,872

87.2 43.1 17.8

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

Table 7B. Never married females by age, 2000. Females All persons

20–24 years 25–34 years 35–44 years

Italian ancestry

Total no.

Never married

Percent

Total no.

Never married

Percent

9,320,001 19,674,620 23,107,856

6,441,646 5,850,390 3,095,786

69.1 29.7 13.4

523,309 1,145,687 1,323,406

418,402 368,598 166,430

80.0 32.2 12.6

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

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96 William Egelman

age, a little over two out of five have yet to marry. For both these age categories, Italian-American males have substantially higher percentages than their male counterparts in the rest of society. However, in the highest age category presented, there is no difference in the percentage never married. One may infer from these data that Italian-American males will eventually marry at the same rate as all other males, but they will marry at a somewhat later age. For Italian-American females a similar pattern appears in the data. A larger percentage of Italian Americans remain never married in their early twenties as compared to all females in the population. The difference narrows for the twenty-five- to thirty-four-year category; however, Italian Americans are still less likely to have married. As with the males, the difference in the thirty-five to forty-four age category is no longer significant. Again, as with the males this may indicate a later age at which Italian-American females marry as compared to all females. Another measure of change is represented by the data in Table 8, showing unmarried partner households. Italian Americans engage in this type of relationship at a rate no different than that of the general population. In fact, Italian Americans are slightly more likely to have such a relationship although the differences are not significant. Again, given traditional notions of the centrality of Italian-American family life, these data infer shifts in these traditional patterns.

Conclusions In examining these data, the overall impression is that few significant differences exist between Italian Americans and the total United States population. On a macro level, there is strong evidence that Italian Americans have Table 8. Unmarried partner households, 2000.

Total no. of households Unmarried partner households Male householder and male partner Male householder and female partner Female householder and female partner Female householder and male partner All other households

All persons

Italian ancestry

105,539,122 5.0 0.3 2.4 0.3 1.9 95.0

5,880,958 5.6 0.4 2.7 0.4 2.2 94.4

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 census summary file 4 (SF 4), sample data.

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Italian Americans, 1990–2000: A Demographic Analysis 97

moved into the mainstream of American society. While still heavily represented in the northeast region, there is some dispersion to the Sunbelt states. When they migrate, they appear to follow migration patterns similar to other Americans. In 1990, Italian Americans had approximately the same or slightly higher levels of educational attainment. By the year 2000, the differences had increased with Italian Americans having substantially higher levels of college graduates. With the increase in educational attainment, there is a parallel increase in occupational status as measured by an increase in higherlevel white-collar service occupations and a decrease in blue-collar occupations. As a result, Italian Americans now on average have substantially higher earnings than persons in the general population. Assimilation is a process. It involves changes over time both within a specific population and in the larger society. These data indicate that the processes of assimilation are proceeding along a relatively rapid path for Italian Americans. The changes between 1990 and 2000 appear to be dramatic. What the consequences may be for the Italian-American community need to be explored in further research that includes both qualitative and quantitative data.

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage The Italian-American Spouse william egelman, william gratzer, and michael d’angelo 2005

All cultures create rules regarding mate selection. Endogamy, the norm or rule that states one should marry within some social category, is one of the strongest norms in all societies. As Merton (1941) notes, ‘‘in no society is the selection of a marriage partner unregulated and indiscriminate’’ (361). Barron (1972) also asserts the universal power of the norm of endogamy. He writes that ‘‘all records show that in every society, historical or contemporary, primitive or modern, cultural restrictions are designed to limit the possible marriage partners available to any person’’ (39). In the United States, intermarriage may occur between members of the dominant group and the minority group; or, there may be intermarriage between members of different minority groups. Given the history of immigration to the United States, there are any numbers of ethnic immigrant groups whose members may have the opportunity to make contact, interact in a variety of situations, fall in love, and eventually marry. Each of these ethnic groups brings with them a variety of norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs. Each group brings with them their own norm of endogamy with its accompanying definition of who is an acceptable partner and who unacceptable. In the assimilation process, the definition of endogamy may undergo change. A type of continuum may evolve where some come to be less unacceptable than others are. Where a group lies on this continuum depends on the size of the group, the period of immigration, patterns of settlement, and the degree of similarities and differences between the groups. This paper will focus on intermarriage patterns between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, two groups exhibiting similar patterns. They both arrived in large numbers in the United States between the years 1880 98

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 99

and 1930, despite small representations before and after this period of migration. Both groups settled in large numbers in New York City. The city then became the predominant location of settlements, very often in neighborhoods adjacent to each other, though not in the same neighborhood. Each group maintained their own unique ethnic special boundaries within the residential polyglot of what was New York City at the turn of the century. The more recent concept of choice as a determinant of ethnicity as well as similar educational levels and occupational achievements, geographical and social mobility, and the increased secularization of society will be looked at as they relate to intermarriage.

Italian Intermarriage Approximately 75 to 80 percent of all Italian immigrants to the United States came from southern Italy, comprised of mainly a rural peasant culture. Such societies tend to be tradition-directed, where the group has precedence over the individual, and family is the central institution. Tomasi (1972) notes the centrality of family in southern Italian culture when he writes: ‘‘The individual is socially and interiorly organized around the family, which determines status, roles and values for him (or her). His (or her) personality develops out of, and is sustained by his (her) essentially familiaristic orientation’’ (18). Not surprisingly marriages were seen as family arrangements, not as individual contracts, but allowing for alliances to be formed between families. In the immigration and assimilation processes, endogamous norms weakened. Richard Gambino (1974) describes this weakening of norms in the following way: Attempts by Italian immigrants to impose this system of courtship and wedding upon their American-born children were strongly rejected and led to great conflict between generations. The second generation sought parental approval but insisted on free dating and personal selection of spouses in the American manner. The second generation usually won its way, but at a cost of breaking contact with the cultural wellsprings of its own values. (182)

Joseph Lopreato, in his classic study of Italian Americans (1970), examines the research data from Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy’s (1952) study of ethnic groups in New Haven, Connecticut. He finds that at the turn of the

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100 William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo

century Italians were highly endogamous. However, in a somewhat prescient observation, Lopreato concludes his analysis of intermarriage patterns by stating: It is possible, however, that under the influence of increasing secularization and the culturally equalizing effects of mass communications, ethicoreligious bonds will weaken to a much greater extent and allow a higher degree of freedom in the choice of marital partners, and, hence, of personal relationships in the most intimate aspects of the human existence. (136)

By the 1950s there was a growing tendency toward out-marriage. By 1980 approximately 20 percent of New York City’s Italian-American population was of mixed ancestry (Egelman and Salvo 1994). Mary Waters (1990) notes that while there is still a tendency for ethnic endogamous marriages, there appears to be a shift in out-marriages. Younger cohorts are more likely to marry out than older age cohorts are. In her own research she found that ethnicity was the least salient of endogamous variables, race being the most salient, and religious differences somewhere in the middle with respect to the degree of its acceptance. Waters illustrates the shifting importance of religion by quoting from one of her Italian-American respondents. When asked about having his child marry someone of a different religion, a male respondent answered: It is up to them. We just want what is best for them. We think it is even harder to marry outside of the religion (as compared to marrying outside the ethnic group). How would you raise the kids? That is the most important question. But this is a decision that the kids make on their own. It is not up to their mother and me. We just want their happiness. (109)

Alba in his (1985) analysis of NORC data from 1975 to 1980 finds increasing levels of interreligious marriages for Italian Americans. The birth cohort born prior to World War I has an out-marriage rate of approximately 15 percent. The post–World War II cohort has an out-marriage rate at approximately 50 percent. The out-marriage rate is so high that Alba argues that it will dilute Italian-American distinctiveness Gambino (1974) offers some evidence to support the contention that Italian Americans increased their out-marriage rates. Citing a study by Andrew Greeley, Gambino asserts that out-marriage rates were less than 10 percent of all marriages in the first generation, and rose to about one-third of all marriages in the second generation. Most of the non-Italian spouses

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 101

were either of Irish or German ancestry. In all likelihood Irish Americans supply the largest number of spouses. Gambino goes on to argue that in New York City Italian and Jewish marriages were also relatively large in number. He offers two possible explanations for these types of intermarriages: First is the obvious fact that both groups have very large populations in the same relatively small geographic area. Second, both groups have traditions of strong family orientation. Although life patterns are significantly different in both groups, their parallel family matrices serve to overcome each group’s aversion to exogamous marriage. (185)

Marianna De Marco Torgovnick (1994), in her recent book of autobiographical essays, notes: ‘‘I am an Italian American woman married to a Jewish man—a classic New York mixed marriage. I know that Jews and Italian Americans go together as naturally as pizza and bagels fit into the American diet; in fact, as immigrants, they shared neighborhoods, jobs, and experiences’’ (vii). While not completely historically correct, Torgovnick does illustrate a commonly held belief of the similarities between Italian and Jewish American cultures. Franco Mulas also examines the relationship between Italians and Jews in his study of ‘‘Jews in the Italian-American Novel’’ (1994). He looks at the work of three Italian-American authors, Pietro Di Donato, Jerre Mangione, and Mario Puzo. He asserts that in the work of these three authors, Jews are depicted with a combination of admiration and envy. The authors admire the intellectual capacity of Jews. There is also a sense ‘‘of a shared destiny in the struggle to break free from the poverty that both have been forced to endure’’ (247).

Jewish Intermarriage In 1990, the Council of Jewish Federations published a population survey that sent shock waves through the Jewish-American community (Kosman et. al. 1991). The report stated that over one-half (52 percent) of recent marriages that involved Jewish Americans were intermarriages. This rate of intermarriage is dramatic given the historical experiences of Jews. For centuries they have been the pariah group of Western Christian societies. Intermarriages were banned and if such marriages occurred they often were treated as crimes.

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102 William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo

The American experience was somewhat different. In the immigration process Jews found the United States to be a much more liberal society than the European societies. However, while there were no laws forbidding interfaith marriages, most of the immigrants and their children stayed endogamous in their marriage pattern. Why then the dramatic shift toward intermarriage in the recent decades? Sarna (1994) has argued that there are four basic transformations that may account for this shift. First, social actors may no longer view ethnicity as a meaningful category. While race and gender appear to remain significant variables, ethnicity has become blurred. Second, religion is being transformed in society. Some Americans do not follow any religion, and an increasing number of minority faiths are emerging. Third, intermarriage across a number of religious boundary lines is increasing—Jews are not the only group marrying out. It appears that Jews are simply one of a number of religious groups participating in this pattern. The fourth transformation refers to changes in identity. Sarna argues that ethnic and/or religious identity has now become a matter of choice. People feel they have a variety of options to choose from. Identity, he argues, is now a matter of consent. Traditionally, it was seen as a matter of descent. He explains the difference in the following way: ‘‘Jewishness by descent ties the future of Jewry largely to kinship and propinquity, the number of children that Jews give birth to. Jewishness by consent links the Jewish future to conversion and adhesion, the ability to attract newcomers and hold on to them’’ (58). In addition to these societal factors, there are elements internal to the group that may account for the increasing rate of intermarriage (see Maxwell 1997). One major factor is related to educational achievement. Jewish Americans have very high rates of educational attainments, which is related to greater social and geographic mobility. These, in turn, are associated with broadening one’s opportunity to meet a greater variety of persons. Higher education is also associated with increasing one’s openness to the larger world, challenging as it does traditional beliefs and customs, and possibly liberalizing one’s views. Higher education may play a dual role in increasing the possibility of intermarriage: increasing the opportunity to meet others of a different faith, and secondly, leading individuals to develop a mindset that increases the possibility of taking advantage of these opportunities. Changes in the level of educational attainment may make an impact on Italian Americans. Historically, Italian Americans had relatively low levels of educational attainment (Egelman 1986). Recent data analyzing the ItalianAmerican population in New York City indicate dramatic increases in educational attainment (See Egelman and Salvo 1994). For example, from 1980

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 103

to 1990 the percentage of Italian-American males who graduated from college rose from 14 percent to 22 percent. For Italian-American females, the increase of college graduates rose from 7.1 percent to 15.2 percent. For a ten-year period, these increases are substantial. Jewish Americans took advantage of educational opportunities at an earlier stage than did Italian Americans, but as noted, Italian Americans as a group are beginning to achieve higher levels of educational attainment. Since educational attainment is related to occupational mobility, both of these factors may be linked to an increase in exogamy, still further increasing opportunities to meet others from different ethnic backgrounds. Educational and occupational homogamy thus becomes more important than ethno-religious homogamy in the mate selection process. Finally, the increased level of secularization in society may further increase larger numbers of interfaith marriages (see Lehrer 1998).

The Survey A review of the literature showed relatively little information about the non-Jewish spouse in interfaith marriages. A survey document, therefore, was developed to examine a variety of characteristics of those individuals married to Jewish Americans. Initially the authors undertook a survey utilizing a snowball technique. Some thirty-three surveys were collected using this technique. With some technical assistance from the Faculty Technology Center at Iona College, a copy of the questionnaire was placed on the Internet. Seventy-three more subjects were surveyed from this source, for a total of 106 subjects. A total of ninety-six subjects answered the open-ended question on ethnic identification. Of these, twenty-six were identified as Italian American and seventy were not Italian American. There were a total of thirty-three males and sixty-eight females for those who answered the question on gender. Within ethnic categories, for non-Italians there were twenty-nine males and forty-eight females. For the Italian-American subgroup, there were twenty females, but only four males. The average age for the subgroups was 45.1 for the non-Italians and 42.1 for the Italian Americans.

Analysis The subjects represented a very highly educated group. Twenty-nine percent of the group had a college degree, and 39 percent had done some type

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104 William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo

of graduate work. Almost two-thirds of the Italian sample had done at least some graduate work. This compares to a figure of only 7 percent nationwide for Italian Americans (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998). The authors examined the differences in attitudes toward certain values. Respondents were asked to answer whether they found each of these values as unimportant, slightly important, important, or very important. Table 1 presents a summary of the results in percentages. Few differences exist between Italian-American spouses and others with respect to their values, except in the areas of ‘‘daring’’ and ‘‘money’’—both valued by Italian Americans more highly than by their non-Italian counterparts. While not statistically significant, it is interesting to note that almost two out of five Italian-American spouses did see daring as important. Italian immigrants, along with their Irish counterparts, were seen as less likely to be involved in risk-taking behavior. Jews, on the other hand, were seen to be more likely to be risk takers. Why, then, did these results appear? It may be the case that this is a self-selecting sample with respect to ‘‘daring.’’ As noted previously, this is a highly educated sample of Italian Americans. They were somewhat daring in their willingness to go beyond group norms in their educational experiences. Daring, it would seem, also played a role in their selection of mates. Therefore, it may be inferred that these Italian Americans value daring because it represents a reflection of their own character. The largest difference was in the importance the groups placed on religion. The Italian-American group viewed religion as less important than did the non-Italian group. With all these data, however, one must exercise caution given the small number of Italian Americans in the sample.

Table 1. The Importance of Values by Ethnic Origin (those responding ‘‘very important’’ or ‘‘important’’). Value

Non-Italian n ⳱ 70

Italian n ⳱ 26

Honesty Daring Understanding Love Money Religion Loyalty

100.0 31.4 100.0 100.0 51.4 70.0 97.1

100.0 38.5 100.0 100.0 65.4 42.3 100.0

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 105

Investigating the religious theme one step further, the authors asked respondents to agree or disagree with the following statement: ‘‘As a child I was very religious.’’ The Italian subsample was somewhat less religious as children than were persons in the non-Italian subsample. Roughly 35 percent of the Italian group disagreed with the statement as compared to 21 percent of the nonItalian group. The same pattern emerges when we examine the subjects’ current perceptions of their own religiosity. Subjects were asked to respond to the fol.’’ lowing statement: ‘‘Today I would describe myself as Italian-American spouses do not see themselves as very religious, with almost one-half of the Italian-American group describing themselves as ‘‘Not Very Religious’’ and only 14 percent view themselves as very religious. Twice this percentage of non-Italians viewed themselves as very religious. How does this translate into everyday practices of religious traditions? Questions were posed to the subjects regarding traditional Christian and Jewish practices. Table 4 examines their responses to participating in traditional Christian activities. Italian-American spouses are less likely to attend

Table 2. Past religiosity by ethnic origin (in percentages). Response

Non-Italian n ⳱ 42

Italian n ⳱ 22

35.7 42.9 14.3 7.1

22.7 40.9 31.8 4.5

Strongly agree Agree Disagree Strongly disagree

Table 3. Subject’s current religiosity by ethnic origin. Degree of religiosity

Non-Italian n ⳱ 42

Italian n ⳱ 22

26.2 50.0 23.8

13.6 40.9 45.5

Very religious Somewhat religious Not very religious

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106 William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo

important church services but on the other hand, just as many Italian Americans will have Christmas trees in their home as non-Italians will. Table 5 presents data on participation in traditional Jewish activities. While there is only a slightly more than one in four chance that either group will belong to a synagogue, over half of both groups participate in what one may refer to as home-based religious traditions, such as a Passover Seder and lighting Hanukkah candles. Four out of five Italian-American spouses have Hanukkah candles lit in their homes and this may be related to an ecumenical attitude that may be emerging around Christmas and Hanukkah. It also may be related to a major element in Italian and Italian-American tradition, and that is the centrality of home and family values that are, in fact, also central to traditional Jewish culture. Putting up Christmas trees and lighting Hanukkah candles are family-centered activities. These activities represent religious, social, cultural, and family traditions and may represent, in this instance, an interesting syncretic combination of Italian and Jewish traditions.

Summary and Conclusions This study does not look at the question of whether Italian Americans may be more likely to marry Jewish Americans than other ethnic Americans—a

Table 4. Participation in Christian traditions. Tradition

Non-Italian N ⳱ 70

Italian N ⳱ 26

42.9 60.0 74.3

30.8 42.3 76.9

Attend Sunday church services Attend Easter services Have a Christmas tree in your home

Table 5: Participation in Jewish traditions. Tradition Belong to a synagogue Attend a Passover seder Light Hanukkah candles

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Non-Italian n ⳱ 69

Italian n ⳱ 26

29.0 56.5 52.9

28.0 53.8 80.8

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 107

fruitful subject for another study—nor does it correct for what may be geographic bias with many Italian-American respondents coming from the northeast as well as the high concentration of Jewish Americans living there. Although this study may be viewed as a preliminary work, due to representing only four Italian-American males out of 106 total subjects, combined with the overrepresented number of subjects in the highest occupational category, there are still interesting points of discussion. Sixty percent of the non-Italians and 73 percent of the Italian Americans were in the Professional/Managerial category. This is not surprising given the high level of educational attainment. With respect to intermarriage, it is also not surprising to find large numbers of well-educated, high-occupational-status persons in the sample. Kalmijn (1991) has argued that educational homogamy is becoming a more important endogamous variable than that of religion, and one might add ethnicity. He suggests that the older religious melting pots are being replaced by homogeneous educational melting pots. Maxwell (1997) has also noted the important impact educational attainment has made on intermarriage. She sees higher educational attainment as having an inverse relationship with traditional attitudes and behavior. Maxwell argues that modern Judaism may combine a non-belief in the divinity of Christ with a ‘‘predilection for matzo ball soup.’’ A similar analysis may be made for Italian Americans. As they continue to increase their level of educational attainment, traditional customs and behavioral patterns may very well change. Ellen Jaffe McClain (1995) in her book on intermarriage notes a problem faced by many Jewish parents. She writes: ‘‘As Jews become more and more comfortable Americans, many Jewish parents have found it increasingly difficult to tell their children that they shouldn’t marry non-Jews, and many aren’t so sure intermarriage is all that bad’’ (18). Italian-American parents may be facing the same dilemma. Lipset and Raab (1995) refer to intermarriage as the ‘‘archway of assimilation’’ (182). They argue that intermarriage rates increase as ethnic isolation diminishes. Intermarriage may be seen as a measure of acceptance, integration, and assimilation. For Italian-American parents, and for Jewish-American parents as well, a strong resistance to intermarriage between their respective children may be seen as a rejection of American values and ideals. At its core intermarriage between Italians and Jews may be a result of the groups’ growing acceptance and mainstreaming into American society, and the success of the assimilation process their respective ancestors embarked upon over one hundred years ago.

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108 William Egelman, William Gratzer, and Michael D’Angelo Works Cited Alba, Richard D. 1985. Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Barron, Milton L. 1972. ‘‘Intergroup Aspects of Choosing a Mate.’’ In The Blending of America: Patterns of Intermarriage, edited by Milton Barron. 36–48. Chicago: Quadrangle. Barzini, Luigi. 1965. The Italians. New York: Atheneum. Egelman, William. 1986. ‘‘Italian-American Educational Attainment: An Analysis Based on Current Population Survey Data.’’ In The Italian Americans through the Generations, edited by Rocco Caporale, 197–211. Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association. Egelman, William, and Joseph Salvo. 1984. ‘‘Italian Americans in New York City: A Demographic Overview.’’ Paper presented at American Italian Historical Association Annual Conference, November 1984. ———. 1994. ‘‘Italian Americans in New York City, 1990: A Demographic Overview.’’ In Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, edited by Jerome Krase and Judith DeSena, 114–26. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum. Gambino, Richard. 1974. Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans. New York: Doubleday. Kalmijn, Mattthijs. 1991. ‘‘Shifting Boundaries: Trends in Religious and Educational Homogamy.’’ American Sociological Review 56:786–800. Kennedy, Ruby Jo Reeves. 1952. ‘‘Single or Triple Melting Pot? Intermarriage in New Haven, 1870–1950.’’ American Journal of Sociology 58:56–59. Kosman, Barry et. al. 1991. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. New York: Council of Jewish Federations and The Center for Jewish Studies, CUNY Graduate Center. Lehrer, Evelyn. 1998. ‘‘Religious Intermarriage in the United States: Determinants and Trends.’’ Social Science Research 27:245–63. Lipset, Seymour M., and Earl Raab. 1995. Jews and the New American Scene. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lopreato, Joseph. 1970. Italian Americans. New York: Random House. Maxwell, Nancy. 1997. ‘‘If You’re So Smart, How Come You’re Intermarried?’’ Tikkun 21:42–44. McClain, Ellen Jaffe. 1995. Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community. New York: Basic Books. Merton, Robert. 1941. ‘‘Intermarriage and the Social Structure: Fact and Theory.’’ Psychiatry 4:361–74. Mulas, Franco. 1994. ‘‘Jews in the Italian-American Novel.’’ In Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, edited by Jerome Krase and Judith DeSena, 247–53. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum. Sarna, Jonathan. 1994. ‘‘The Secret of Jewish Continuity.’’ Commentary 98:55–59. Tomasi, Lydio. 1972. The Italian American Family. Staten Island, N.Y.: Center for Migration Studies.

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Italian-Jewish Intermarriage: The Italian-American Spouse 109 Torgovnick, Marianna De Marco. 1994. Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1998. ‘‘Selected Characteristics for Persons of Italian Ancestry,’’ Internet release, February 18, 1998, www.census.gov/population/ socdemo/ancestry/Italian.txt, accessed, January 19, 2001. Waters, Mary. 1990. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Gender Relations among Italian Americans richard gambino 1998

In a 1958 book, Edward C. Banfield put forth the theory of the southern Italian social system as an egregious example of ‘‘amoral familism.’’1 The theory is still widely used by social scientists and other writers in influential intellectual circles. Banfield’s view that people in southern Italy had no community or social moralities, only loyalty to their nuclear families’ shortterm interests, is often cited or quoted. For example, in the June 1993 issue of Commentary, James Q. Wilson cites the family system of southern Italy as an example of systems that are socially and politically dysfunctional because they are ‘‘amoral.’’2 He continues that America has no need for such family cultures. They should be kept out of our society when possible, and when found, they should be radically reformed. In an exchange of letters on the question of today’s immigration in the August 1993 issue of Commentary, Peter Brimelow cites, and Francis Fukuyama accepts, the theory that the amoral familism of certain ethnic groups is the cause of past and present poor citizenship, organized crime, and other social ills in the United States. Brimelow adds today’s ‘‘Iraqi Christians’’ to immigrants of the past whose cultures were systemically criminal and Michael Lind cites Banfield’s thesis.3 In a defense of Italian Americans and Mexican Americans, Fukuyama agrees that ‘‘it is probably appropriate to compare present-day Mexican immigrants to the several million southern Italians of peasant background who flooded into the United States,’’ accepting the theory of amoral familism and these groups having ‘‘a knack for organized crime’’ as the points of comparison.4 The patriarchal and amoral familism theories of the Italian-American family are well entrenched, not only among scholars but also among oldstyle nativists and others who still speak of the Italian immigrants’ ‘‘less than ideal cultural baggage,’’5 which caused and still causes problems for a morally superior (Protestant) American culture. This is a standard view among 110

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other neonativists today who believe in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment model of the totally cosmopolitan ‘‘universal man.’’ Moreover, the Italian-American system is also denigrated from the opposite side by antinativist and anti-Enlightenment multicultural thinkers. Among multiculturalists, the Italian-American family is routinely and confidently cited as a clear example of the oppressive, patrimonious nature of western civilization that holds women and children as little more than the property of men. It is my view that neither the southern Italian family nor the ItalianAmerican family were or are socially amoral. Moreover, the southern Italian and Italian-American families were and are at least as matriarchal as they were patriarchal, and perhaps more matriarchal than patriarchal. Finally, gender relations between male and female adults and between adults and children in these families are complex and not widely understood. There are essential values involved in Italian-American gender relations that are distinguishable from some distortions created by social and economic stresses. These essential values are desirable models for future gender relations among all Americans. My overall thesis is that the essential values of the southern Italian and Italian-American families are all corollaries of a central concept—the product of centuries of pragmatic experience—that males and females are not contradictory beings (or ‘‘classes’’ caught in some historical dialectic where gender is the equivalent of Hegel’s war between spirit and matter or of Marx’s warring economic classes). Instead, the concept is that males and females are complementary. True, they have not been equal. But in our efforts toward equality, it makes all the difference whether we see the genders as doomed to eternal power struggles or as complementary expressions of the same species. Camille Paglia, for all her provocative and hyperbolic rhetoric, makes a telling point when she says that the traditional Italian system produced powerful female and male personalities. ‘‘My feminism,’’ she says, ‘‘calls for strong men, strong women, which is in fact the Italian system, enormously powerful personalities.’’6 The potential for such powerful gender-specific personalities is bottled up in the present dilemma of Italian-American culture, which is caught in the squeeze between Italian Americans’ ignorance of self on the one side and, on the other, the bizarre distortions prevalent among scholars as well as those in the mass media. These distortions have direct consequences regarding gender relations. A study of Italian-American adults revealed that each gender accepts the dominant culture’s negative views about Italian Americans of the opposite gender and thus rejects the opposite gender within the ethnic group. As

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reported in an unpublished 1986 Ph.D. dissertation by Lisa Mann, ‘‘It became clear that denigrating stereotypes not only affected self-esteem but also served to make Italian Americans of the opposite sex seem less attractive.’’7 But, in fact, the potential in the Italian-American system, with its emphasis on responsible adults, offers men considerably more nurturing possibilities for coming to terms with their fathers and what it is to be a man than trendy expressions of the ‘‘men’s movement’’ with men dressed in pseudoprimitive garb banging tom-toms in some patch of suburban woods. In a book about masculinity that is rich with the insights of a lifetime of clinical experience, psychiatrist Frank Pittman notes that men (and women) have almost ‘‘ended the human family by sacrificing marriage to the glory of frantic, suicidal narcissism. Therapists came along to assure the world that the problem was the family and that the family must be sacrificed for the sake of everyone’s mental health, narcissism and sexual freedom. . . . Noel Coward sang plaintively, ‘What’s going to happen to the children when there are no more grownups?’ We’re finding out.’’8 In contrast to the views of the Italian-American woman in Anglo-American literature, Rose Basile Green points out that in Italian-American literature these same women are held up as, and expected to embody, the traditional defining roles of Italian womanhood.9 These include being the center and protector of the Italian cultural core of love and honor, being responsible for the moral formation of children, the expedition of moral duty among all family members, and the protection of all members of the family. Italian-American women in life as in literature are expected to live up to these expectations, and are assessed according to them as successes or failures—as competent, weak, or strong. One thinks here of the central character, Lucia Santa Corbo, in Mario Puzo’s novel The Fortunate Pilgrim. Lucia Santa struggles powerfully, even heroically, to succeed in the traditional responsibilities of Italian womanhood, while American males see her in terms like those of an Italian-American male doctor in the novel. His Americanized perceptions of her, abetted by his American education and the wealth it has brought him, is so at odds with his profound Italian personality that he becomes obsessively enraged by the war within himself of his conflicting emotions about her: In the dark, windowless bedroom lay the heavy figure of Lucia Santa. Standing beside her was the small girl Aileen, letting her face and hands be washed by the cloth the mother took from a water basin beside her bed. The scene reminded the doctor of some of the religious pictures he had seen in

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Gender Relations among Italian Americans 113 Italy, not for any sentimentality, but because of the composition of the reposing mother tending the child and the lighting of the room, with the dim yellow of the electric bulb casting a beatific glow on the dark-colored walls. He tried to isolate the resemblance. . . . When they were alone he told her to turn over on her stomach, and then rolled up the plain woolen nightgown. He saw the knobby bumps at the base of the spine and said with a reassuring laugh, ‘‘Ah, Signora, you have arthritis. A month in Florida would make you a new woman. You need sunlight, heat, rest.’’ He examined her, . . . conscious of the swelling buttocks of this peasant woman in her forties. Like her [older] daughter’s they were the buttocks of the sensual Italian nudes hung in Florence, great, rounded, as deep as they were wide, but they aroused no desire in him. None of these women could. In his mind they were unclean, unclean with poverty. . . . When Dr. Barbato left the Corbo house he . . . pondered the world and humanity. He felt something resembling awe. With mock humor he recounted the misfortunes of this family. The husband in the cuckoo house, the daughter with that big white worm [tuberculosis] . . . (and don’t forget the first husband killed in that accident), the son with a dismal marriage to a poverty stricken immature girl. Now the woman, burdened with half grown children, became crippled herself and having the nerve to get angry at his remarks. . . . Feeling sick, he muttered without knowing what he meant, ‘‘What the hell are they trying to do?’’ The cold wind came across the railroad yards from the Hudson and set his blood racing. He felt angry, challenged, that this had been permitted to happen in his sight, as if his face had been slapped, as if he were being dared to interfere in some cosmological bullying. His blood churned. This was too much. Too much. . . . For the next two months Dr. Barbato, out of rage, practiced the art of healing. He visited Lucia Santa every second day, gave her injections, gave her treatments, and chatted over old times with her for at least twenty minutes as he gave her massages. . . . Lucia Santa smiled at him. It was a smile that acknowledged her debt and denied his wit. If there was work, people would get up from a deathbed to work, they both knew. As Dr. Barbato prepared to give her an injection she murmured in Italian, ‘‘Ah, Doctor, how am I going to pay you?’’ For once he was not angry. With a comforting smile he said, ‘‘Just invite me to your daughter’s wedding.’’ Implying that there were joys in living, that rewards

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114 Richard Gambino must follow suffering, good fortune follow bad; that all would be well, the daughter would recover, the children grow, time pass.10

The true squeeze in which Italian-American women are caught, and which causes them so much pain and confusion, is not so much attributable to patriarchal men as it is to being torn between expectations of the women as erotic creatures who soon metamorphose into mamma mias and the women’s own self-expectations as the moral centers of their culture. The squeeze is also between a series of views, often conflicting, popular in scholarship today. Some of these are recorded by Donna Gabaccia in a survey of studies about Italian-American women from the 1970s to the present.11 They include ‘‘women-centered’’ studies, Italian-American women as pioneer ‘‘predecessors of today’s ‘jugglers’ . . . combining wage-earning with marriage and motherhood.’’ These views also encompass the argument that the Italian system of ‘‘la famiglia was more a product of immigration and life in the United States than of Italian traditions,’’ and the ‘‘sisterhood’’ theorists who see Italian-American women in the context of a ‘‘multiethnic sisterhood of women,’’ as victims of ‘‘abusive fathers and husbands,’’ as ‘‘continuing old-world traditions of mob, often violent female action,’’ as shaped (as in exploitation) by capitalism, as living in a ‘‘Catholic world of sodalities and altar societies,’’ and as ‘‘apolitical if not exactly anti-feminists.’’ Gabaccia’s conclusion from the survey is: But the methods and sources of history and the social sciences proved inadequate in a number of ways. They revealed frustratingly little about female experience and subjectivity, and for that reason they seemed of limited use in answering questions about moral phenomena like identity, consciousness, cultural change, values, and emotions. They also, too often, assumed unquestionably the existence, measurable nature, and immutability of ethnic identity rather than viewing ethnicity as a changing social or ideological construct.12

One might add ethnicity also as a cultural and psychological construct to the models of thought social scientists have mostly ignored. As is true of Italian-American affairs generally, this troubled status is exacerbated by the group’s lack of educated knowledge about its ethnic history and culture on the one hand and, on the other, by bizarrely distorted images of Italian Americans, ranging from wildly inaccurate scholarly perceptions to the caricatures with which the mass media are obsessed. What I once heard Jerome Krase say about Italian Americans, generally, is also true about

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Italian-American women in particular. They have ‘‘an unknown past and an uncertain future.’’ The caricatures of the amoral Italian-American family—its enlightened, powerful, destructive passionate center, the Italian-American woman, and the cafone/mafioso man—dovetail completely. The centrifugal force of Italian female passion is like that of a great black hole (the Freudian overtones of the term from astronomy are entirely appropriate), so powerful that any morality that comes into her family’s orbit from outside is engulfed and obliterated. Any morality that might arise within her family’s orbit cannot escape from it. Thus, Banfield’s label of ‘‘amoral familism’’ as applied to Italian Americans is seen as capable only of producing women of the same type and men who are either amoral cafoni (ill-mannered, vulgar people), mafiosi, or both. So we have hermetically sealed bonds between the three stereotypes of the Italian-American family, woman, and man. It is time to break the seals, disentangle the stereotypes, and refute each. There are major problems with Banfield’s theory. Near the beginning of his book, Banfield says, ‘‘We are not competent to say how representative Montegrano [the fictional name he chose for the town in Lucania he studied] is of southern Italy as a whole.’’13 This, however, doesn’t stop him from applying the theory to the rest of southern Italy, asserting that ‘‘Montegrano is fairly the ‘typical’ south, viz., the rest of Lucania, the regions of Abruzzi and Calabria, the interior of Campania, the coasts of Catania, Messina, Palermo, and Trapani.’’14 Banfield writes: ‘‘The amoral familist will value gains accruing to the community only insofar as he and his are likely to share in them.’’15 How then, one might ask, do the people of Montegrano differ from, let’s say, voters in the United States? Banfield sought to disarm this line of criticism early on in the work: Some readers may feel that amoral familism, or something very much like it, exists in every society, the American no less than the southern Italian. Our answer to this is that amoral familism is a pattern or syndrome; a society exhibiting some of the constituent elements of the syndrome is decisively different from one exhibiting all of them together. Moreover, the matter is one of degree: no matter how selfish or unscrupulous most of its members may be, a society is not amorally individualistic (or familistic) if there is somewhere in it a significant element of public spiritedness or even of ‘‘enlightened’’ self-interest.16

One might ask, what about the fabled extended family of southern Italy? Doesn’t it qualify as an institution of at least an ‘‘enlightened-self interest’’

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extending beyond amoral familism, which Banfield defined as ‘‘the inability of the villagers to act together for their own common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate material interests of the nuclear family [emphasis added]’’?17 Banfield’s stance vis-a`-vis this question is astonishing. He asserts that there was in southern Italy ‘‘the absence of the institution of the extended family,’’18 a preposterous error. The family system of southern Italy extended to all blood relatives and those married to blood relatives, and secondly to an extraordinary network of families created and linked by a system known as comparaggio, a term in southern dialect that translates inadequately as ‘‘godparenthood.’’ (The corruption of the term ‘‘godfather’’ presents one more unnecessary misunderstanding.) The networks formed by marriages, which were arranged to suit extended family interests, and the institution of comparaggio, also arranged for extended family interests, were vast—in fact, they were social, and in rural villages often encompassed the major portion or whole of a town’s population. The duties and responsibilities owed by each person to the others in the network were carefully defined, if unwritten. They were in fact so rigidly enforced by family pressures as to make the social system quite moralistic, and surely not amoral. We see Banfield’s long-lived misunderstandings refuted in the writings of Ann Cornelisen. She had lived in southern Italy for twenty-two years studying its people (in contrast to Banfield’s nine months there). Her 1976 book, Women of the Shadows, is an analysis of the social system of the Mezzogiorno and how its women fit into it. Toward the conclusion of her work, Cornelisen gives her assessment in uncompromising terms of southern Italian society and of popular stereotypes of it: One of the constants so well established that is neither supposition nor respectable myth but dogma, is that simple Western societies, peasant societies, are matrilineal and patriarchal. For twenty years I have obediently tried to convince myself that Southern Italian towns I have lived in, worked in and studied were patriarchal in structure and for twenty years I have failed. Massive doses of sociology and social psychology, though almost fatal, have not cured me. Twenty years of thought and effort to understand Southern Italian peasants, and even more important, twenty years of listening to them and watching them are not proofs. I have no formal proofs. I know of no way to establish them: people’s lives present few absolutes. My opinion was and is simply an opinion which has far too long chipped away at my resolution to ignore it.

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Gender Relations among Italian Americans 117 In the end I cannot. I believe that the social structure of Southern Italian villages, archetypical peasant societies, is matriarchal, and that the social structure of most other poor, relatively isolated Western communities where the Catholic Church either dominates or is an outright state religion, is matriarchal. It is a de facto system, one that is felt by everyone, that functions every day, but is not codified and does not have to be recognized. It is simply there. There are no large decisions to be made by the men and day-to-day existence is left to women, who unconsciously take over all the practical aspects of life. There are no others. Once a woman has power, however slight her influence appears to be outside the family, she consolidates it into a hold over her sons stronger than that famous boast of Jesuits. [Said to be: ‘‘Give us a child until he is seven, and we will have him for life.’’] Only death will loosen it, but already her daughter-in-law has learned the art of day-to-day living and day-to-day power that has tied her sons to her firmly as though they were still swaddled. She has also slowly replaced her husband’s mother, and he, accustomed as he is to the strength of women, does not notice it. He would, in fact, insist with aggressive pride, ‘‘In casa mia, commando io!’’ In my house, I command.19

When Cornelisen’s thesis has been cited at conferences, two objections have been raised. One is that research shows that among African Americans, matriarchy correlates with class. That is, matriarchy among blacks is strongest in poorer, single-female headed families, but is not found intact in families where a husband is present and has a steady income. If this is true, it cannot be automatically assumed that it resembles the Italian-American situation unless one assumes the kind of strict economic determinism that rules out cultural influences, for example, the differences between African cultures and Italian culture, and those between African-American culture and Italian-American culture. The second objection is a generalized version of the first one—it is based on the assumption that among all ethnic cultures in the United States women only have power and authority when a husband is not present, or is chronically unemployed. The generalized version begs the question, just as does the specific one, about the determining power of differences between cultures in addition to economic factors. In the United States, Italian immigrants formed hundreds and perhaps thousands of mutual aid societies, many still functioning today. In the first successful large industrial strike in United States history, the ‘‘Bread and Roses’’ textile strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Italian women literally linked arms and pressed their bodies against soldiers’ bayonets every

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day for almost three months in a struggle to occupy the contested streets of Lawrence’s mill factory district. The same Italian women, deliberately without the presence of their men so as to not give an excuse for violence against them, also escorted hungry children to Lawrence’s train station for evacuation. After the women and children were brutally beaten with soldiers’ rifle butts and thus prevented from boarding trains, more women later repeated the march on the railroad station and this time succeeded. This is hardly the behavior of passive females or of immigrants who brought ‘‘less than ideal cultural baggage’’ or amoral familism. Census materials reveal results of a continuing independence of mind and distinctive patterns of behavior among today’s Italian-American women. Unlike their immigrant ancestors who had no effective knowledge of or access to birth control, today’s Italian-American women have the lowest fertility rate (number of children per woman) and live-birth rates among all American ethnic groups studied by the census bureau (or, as the bureau calls them, ‘‘ancestry groups’’),20 and have had for some time. Yet at the beginning of the 1994 movie, Angie, an Italian-American woman tells us that she was the only child of her parents in 1972 and that ‘‘for Catholics this was like being from Mars.’’ Italian-American women in the age groups under twenty-five years old and over forty-five are found in the labor force outside the home in the highest percentages among all ancestry groups in the United States; but during the period between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, the child-bearing age, Italian women are found in the workforce in percentages that are much lower.21 Italian-American women are living as workers or careerists, wives, mothers, and individuals in a pattern that seems to give full time to some roles in sequence. This might favor their children with maternal attention, might create rifts between them and career-preoccupied husbands, and almost certainly handicaps the women in competitive status when they return to work or careers in middle age. Do they feel the pattern is worthwhile? Do they see their lives as sacrificial, fulfilling, frustrating, or all of these and perhaps more? Do some Italian-American mothers try to ‘‘infantilize’’ their grown children as some have stressed? To my knowledge, the thesis was first raised by a historian, Andrew Rolle, in a 1980 book employing the classic Freudian model of psychology.22 One of the great alternative models of psychology to evolve in more recent times sees the individual psyche not merely as a self-contained entity but more as a part of an interpsychic system that has as its core a person’s family, or whatever functions in his life as a family, instead of the Freudian and other views of intrapsychic analysis. Not surprisingly,

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one of the pioneering centers of the family systems approach arose in Italy. The questions that need to be answered include which Italian-American women try to infantilize their grown children, and why, as well as the influence of factors such as age, generation, economic class, and education. By far the most compelling case made that Italian women infantilize their sons, who collaborate in the process, is given in a paper by Elizabeth G. Messina.23 But Messina’s paper, and the supporting studies she uses, are limited to elderly immigrant Italian-American women and to women in Italy. We need much more study of second, third, and fourth generations of Italian-American women and, for that matter, of younger women in Italy. These populations of women have broken with much of the old mold. (For example, women in Italy now have the lowest fertility rate of any nation in the world, and the low Italian-American fertility rate has already been mentioned.) Messina’s case seems to be buttressed by studies in Italy reported in a 1996 New York Times article.24 It cites reports that 50 percent of twenty-nineyear-old single men in Italy still live in their parents’ homes, as do a large percentage of single women. This, it is said, has nothing to do with income—the percentage of single men living in parental homes is higher in prosperous northern Italy than in the nation’s poorer south. Does this add up to ‘‘infantilization’’ or is it attributable to a different set of cultural norms? (Or is it strictly a defining quirk peculiar to a self-delineated minority, that is, those who marry late?) The Times quotes Italian sociologists who favor the infantilization explanation, but also one, Chiara Saraceno, who favors the cultural norms sans infantilization explanation. She says: ‘‘If in the States a young person doesn’t want to leave home, everyone wonders what is wrong with this person. Here if a young person wants to leave home, everyone wonders what’s wrong with the family.’’25 This essay has been an attempt at conveying some of the thickly textured patterns of Italian-American gender relations. Many more questions need study, for this is an area of fruitful research that might be illuminative for all Americans. Notes 1. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958). 2. James Q. Wilson, ‘‘What Is Moral, and How Do We Know It?’’ Commentary (June 1993): 38.

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120 Richard Gambino 3. Letter from Peter Brimelow, Commentary (August 1993): 2, 4; Letter from Michael Lind, ibid., 4–5. 4. Reply to letters, Francis Fukuyama, Commentary (August 1993): 7–9. 5. Ibid., 8. 6. Christina Bevilacqua, ‘‘Interview with Camille Paglia,’’ Italian Americana (Fall/Winter 1992): 85–86. 7. Lisa Mann, ‘‘Ethnotherapy with Italian Americans: An Evaluation of ShortTerm, Group Exploration of Ethnic Identification and Self-Esteem,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Lisa Mann. Graduate Department of Psychology, New York University, 1986, 257. 8. Frank Pittman, Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 133). 9. Rose Basile Green, ‘‘The Italian American Woman in American Literature,’’ The ltalian Immigrant Woman in North America, Proceedings of Tenth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, 1978, 341–49. 10. Mario Puzo, The Fortunate Pilgrim (New York: Lancer, 1964), 180–84. 11. Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘Italian American Women: A Review Essay,’’ ltalian Americana (Fall/Winter 1993): 38–61. 12. Ibid. 13. Banfield, Moral Basis, 10. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 98. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ann Cornelisen, Women of the Shadows (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 218–19. 20. This census profile is presented by Francis X. Femminella, ‘‘Economic Characteristics of ltalian Americans,’’ in Italian Americans in the 1980s: A Sociodemographic Profile, ed. Graziano Battistella (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1989), 55. 21. Ibid. 22. Andrew Rolle, The Italian Americans: Troubled Roots (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980). 23. Elizabeth G. Messina, ‘‘Italian American Women in the Nineties,’’ paper presented at a conference on Italian-American women at State University of New York, Stony Brook, October 1993. 24. Celestine Bohlen, ‘‘At 30-Something, Leave Home? Mamma Mia, No,’’ New York Times, International Section. March 1, 1996, A4. 25. Ibid.

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Food, Recipes, Cookbooks, and Italian-American Life An Introduction donna gabaccia 1998

Scholars have finally begun to take eating and cooking seriously. Many now accept as a starting point the observation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who in 1825 intoned, ‘‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.’’ The linkages among food, culture, and identity have long occupied small numbers of folklorists and anthropologists. But until recently most writing about food was done by popular writers—who offered guides to tourists and other adventurous consumers—and by gourmets reflecting on the haute cuisines of the lands they knew best. In the past ten years, however, historians, literary scholars, and sociologists have brought the study of eating closer to the scholarly mainstream by focusing instead on ordinary people and everyday eating. All have discovered cookbooks as an exciting new source of information on human history and identity. Among Italian Americans, food and cooking are powerful expressions of our ties to the past and our current identities. They also say much about how America has responded to us and our foods. On the one hand, it seems that everyone from African Americans to WASPs now cook and eat spaghetti, claim to love Italian food, and buy Italian cookbooks—but they do not imagine that they ‘‘become Italian American’’ by doing so. Indeed, many new immigrants to the United States think that pizza is an American invention; they may even have eaten pizza mass-produced by Pizza Hut before they left their homelands. At the same time, Italian Americans sometimes feel insulted by advertisements—‘‘that’s a spicy meatball!’’—and by popular culture images of overweight ‘‘Mammas’’ tied to their saucepans that depict Italian Americans as obsessed with eating. Many seem to believe that we are much, much more than what we eat, and that too many negative stereotypes link Italians and food. In this section of the anthology, four 121

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contributors explore cookbooks as one important expression of ItalianAmerican culture and identity. The first selection provides historical context for defining and understanding Italian-American cookbooks. What makes a cookbook regional, Italian, American, or Italian-American? How have Italian immigrant kitchens differed from those of other Americans, other immigrants, and other Italians? Carol Helstosky first analyzes a particular cookbook, La cucina casareccia napoletana, sold in New York’s Little Italy in the late 1930s. Donna Gabaccia, who acted as a guest editor for this special feature in Italian Americana when it was first published in 1998, then provides a general overview of the wider variety of cookbooks that have focused on immigrant kitchens over time. In her essay, she draws particular attention to ‘‘community cookbooks’’ (including a partial bibliography of cookbooks of this type) and to other cookbooks written by Italian Americans themselves. The second half of this sequence follows up on Helstosky’s and Gabaccia’s observations with two personal reflections on writing and publishing cookbooks by Catherine Tripalin Murray (A Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush’’) and Cassandra Vivian (Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian). Although each author wrote a different type of cookbook, their personal reflections reveal a common motivation—to connect family, memory, and recipes. Cookbooks are by no means the only resource available to historians of food, culture, and society. And, as Carol Helstosky notes, they are complex sources, inherently difficult to interpret. Still, cookbooks remain some of the most fascinating and ubiquitous texts that describe our eating habits. We invite cooks, collectors, and scholars among Italian Americana readers to take cooking and eating seriously. We hope they will look with new respect at their own cookbook collections, for they are both personal statements and scholarly archives-in-the making.

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The Tradition of Invention Reading History through La cucina casareccia napoletana carol helstosky 1998

In his introduction to the 1970 reprint of Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, Piero Camporesi argued eloquently for greater recognition of cookbooks as historical artifacts. According to Camporesi, cookbooks have the unique capacity to unify populations on conscious and unconscious, public and private levels. As historical artifacts, cookbooks tell us about the construction of collective identities, the invention of culinary traditions, and the process of recording in writing what has been an oral tradition in many cultures. Such was the case with Pellegrino Artusi’s cookbook; originally published in 1891, it has long been considered the foundation of the Italian culinary tradition. In shaping a collection of regional dishes into a homogenous, and homogenizing, cuisine, Artusi created a work that unified Italians culturally at a time when the idea of political unity seemed mythic or futuristic at best.1 Artusi’s cookbook is of historical significance because it is a rare written documentation of Italian recipes. It is rare because it is unusual; well into the twentieth century, Italy’s many culinary traditions were transmitted, elaborated, and preserved orally. There were various efforts to stimulate a culinary publishing industry (during the fascist era, after World War II), but many Italian recipes were preserved in memory only until the global popularity of Italian cuisine generated increased demand for culinary publications within Italy. In sharp contrast to Italy, the United States boasted a vibrant impulse to document in print various cooking habits and customs.2 From nineteenthcentury domestic economy manuals, to popular cookbooks (Boston Cooking School, Betty Crocker) issued in multiple editions, to locally produced cookbooks catering to a particular audience or culinary need, the history of 123

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the American cookbook is both longstanding and expansive. In many respects, the tone of American cookbooks mirrors the attitudes of Americans toward food: as Donna Gabaccia has argued, American attitudes toward food can be best termed ‘‘creole,’’ adapting, mixing, and blending the foreign and the familiar to create new dishes.3 Throughout the last two centuries, American cookbooks have reflected the diversity of a culinary tradition in a nation where most citizens claim ancestry from another nation. Today, one need only to look in the ‘‘cooking’’ section of any bookstore to understand the significance of culinary tradition as history in contemporary American culture. As historical artifacts, cookbooks freeze the cultural practice of food preparation for the purposes of preservation and duplication in other social and temporal contexts. Yet, cookbooks can also reveal the dynamics and tensions of particular culinary systems when translated across communities and time periods. That is, cookbooks can simultaneously present us with a glimpse of a particular commemorative tradition as well as an interactive system of communication among food preparers, chroniclers, and consumers. For example, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cookbooks and domestic economy manuals constituted a major vehicle for the transmission of information regarding new food items, trends in food preparation, and technologies for use in the kitchen. Viewed historically, cookbooks reveal the mutable quality of culinary systems and consumption habits. Food habits and practices as they were laid out in culinary written culture are no more wholly representative of tradition than they are of modernity, but lie somewhere in between. Cookbooks allow us to see the tensions between tradition and change, as well as the overlapping of culinary cultures, especially when the cookbook author tries to commemorate or preserve a specific type of cooking for a broad audience. By examining a cookbook of Italian recipes published for an ItalianAmerican audience in the 1940s, I wish to explore this ‘‘in between’’ quality of cookbooks. La cucina casareccia napoletana pei golosi e buongustai, collected by Rosa Aiello, was printed some time in the 1940s (the exact date is unknown) by the Italian Book Company of New York.4 At first glance, Aiello’s book appears to be an effort to document the tradition of southern Italian cuisine to an audience of Italian-American readers. It is a small, ordinary-looking pamphlet, written in Italian, of over one hundred recipes of Neapolitan origin. Yet this book is no ordinary historical document. For one, it attempts to document the cooking traditions of Neapolitans, regarded at the time by many as cucina povera (cooking of the poor) as a source

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of pride for an Italian-American audience. Secondly, the book preserves in writing recipes that were commonly passed down orally in Naples and even among Italian Americans and recent Italian immigrants in the United States. And finally, La cucina casareccia napoletana reveals the kinds of problems attendant upon translating culinary traditions across geographic, economic, and political boundaries. More to the point, the book underscores the difficulty of defining exactly what constitutes a ‘‘tradition’’ when it comes to preparing and consuming food. What exactly was the tradition of Neapolitan or even Italian cuisine in the 1940s? The cuisine of fascist and World War II–era Italy was not a static food system but the evolving product of an unevenly developed economy and political disorder. In order to make such a cuisine adaptable to the dramatically different material circumstances of Italian immigrants in the United States, Rosa Aiello absorbed, transformed, and invented a southern Italian culinary tradition. To compare the two culinary traditions (Italian and Italian-American) is to understand how they were both dissimilar and comparable. During the war and allied occupation, Naples itself was the site of poverty and misery. American and British soldiers stationed there recalled how deprived of every foodstuff Neapolitans, and the entire south of Italy, were. And prior to the war, years of fascist austerity made for a very lean culinary tradition. The nineteenth century was not much better; Italian and foreign observers all remarked how little Neapolitans cooked. Constrained by the lack of income and living space, most Neapolitans were reduced to buying street fare: pizza, pasta, sandwiches, seafood, all purchased and consumed hurriedly on the sidewalk or building stoop. What, exactly, did Rosa Aiello intend to commemorate when she produced La cucina casareccia napoletana in the 1940s? In terms of organization, La cucina casareccia napoletana is a curious blend of modern and traditional cookbook styles. The use of descriptive paragraphs—without lists of ingredients—and references to not-so-exact measurements make the book a literary, not technical, transmission of culinary information. The book retains a more traditional approach to documenting recipes; there is no mention or concern with the rules of domestic economy or household rationalization, both of which permeated 1940s American and Italian cultures. The book thus retains an intimate quality, as if readers are having a private conversation with Aiello. Yet there are elements of organization in the book that remain distinctly modern or contemporary according to the norms of cookbook style and organization. Unlike most Italian cookbooks, which organized recipes by their placement within the meal

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(courses), Aiello chose to organize her recipes alphabetically. The narrative style of the book may be intimate but it is not folksy; little or no information is given about the origins or history of each dish. More interesting is how the book constructs ‘‘homestyle’’ (casareccia) southern Italian cooking for epicures and connoisseurs, presumably, consumers who could afford to eat something better than humble ‘‘home-style’’ dishes. This paradox may not be readily apparent to those of us accustomed to understanding peasant food traditions as types of cuisine or even haute cuisine, but to write of ‘‘home-style’’ Italian food as a gourmet tradition was fundamentally at odds with the everyday experience of most Italians, not just southern Italians but the majority of Italians who faced economic hardship during the years of the fascist regime and World War II. The recipes in Aiello’s book evoke Italy as a culture of abundance, a modern-day land of cuccagna or bengodi, medieval paradises where it rained ravioli and buttered macaroni cascaded down mountains of grated cheese into watering, expectant mouths. The recipes are lavish and ingredients include generous cuts of red meat, expensive types of fish, eggs, cheese, butter, and finely milled flour. Certainly, no one in 1940s Naples, or even in 1920s, 1880s, or 1840s Naples, ate this well. Clearly, the recipes offered in the text of the cookbook reveal a split between cuisine as a public discourse and everyday food preparation in the private sphere. Alternatively, the simplicity of many of the recipes defines a culinary style that was representative of many decades of a low-wage, low-consumption economy in Italy. Humble dishes, such as soups and stews, fill the pages of La cucina casareccia napoletana and even the recipes for meat dishes are based on simple preparation techniques. Red meats and fish are either roasted or prepared in umido (a simple ragout of water, butter, wine and spices), a cooking technique reserved for less expensive, tougher cuts of meat. The preparation of these dishes reinforced an Italian culinary tradition shaped by the material conditions of everyday life. Even as late as the 1940s, many Italian working-class housewives did not have access to an oven, while urban and rural working women had little time to prepare food and little money to spend on family meals. The vast majority of Italians consumed their own version of ‘‘fast food’’: a steady diet of hastily prepared, cheap, and filling dishes meant to satisfy one’s hunger, not one’s tastes or desires. Thus, even the more expensive dishes (those that involved meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and other costly ingredients) listed in La cucina casareccia napoletana do not involve lavish preparation or an excess of ingredients. Just as Italians actively created

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food systems that emphasized simplicity and ease of preparation, ItalianAmerican consumers were instructed on how to adapt to this culinary style to suit new circumstances of increased economic prosperity and affluence. In all likelihood, Rosa Aiello and other compilers of Italian-American cookbooks create what anthropologist Sidney Mintz described as ‘‘new consumption situations’’ endowed with new meanings to suit a particular cultural and economic context.5 In this case, Italian-American cookbook authors refashioned Italian cuisine inasmuch as they attempted to preserve a more homogenous ethnic identity for immigrants through the practice of preparing and consuming food. In so doing, these authors constantly reworked the meaning and purpose of the Italian culinary tradition to suit shifting economic and social circumstances. Unlike the situation in the United States, culinary culture in Italy was not transmitted through cookbooks, but through oral culture. One needs to be cautious, however, not to exaggerate or generalize about the nature of, and the time-frame for, culinary oral culture in Italy. Certainly by the 1940s, there was a thriving publication industry dedicated to cookbooks and domestic economy literature, although it was aimed primarily at an emerging middle-class female consumer. Historian Piero Meldini, however, declares that the notion of la cucina della nonna (grandmother’s cooking), of cherished recipes handed down through generations, was largely a cucina immaginaria (cooking of the imagination) throughout most of Italian history.6 Tracing a written culinary tradition in Italian history is difficult. Prior to World War I, there were only a handful of published cookbooks and domestic economy manuals in Italy, most notably, Pellegrino Artusi’s La scienza in cucina, an encyclopedic collection of Italian and non-Italian recipes. World War I brought new demands on household economies and spurred the rise in popularity of advice manuals for economizing in the face of wartime shortages. Still, these books tended to concentrate on household budgeting and cleaning details; recipe collections were rare. During the fascist regime (1922–45), there was a rapid and unprecedented rise in culinary publications, from cookbooks and pamphlets to magazines and kitchen calendars featuring recipes and cooking tips. From the high cuisine of gourmet Alfredo Panzini to the more pedestrian Petronilla’s tips for recycling leftovers, the fascist-era boom in written works about food reflected a new popular concern with the Italian culinary tradition. During the fascist period, Italy’s culinary tradition, defined and defended by individuals like Alfredo Panzini and Delia and Umberto Notari (who founded the

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magazine La cucina Italiana in 1929), was a dynamic system of cultural communication, by no means impenetrable to change or foreign influence. A first-class restaurant in Milan, for example, offered Hungarian goulash and French frogs’ legs alongside risotto alla milanese and gnocchi alla romana.7 Nonetheless, Italian consumers had an uneasy relationship with foreign cuisine, especially American food. Cultural commentator Irene Brin bitterly observed that American cuisine was composed of canned foods, meals hurriedly consumed in crowded coffee shops, and take-away foods purchased but not prepared by American housewives.8 Yet it would be difficult to define exactly what constituted Italian cuisine during the fascist period. Even the consumption of pasta, a longstanding southern Italian tradition, was decried by futurist artist Filippo Marinetti with the publication of the ‘‘Manifesto of Futurist Cooking’’ in 1930: Pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example, it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental skepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.9

Marinetti’s call to abolish pasta was more than a spirited jab at Italian culinary tradition; the Futurist ‘‘Battle against Pasta’’ was politically in sync with Mussolini’s admonitions against increasing national levels of wheat consumption. In order to make the Italian economy more self-sufficient, Mussolini’s regime encouraged consumers to reduce their consumption of wheat. In particular, southern Italian consumers of bread and pasta were told to eat less of their dietary staples (northern Italians ate a more varied diet, mixing corn and wheat or consuming primarily corn in the form of polenta). Because pasta consumption was the hallmark of southern Italian consumption habits, political and artistic critiques of pasta reveal a complex relationship among food, regional identity, and loyalty to the fascist regime. The numerous recipes for pasta in La cucina casareccia napoletana do not reflect these complex relationships or controversies back in Italy. Rather, the book solidifies and promotes pasta consumption as a unique and significant southern Italian tradition. Vermicelli, maccheroni, and tagliatelle are tossed with butter and grated cheese, mixed with hot oil and clams, and smothered in tomato ragout. While these recipes do not strike the contemporary reader as examples of gourmet or haute cuisine, they were a step above the pedestrian fare for the average Italian at the time. The majority of urban and rural

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workers, whether from the north or south, ate bread or polenta and a companatico (onion, garlic, peppers, sardines, or anchovies) for their daily lunch. Dinner was both ‘‘hurried and frugal’’ according to historian Paolo Sorcinelli, consisting of a dish known as aqua cotta (water with herbs, lard, and onions) or minestra al battuto (pasta with lard, seasonings, and sometimes tomatoes).10 If Italians ate pasta dishes in the 1930s or ’40s, they ate them on Sundays. Many of the pasta recipes in la cucina casareccia napoletana are elaborate and exquisite; for example, there are five recipes for timpano, a baked pasta dish for special occasions. Southern Italians might make timpano for a holiday or other special event, but the dish did not fit easily into contemporary culinary trends that stressed frugality of ingredients and simplicity in preparation. Indeed, the fascist period and the advent of World War II witnessed a wave of those interested in la cucina del poco, cooking with little, ostensibly on account of worsening economic conditions. Piero Meldini attributes the austere, anti-hedonist morale in fascist society to the regime’s economic policies and reconciliation with the Catholic Church: ‘‘the alimentary and culinary policies or ethics of fascism most likely encouraged the recuperation of regional gastronomic traditions, of the cooking style of the Contadina . . . of humble dishes.’’11 The ethic of saving, of going without and making do with little, was a long-standing one in Italy, not limited to the southern part of the country, but applicable to all regions. If one could speak of a ‘‘national’’ culinary tradition for Italy, the absence of certain foods and the frugal preparation of what was available would figure prominently in defining such a tradition, at least in the decades prior to the economic boom of the post–World War II era. Key words dominated the domestic literature of the fascist and wartime periods—avanzo, rimasto, finta—in describing the preparation of dishes. Leftovers were reshaped and fried with the help of cheese, flour, and eggs. The most popular dish was the minestra, a catch-all term which meant soup, stew, pasta, or rice, frequently prepared with leftovers or whatever was on hand in the kitchen. One of the most popular cookbooks of the fascist era, Zia Carolina’s Cucina pratica (1936) contained over thirty recipes for minestra, all made from leftovers.12 Other cookbooks and culinary magazines advised housewives not to waste a scrap of food: even cheese rinds and vegetable stems could be made into something edible and appealing. Because La cucina casareccia napoletana seeks to present southern Italian recipes to a presumably wealthier audience, it contains no recipes that utilize

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leftovers or less desirable ingredients. Readers are advised to find the freshest, largest, and best quality ingredients possible for the preparation of various dishes. Here, the Italian imperative to make a good impression (fare bella figura) remained strong among communities of Italian immigrants in the United States. Recipes for special occasions in La cucina casareccia napoletana are similar to those found in Italian books on entertainment and etiquette (galateo), which were distinct from cookbooks and domestic economy books. Back in Italy, however, middle- and even upper-class Italians struggled to make a good impression on guests in the face of poor economic conditions and fascist imperatives to do without. By the outbreak of World War II, the freshest, largest, and best quality ingredients were only available on the black market, at outrageous prices. The more exquisite recipes of La cucina casareccia napoletana remind us of the tremendous gap between Italians and Italian-Americans in the 1940s, at least in terms of material existence. Yet, in the pages of La cucina casareccia napoletana one sees a similarity in culinary traditions, at least in the attention to detail of preparation and presentation of food. In Italy, cookbook authors advised housewives to make a good impression by preparing a modest dish with great care and attention to detail. Inexpensive foods like eel, sweetbreads, and pigeon were made exquisite with the addition of certain herbs, a dash of wine, or an unexpected spice. The recipes of La cucina casareccia napoletana also reflect a simplicity and originality of preparation and presentation. A dish called palamita alla mosaica, for example, used palamita (Atlantic bonito) fillets, saute´ed, then arranged on plates and adorned with simple sauces (green, tomato, sweet and sour), so as to create a pleasing mosaic of colors and flavors. The creative preparation of the dish no doubt compensated for the fact that the palamita was an inexpensive fish, hardly a delicacy. Such a recipe would have pleased Italian cookbook authors in the fascist era. Similarly, recipes for meat, poultry, and fish call for simple preparation (roasting or saute´ing) and simple accompaniment (lemon wedges or an uncomplicated sauce). Clearly, the presentation of a large piece of meat or fish was indicative of one’s social status; there was no need to embellish that status with overly rich sauces or fancy preparation techniques. Many of the recipes and suggestions in La cucina casareccia napoletana borrow heavily from the Italian culinary tradition in that they emphasize the simplicity and creativity of preparation. In Italy, this was done to compensate or substitute for a lack of elaborate seasonings or the cheapness of the ingredients. As a reflection of the culinary imperative to create seemingly

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elaborate dishes with few ingredients, La cucina casareccia napoletana reproduced the Italian tradition of la cucina del poco on a higher economic scale. It would not be inaccurate to describe the culinary tradition elaborated by Rosa Aiello as reflecting an upper-class and bourgeois minority in the Italy of that time. Yet, for all the borrowing and recasting of tradition, the food system created did not duplicate the material conditions of the majority of Italians under fascism. Elegant yet simple roast meats, the elaborate timpano, and rich egg and cheese dishes hardly reflected the staple foods of most southern Italians. Even the comfortable classes in Italy subsisted on meatless dishes or organ meats, and as economic conditions worsened with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, economic sanctions, and the coming of war, upperclass Italians had to further tighten their belts. By the 1940s, all Italian housewives were being instructed how to prepare a minestra without pasta or rice, how to make desserts without sugar, and even how to make coffee without coffee! ‘‘Cooking with little’’ under fascism became ‘‘cooking with nothing’’ during the war. Still, the middle-class imperative to scrimp and save remained strong: cookbooks from the wartime and postwar eras were filled with recipes for pretend fish, invented meat, mayonnaise without eggs, and cocktails without alcohol. The quality of the ingredients used in La cucina casareccia napoletana, then, sharply contrasts those used in Italian wartime cooking: butter, fresh cheese, eggs, fine flour, and fresh meat versus stale bread, potatoes, and grated cheese. The disparity between Aiello’s commemoration of Italian cooking and what was actually being prepared in fascist and wartime Italy shows us much more than the obvious difference between the two societies. The recipes and preparation tips offered by Rosa Aiello in La cucina casareccia napoletana, read between the lines of two distinct historical contexts, underscore the mutability of culinary traditions across time and place. While the idea of constantly changing culinary traditions is an awkward, perhaps contradictory one, it might enable us to better understand food systems and how they change over time and region. Although food consumption habits are fickle, protean, and dynamic, they also retain—usually by popular demand—the weight of memory and tradition. Indeed, social, cultural, and even economic historians need to be attentive to the relevance of cookbooks as templates of popular memory and interactions between cultures. Authors and compilers of cookbooks and recipe collections performed more cultural work than preserving and commemorating culinary practices for future use. Rather, they have been, and continue to be, active agents in the recasting

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of culinary traditions to fit new contexts, thereby recasting entire food systems, and thereby recasting history. Notes 1. Piero Camporesi, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina el’arte di mangiar bene (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), x. On the history of Italian food and culinary culture see Alberto Capatti, Alberto De Bernardi, and Angelo Varni, eds., Storia d’Italia, Annali 13, ‘‘L’alimentazione’’ (Turin: Einaudi, 1998); Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana. Storia di una cultura (Rome: Laterza, 1999); Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2004); and Paolo Sorcinelli, Gli Italiani e il cibo. Dalla polenta ai cracker (Milan: Mondadori, 1999). 2. See, for example, Peppino Ortoleva, ‘‘La tradizione e l’abbondanza. Riflessioni sulla cucina degli Italiani d’America,’’ AltreItaliani (January–June 1992): 64–65 for a thought-provoking comparison between the United States and Italy. 3. Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 4. Rosa Aiello, La cucina casareccia napoletana pei golosi e buongustai (NewYork: Italian Book Company, 194?). 5. Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 17. 6. Piero Meldini, ‘‘A tavola e in cucina,’’ in Piero Melograni, ed., La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi (Rome: Laterza, 1988), 433. 7. Paolo Sorcinelli, Gli Italiani e il cibo. Appetiti, digiuni e rinunce dalla realta´ Contadina alla societa´ del benessere (Bologna: CLUEB, 1992), 97. 8. Irene Brin, Usi e costume 1920–1940 (Rome: Donatello de Luigi, 1944), 227. 9. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia`, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), 37. 10. Sorcinelli, Gli Italiani e il cibo, 63. 11. Meldini, ‘‘A tavola e in cucina,’’ 454. 12. Zia Carolina, Cucina pratica (Milan: SACSE, 1936), 11–12.

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Italian-American Cookbooks From Oral to Print Culture donna gabaccia 1998

What makes a cookbook Italian-American? Not simply its place of origin or language of publication. Numerous books about Italian cooking are published in English in the United States and Canada, but few would agree that this makes them Italian-American; after all, they may be books about cooking in Italy. Perhaps it is the content of the recipes that makes a cookbook Italian-American. But a cookbook need not limit itself to the culinary realms of the immigrant kitchen to be considered Italian-American. Could the origins of the cookbook author, or her parents or grandparents, define a cookbook as Italian-American? If so, we will want to reserve our ItalianAmerican label for cookbooks produced by writers with demonstrable ties to the migration experience. Perhaps, then, preparation by Italian-American hands defines a dish—or the cookbook from which it comes—as ItalianAmerican. But even these last two definitions have limits, for Italian Americans sometimes choose to write about—and to prepare or eat—Japanese food, macrobiotic diets, or fast food. Obviously, there are many ways to bridge the culinary worlds of Italy and America. The history of migrations from one land to another is just one bridge among many—and it is a complex bridge—but it is the one that most Italian Americans would probably choose to define a cookbook as ItalianAmerican. In this essay I focus on the history of cookbooks written by, or for, immigrant cooks and their descendants, attending particularly to those cookbooks that offer information about the kitchens and cooking of Italianorigin foods in the kitchens of Italian immigrants and their descendants. I interpret these Italian-American cookbooks against the backdrop of a much larger body of American cookbooks that introduced Italian recipes to cooks with no immigrants in their kitchens. 133

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134 Donna Gabaccia

Most of the immigrant cooks who came to the United States, regardless of background, brought their recipes with them in their heads. Cookbooks were rare anywhere in the world before the nineteenth century. Literate, urban, and middle-class women in Europe and the United States were more likely to use cookbooks than those who were rural or poor. A rising sense of nationalism in the nineteenth century seems to have encouraged the codification of national cuisines from varied, local, and regional traditions in many countries around the world, including those with large rural, illiterate populations. Once in the United States, most immigrants produced and published cookbooks in their native languages as well as English. The Deutsch-Amerikanisches Illustriertes Kochbuch (New York, 1891) and Marie Rosicka’s Bohemian cookbook, Narodni Domaci kucharka cesko-americka (Omaha, 1904), reprinted parts of homeland cookbooks and adapted homeland favorites to new world food markets, often adding new recipes borrowed from American or other immigrant neighbors. Some, like the Suomalais-Amerikalainen Perhe-Keittokirja/Finnish-American Family Cookbook (Milwaukee, 1923) appeared in bilingual editions to facilitate use by daughters and granddaughters who were losing their Finnish-language skills, but not their taste for Finnish foods. The popular Jewish Cookery (Esther Levy’s collection of kosher recipes, published in Philadelphia in 1871) and Aunt Babette’s Cookbook (Chicago, 1889) simply assumed that English-speaking women would want to continue the cooking traditions of Jewish central Europe. By contrast the Ch’u shu ta ch’uan Chinese and English Cookbook (San Francisco, 1910) and Kokki-Kirja (Complete Directions for the Preparation of American Foods [Fitchburg, 1903]) aimed respectively at Chinese and Finnish immigrants who expected to take jobs as domestic servants in American homes. They offered recipes for American dishes (puddings, biscuits, and so on) in the native languages of the prospective servants. One finds very few examples of any of these types of cookbooks for Italian immigrant cooks. Maria Gentile’s The Italian Cookbook (New York, 1919) was published by the Italian Book Company, which also produced the cookbook La cucina casareccia napoletana,2 which Carol Helstosky discusses in this volume. Contemporaneously, Pellegrino Artusi’s Italian classic La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene had been adapted for use by immigrants as the simply titled Italian Cookbook (New York, 1940). Other immigrant cooks in America found printed recipes in works published in Italy and imported to the United States. Three thousand miles to the west of New York’s Italian Book Company, an Italian bookstore in San Francisco’s

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North Beach, A. Cavalli, offered immigrant cooks Ettore Grati’s Il cuoco di tutti, published in Florence in 1923.3 Many of San Francisco’s Italian cooks were from Italy’s northern and central provinces, as were most of the recipes in this book: 140 for minestre (soups); 170 for meat; 130 for poultry and game; 150 for fast-day dishes; 160 for greens and vegetables; 160 for egg dishes and sauces; 180 for sweets; and 110 for liquors and other drinks. Written in Italian or English, and sometimes published or reprinted as well as sold in the United States to immigrant cooks, these cookbooks might be considered the first Italian-American cookbooks. Even in their time, however, these few Italian-American cookbooks were completely dwarfed in number by two competing genres: home economic textbooks for the daughters of Italians and other immigrants and works by Anglo-Americans (or an occasional immigrant chef ) aimed at introducing the foods of Italy to Americans with no familial or migratory ties to Italy. Almost every girl who completed an eighth grade education in the United States in the years between 1910 and 1960 took a home economics course that taught the basics of American-style cooking. We cannot know whether such training worked a greater influence on girls’ development as cooks than their own mothers or orally transmitted recipes. But at the very least, the history of home economics suggests that Americanizers were more successful in reaching the literate second-generation of Italian-American cooks than were the publishers and book distributors of the Italian-American community. Home economists’ cookbooks taught the superiority of a homogenous national and American cuisine. These cookbook authors had themselves invented this cuisine by blending into their recipes the abstemious and simple eating habits of colonial New England with the canned goods and processed foods of American agribusiness. As late as 1940, the Home Economics Section of New York’s Department of Welfare recommended immigrants eat hominy grits with milk and sugar, bread and butter, and milk and coffee for breakfast; baked beans, coleslaw with carrots, bread and butter, and custard pudding with raisins for dinner; and cream of carrot soup with rice, cottage cheese and prune salad, bread and butter, and tea for supper. Curiously, home economics texts also acknowledged occasional contributions from immigrant cultures. For example, Pearl L. Bailey’s Domestic Science, Principles and Application, A Textbook for Public Schools (St. Paul, 1914 and 1918) offered recipes for macaroni with tomatoes in casserole, while the New York Department of Welfare distributed recipes for spaghetti with tomato sauce to Puerto Rican migrants arriving during the Depression.4

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Already by the 1920s, as historian Harvey Levenstein has pointed out, American cooks of a wide variety of backgrounds were beginning to adopt Italian foods and even to prepare them at home.5 They could turn to books like Helen Campbell’s In Foreign Kitchens: With Choice Recipes from England, France, Italy and the North (Boston, 1893) or Mabel Earl McGinnis’s Simple Italian Cookery (New York, 1912). It is unlikely that any of these American cooks’ experiments with Italian cooking produced dishes comparable to those on immigrant tables. Recipes from the 1920s, for example, included tomato sauces made with Worcestershire sauce, beef suet, and horseradish— but no garlic. Americans’ motives for exploring Italian food changed over time. Bohemians and intellectuals learned to love Italian food and ‘‘dago red’’ (wine) in the years before World War I because they associated it with hedonism, pleasure, and revolt against the straitjacket of Victorian culture.6 Then, from World War I to World War II, women’s magazines and home economists urged economizing housewives to view Italian recipes as important resources in times of depression and war (an example is Jack Cusimano’s Economical Italian Cookbook [Los Angeles, 1917]).7 After World War II, cookbook writers introduced Italian and other foreign cuisines to encourage middle-class housewives to bring cosmopolitan flair and diversity to their dinner parties. Ada Boni’s The Talisman Italian Cookbook (translated, New York, 1950) and Elizabeth Davis’s Italian Food (New York, 1958) introduced a sophisticated Italian cuisine comparable to the more familiar French one, while books like Beverly Pepper’s See Rome and Eat (New York, 1960) and Barbara Stacy’s The Alitalia Book of Authentic Italian Cooking (New York, 1962) sought to make Italian-style gourmet cooking as much a marker of middle-class economic and cultural status as the newly popular holiday trip to Rome, Venice, and Florence. Most of these works focused on the cooking of Italy and ignored the plebeian kitchens of Italian immigrants and their Italian-American daughters—although Italian-Americans probably purchased the books as well. According to sociologist Liora Gvion Rosenberg, Anglo-American cookbook writers detached ethnicity from the ethnics, modified it to the tastes of their own culture, and then delivered it back to the descendants of immigrants as an integral part of their cultural heritage.8 Italian Americans looking for cookbooks based on immigrant kitchens had few alternatives, for even Italian Americans like Garibaldi Lapolla (Italian Cooking for the American Kitchen, 1953) and Chef Joseph di Fiore (Successful Italian Cookery of Selected Chef ’s

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Recipes, 1960) focused on introducing the food of postwar Italy to Americans rather than documenting the cuisine of their immigrant mothers for subsequent Italian-American generations. Slightly more daring authors directed American cooks toward regional home-cooking traditions (Angela Catanzaro, Mama Mia Italian Cookbook: The Home Book of Italian Cooking, 1955; Colette Black’s Southern Italian Cookery, 1963). But even these cookbooks focused on home cooking in Italy, not Italian-American home cooking. Efforts by Italian-American cooks to document Italian-American cooking appeared rather belatedly in the aftermath of the popularity of the socalled new ethnicity, and thus long after Americans had learned to like and to cook a limited range of Americanized Italian specialties like spaghetti, lasagna, and pizza. Individual culinary initiatives grew into family or community endeavors, producing a new genre of self-produced community cookbooks, often designed as fundraisers for ethnic parishes or community associations.9 Italian-American community cookbooks seem few in number when compared to other groups’ cookbooks (such as Greek-, Ukrainian-, or Jewish-American). But they proved successful fundraisers for groups like the Florida Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy; San Francisco’s Museo Italo Americano; the St. Anthony Altar Society of Bryan, Texas; the AmericanHeritage Society of Omaha, Nebraska; and the Ladies Auxiliary of the Hershey Italian Lodge. A sense of loss and recovery, and a fear of disconnection developing across generations of family members, typically motivated Italian Americans to produce cookbooks focused on the foods of immigrant kitchens. Some documented what scholar Herbert Gans (studying Boston’s urban renewal in the 1960s) called ‘‘longing for the lost home.’’ Catherine Tripalin Murray told a Madison, Wisconsin, reporter, ‘‘I did this book because I wanted to learn about my grandmother.’’ She wanted to ‘‘recapture an era and its people . . . while becoming a part of the Italian/Sicilian community I so dearly loved, but was never a part of.’’10 The ‘‘Bush’’ neighborhood of her grandmother and father had disappeared during urban renewal twenty years earlier. Italian-American community cookbooks emphasize connections among food, female expertise, and history. Personal and familiar touches in such cookbooks include handwritten or signed recipes, pictures of family memorabilia, oral histories conducted with elderly relatives, and family pictures of kin, home, and groups of women cooks beaming over large platters of holiday food. Community cookbooks thus promise their readers help in guaranteeing the survival of ‘‘Italian holiday meals . . . prepared in the homes of

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. . . children, grand-children, and hopefully . . . great-grandchildren.’’11 They attempt to recapture the history of a particular family or community. While few claim to speak for a unified ethnic group, or even a particular regional Italian cuisine, they celebrate the private worlds of home, kitchen, family, and neighborhood. Nor are they concerned with describing only the food traditions immigrants brought with them from Italy. The compilers of the St. Louis Bocce Club’s Favorite Recipes include directions for preparing not only involtini di pollo but also black-eyed peas and rice, a full range of the Jell-O salads popular in the Midwest, and Mexican corn bread. Like all Americans, Italian Americans in St. Louis made ample use of processed foods—such as Kraft parmesan cheese coupled with refrigerated quick dinner rolls. Recipes like these are a far cry from Italian-American eating as it appears in cookbooks sponsored by state multicultural projects, for example, The Melting Pot, Ethnic Cuisine in Texas or the Minnesota Ethnic Food Book. There, Italian-origin recipes appear in a separate chapter, as a separate and distinct ingredient in southwestern and Midwestern mosaics.12 Yet the community cookbooks are arguably more accurate reflections of how Italian Americans actually ate in the 1990s than are the carefully preservationist recipes of the multiethnic collections. Community cookbooks rarely find their way into bookstores. One finds instead an occasional commercial cookbook featuring immigrant foodways—such as Helen Barolini’s Festa, Nancy Verde Barr’s We Called It Macaroni (1990), or Vincent Schiavelli’s Papa Andrea’s Sicilian Table (1993). But even these are almost invisible on bookshelves groaning with cookbooks that continue to interpret Italy’s cuisines for American cooks. Today, as in the past, foreign or international cookery is of more interest to well-traveled, well-heeled American cooks than the humble pleasures of ethnic or immigrant kitchens. Americans looking for healthful alternatives to their own home cooking find the Mediterranean diet exciting, but few seem to think that the foodways of Italian or Greek Americans might introduce them to a healthy alternative close to home. It is easy to rage at the invisibility of Italian-American cooking in a country in love with Italian food. But that very invisibility means that scholars have plenty of work to do recovering and documenting its history. Cookbooks remain the single best starting place for this project. They are never easy to find. Even published, commercial, English-language cookbooks rarely command respect or inclusion in libraries or local history collections;

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most of the older Italian-American cookbooks, along with handwritten collections used by immigrant cooks and their daughters, undoubtedly languish in dusty attics. Community cookbooks, too, are more common on kitchen than on library shelves. The first step toward a comprehensive history of Italian-American foodways is to recover and catalogue Italian-American cookbooks. For those interested in beginning that task, a preliminary bibliography of community cookbooks appears below. Notes 1. Jeffrey Pilcher, Che vivan los Tamales: Cuisine and Mexican National Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Arjun Appadurai, ‘‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1988): 3–24. 2. Rose Aiello, La cucina casareccia napoletana pei golosi e buongustai (New York: Italian Book Company, n.d.). I would like to thank Victor Greene for bringing this book to my attention. 3. I want to thank Rose Scherini, whose mother used this cookbook, for bringing it to my attention. 4. Both examples are from Department of Welfare, Home Economics Section, ‘‘Educational Material,’’ Education Material (Multi-lingual), printed material, reel 148 in Federal Writers Project of the City of New York, WPA, ‘‘Feeding the City,’’ Municipal Archives of the City of New York. 5. Harvey Levenstein, ‘‘The American Response to Italian Food, 1800–1930,’’ Food and Foodways 1, no. 1 (1985): 1–24. 6. Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 4. 7. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 29–30. 8. Liora Gvion Rosenberg, ‘‘Telling the Story of Ethnicity: American Cookbooks, 1850–1990,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1991. 9. The model for these cookbooks was indisputably American. During the Civil War, northern Ladies Aid Societies collected their favorite recipes to sell at Sanitary Fairs supporting the Union Army. See Lynne Ireland, ‘‘The Compiled Cookbook as Foodways Autobiography,’’ in Michael Owen Jones, Foodways and Eating Habits: Directions for Research (Los Angeles: California Folklore Society, 1983), 107. 10. George Vukelich, ‘‘The Bush Recalled in Words and Food,’’ Isthmus March 22–28, 1991. 11. Marguerita Fosseca and Alice Rossi, A Legacy of Italian Holiday Traditions and Recipes (n.p.: 1991), 3.

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140 Donna Gabaccia 12. The Melting Pot, Ethnic Cuisine in Texas (San Antonio: University of Texas, Institute of Texan Cultures, 1989), rev. ed.; Anne R. Kaplan et al., The Minnesota Ethnic Food Book (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1986).

Work in Progress: A Short Bibliography of Italian-American Community Cookbooks Altar Guild of St. Raphael’s Church. Our Favorite Recipes. Bridgeport, Conn.: Altar Guild of St. Raphael’s Church, 1963. Belfiglio, Valentine J. The Best of Italian Cooking, Texas Style. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1985. Borelli, Kenneth Joseph. Flavors from a Calabrese Kitchen, California Style. Rev. 2d ed. San Jose: K. J. Borelli, 1983. Buonopane, Marguerite DiMino. The North End Italian Cookbook. 3d ed. Chester, Conn.: Pequot Press, 1991; rev. ed. of North End Union Italian Cookbook. Children of Mary Sodality, Holy Rosary Church. Buon Appetito: A Collection of Italian Recipes. Bridgeport, Conn.: Children of Mary Sodality, Holy Rosary Church, 1955. Cooking the Italian Way. Warren, Mich.: Italian American Cultural Society, 1986. Dell’Orto, Seline. The Manganaro Italian Family Cookbook. Dallas: Taylor, 1989. Di Blasi, Mildred. Mama Di Blasi’s Exotic Erotic Italian Cookbook. Wichita, Kan.: The Author, 1984. Formica, Mabel. Sicilian Connection Cookbook. Savannah, Tenn., and Sherwood, Ark.: Keepsake Cookbooks—FUNDCO, 1987. Fosseca, Marguerita. A Legacy of Italian Holiday Traditions and Recipes. N.p.: 1991. I Cantatori and Their Favorite Italian Recipes. Waseca, Minn.: Walter’s, 1985. Italian-American Club of Tucson Cookbook. Tucson: Italian-American Club, 1990. Italian American Favorite Recipes: From the Kitchens of St. Anthony’s Parishioners Bryan, Tex.: St. Anthony Altar Society, 1980, 1989. Italian-American Heritage Cook Book of Jefferson. Westwego, La.: The Auxiliary, 1979. Italian Catholic Federation, San Francisco District Council. Happy Eating! San Francisco: San Francisco District Council, 1980. Italian Cook Book. St. Petersburg: Italian-American Club, 1952. Italian Festival Committee. Italian Festival Cookbook: A Compilation of Secret Family Recipes from the Best-Known Italian Kitchens in Louisville and Other Select Communities. Louisville, Ky.: Italian Festival Committee, 1974. The Italian Kitchen in Your Home. Ambridge, Pa.: Ambridge Italian Women’s Club, 1900, 1986. La Cucina dell’Amore (The Kitchen of Love): Favorite Recipes from Italian-Heritage Celebrities and Friends. Youngstown, Ohio: R. R. Zerbonia, 1990. La Cucina Nostra. Austin, Tex.: Franzetti Family, 1989. Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Hershey Italian Lodge. Treasury of Italian Recipes. Lenexa, Kan.: Cookbook Publishers, 1983. Leonardi, Mary Baldini. From Nonnie’s Italian Kitchen: The Recipes of Mary Baldini Leonardi. Rochester, N.Y.: Lion Press, 1988.

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Italian-American Cookbooks: From Oral to Print Culture 141 Marconi Senior Citizens Club. Recipes from South Philadelphia Kitchens. Philadelphia: South Philadelphia Community Center, 1980. Mitchell, Angelina Mannuccia. Angelina’s Favorite Recipes: A Personal Collection of Sicilian Style Italian Recipes. Thibodaux, La.: The Author, 1987. Murray, Catherine Tripalin. A Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush.’’ Madison, Wis.: Italian-American Women’s Mutual Society, 1988, 1990. Murray, Catherine Tripalin. A Taste of Memories from ‘‘Columbus Park’’: Recipes, Memories and Photographs of the Old West Side Neighborhood. Kenosha, Wis.: KIN, 1992. The Museo Italo Americano Cookbook. San Francisco: Museo Italo Americano, 1991. Preserving Our Italian Heritage: A Cookbook. Tampa: Sons of Italy Florida Foundation, 1991. Ravioli, Red Rice and All the Rest: Recipes and Memories from the Distretti Family. Memphis: n.p., 1992. St. James Church. Italian-American Community Cookbook. Lenexa, Kan.: Cookbook Publishers, 1983. St. Joseph Table Cookbook Committee. A Book of Favorite Recipes. Shawnee Mission, Kan.: Circulation Service, 1985. St. Louis Bocce Club’s Favorite Recipes. Olathe, Kan.: Cookbook Publishers, 1993. St. Rose Church, Mt. Carmel Society (Girard Ohio). Italian American Favorite Recipes. Leawood, Kan.: Circulation Service, 1968, 1990. A Taste of Italy. Omaha: American-Italian Heritage Society, 1990. A Treasury of Favorite Italian Dishes. Bridgeport, Conn.: Saint Teresa Guild, Holy Rosary Church, 1974. Tusa, Marie Lupo. Marie’s Melting Pot: Recipes. New Orleans: The Author, 1980. Unico National, Rutherford N.J. Chapter. A Book of Favorite Recipes: Italian Cook Book, ‘‘Service above Self.’’ Leawood, Kan.: Circulation Service, 1968, 1990. Vivian, Cassandra. Immigrant’s Kitchen, Italian. Monessen, Pa.: Trade Routes Enterprises, 1993.

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Immigrant Kitchens, Community Cookbooks, and Italian-American Life An Introduction donna gabaccia 1998

In Part II of this sequence, authors of commercial, community, and selfpublished cookbooks reflect on their decisions to write about immigrant kitchens and cooking. Catherine Tripalin Murray (author of A Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush’’) reviews the family roots of her decision to collect recipes. In her case, a desire to know the way of life and the community of her Sicilian-American father motivated her to talk to his old neighbors. (Their neighborhood, like many older ethnic settlements, had disappeared during urban renewal projects of the 1960s.) In getting to know the women and the lives of Madison, Wisconsin’s Greenbush neighborhood, Murray came to know her own grandmother, and she collect memories, pictures, and family memorabilia along with recipes. Cassandra Vivian (author of Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian) tells the story of her decision to write and publish a cookbook, and she provides insight into the financial and creative choices that contribute equally to successful publication. Vivian is very aware of how regionalism shaped her family’s eating. She does not recognize her family’s customs in scholarly or popular depictions of Italian-American food (primarily dishes of south Italian origin). Indeed, her family seems to have been more reluctant to alter culinary tradition than their Toscana-born relatives at home in Italy.

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A Taste of Memories catherine tripalin murray 1998

Each concrete level leading up to the screen door of Ben DiSalvo’s Market in Madison, Wisconsin, was a challenge. Big steps, little legs, tiny feet. There was no way of knowing back then that each step taken was not only an achievement of sorts for a small child but also a giant step in the right direction. For beyond the door, standing on worn wood flooring and a ceiling fan slowly spinning overhead, I discovered a fragment of my heritage. I received a nod of approval from the handsome, white-haired, smiling proprietor from Bagheria as he stooped to my level and handed me a small paper bag of semenses (roasted, salted pumpkin seeds) to nibble on. He and my father traded greetings. These experiences at DiSalvo’s became perennial blossoms of intense ethnic identity for me. When the combination shopping trip/visit to the old Greenbush neighborhood culminated with a ring of the cash register, we hugged goodbye and left the store carrying a long, narrow package of bulk vermicelli, a package of homemade fennel-studded Italian sausage links wrapped in butcher’s paper, a heavy tin of Italy Brand olive oil, and a pungent chunk of Romano cheese for grating. For some reason, every moment from that particular day seemed to be stored within my cache of childhood memories. Was the grass really greener in Greenbush? Apparently, I thought so. I liked the faces I saw and the language I heard. I loved the food with mouth-watering aromas that wafted from house to house by breezes off Lake Monona—aromas similar to those that lingered in our kitchen, miles away on the east side of town. My Hungarian-born mother made few Italian meals for my Sicilian-born father, but when she did, the scents and tastes were worth remembering. I enjoyed visits to the old Greenbush neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, where my father once lived. As a small child, I sensed an aura, an indescribable feeling that I belonged. But something happened that day as 143

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we left Mr. DiSalvo’s corner store that would further nourish my Italian pride. As we turned to the right on Regent Street and headed toward Daddy’s two-tone gray Chevrolet parked alongside the curb, a group of ladies standing together at the corner turned to look at us. Within seconds, their hands were in the air. Quickly moving in our direction, they seemed frantic with excitement. My father was the son of their deceased friend, my grandmother, and it was an opportunity for them to make a connection with her. Besides, my father was a city sports hero, a fine athlete from the old neighborhood whose picture had appeared often in local newspapers. ‘‘Michele! Michele!’’ they shouted. The Italian community respected him and they were proud of knowing Daddy well enough to embrace him. While my grandmother’s friends were filling a void in my life, another chapter was being etched before my eyes. Each tiny white-haired woman wore a bun secured with hairpins at the nape of her neck and gold earrings that hung loosely from aging earlobes. All the women wore black—solid black. Black shoes, long stockings, and dresses. And each tiny woman clutched a white handkerchief in her wrinkled hand. They were all talking at the same time when they reached us. There were many hugs of admiration I wouldn’t understand until years later. After making a fuss over Daddy, they turned to me. One at a time, each woman cupped my face in her hands before placing one hand over her heart as the other hand was raised toward the sky. Looking up, then down at me, and in a rapid stream of language with sound levels rising to parallel the drama, each one assured Daddy of how much I looked like his mother, their friend, the woman Greenbush residents referred to as ‘‘Donna Caterina.’’ My grandmother, or ‘‘Nonna’’ as she would have been called, died a week before I was born. I never had a chance to hear her Sicilian songs or discover the pride in her eyes that would accompany the love she was waiting to shower on me. I missed spending time with her as she prepared old world recipes in her new world kitchen. She was a twentieth-century immigrant and her name was Caterina. I became an American version of her and was named Catherine out of love, respect, and tradition. She was the link to my heritage. I was mesmerized by the excitement generated as we stood together on the sidewalk. And why not? My father was speaking a language different from what he spoke at home, yet he kept up with the little old ladies with the greatest of ease. Without knowing what was being said, I savored every second. The experience became a powerful ingredient of my Italian identity and would keep me on the fringes of being the Sicilian I truly wanted to be

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until I reached fifty, when I sensed a need to recapture what I could about the immigrant settlement affectionately referred to as the ‘‘Bush.’’ The neighborhood had fallen victim to an insensitive urban renewal project in the 1960s and, without documentation, the past, its people, and their food would be lost forever. Greenbush was a ten-block area near the shores of Lake Monona. Low, swampy, and dotted with cattails, it was where the city channeled newly arrived immigrants, including Italian, Sicilians, and Jews, as well as pioneer blacks who were also searching for a place without chains of limitations. Once a city dumping ground, the property seemed worthless to many, yet perfect for segregating from the rest of Madison the ‘‘undesirables’’ from faraway places. Greenbush was where my grandparents, Salvatore and Caterina DiMaio Tripolino, and my father, who was six at the time, settled when they arrived from Palermo, Sicily, in 1911 following a brief stay in New York City. They joined my grandmother’s brothers, Angelo and Dominic, who had arrived earlier and were working on the rebuilding of the State Capitol following a destructive fire in 1904. Together, they resided in a cold-water, three-story flat on Gwinette Court, a short dead-end street that ran along the periphery of the neighborhood’s boundaries. The triangular-shaped Greenbush settlement was secure from the world that extended beyond its boundaries of Park and Regent streets and West Washington Avenue. Within its confines, immigrants were safe from insults. The enclave offered them freedom to embrace their culture, thus creating an ethnically diverse atmosphere where culture and old world tradition could be preserved for their offspring. Residents of the city’s first melting pot may have had difficulty understanding their neighbors, but they could easily relate to each other. For being poor was the neighborhood’s basic ingredient and its cohesiveness made them one. Despite an abundance of mosquitoes breeding in their backyards of cattails and frogs, landfill encouraged the immigrants to plant in drier areas. Before long, grapevines took root, fruit trees were staked, flowers blossomed, and the vital lifelines of religion made connections for residents to thank God for what He was able to provide for them. Greenbush, as a neighborhood and not just a barren swampy plat, was beginning to take shape. Life in the Greenbush neighborhood managed to move up a notch. With it, pride flourished as the ethnically diverse settlement grew more rapidly than the rest of Madison. But as good as it was, or seemed to be, the negative side weighed heavily, causing concern among the city fathers and women’s social organizations. Residents enjoyed bragging that what they had

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predicted earlier was indeed happening. Problems surfaced within the triangle and the media didn’t help. There was nothing wrong with labeling Greenbush ‘‘Little Italy’’ or ‘‘Little Sicily’’; but newspaper editors and reporters salivated over the unrest caused during Prohibition. Labeling the neighborhood for a nationality was one thing, but when the name insinuated crime, it was another matter. The immigrants’ hard work to establish a good reputation in America was replaced overnight with negative comments that would remain until the 1960s when the first house in the neighborhood was bulldozed in the name of progress. Packed into its first sixty years of existence, the Greenbush neighborhood presented a story waiting to be documented. Six decades that read like a bestselling novel needed attention, yet my time was occupied with other things that included raising a family. One morning, I woke up to discover that the old Bush had disappeared. Carrying an abundance of guilt for the next ten years, I decided, after completing a bicentennial cookbook in 1976, that my next project would be a compilation of recipes interspersed with remembrances of the neighborhood I had hardly known, yet loved. Documenting the existence of Greenbush would establish a connection with the grandmother I never knew, the neighborhood where my father grew up, and the heritage I thirsted for. Contact would have to be made with former Greenbush Italian and Sicilian old-timers, realizing that many had already passed away. Requesting favorite recipes from second and third generations was a near impossible feat as nothing was ever written down. The expertise of Mama and Nonna had to be recorded step-by-step to prepare recipes that had been taken for granted with a ‘‘pinch of this and a handful of that.’’ Research began in January 1988. I worked around the clock on an adrenaline high never before experienced. If I wasn’t studying microfilm and clippings at libraries, or files at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, I was engaged in interviews at kitchen tables. With every discovery made, the depths of the past mushroomed. At the end of each day, I gathered enough strength to continue typing until midnight and beyond. While making these connections, I sensed that I was becoming a piece to the puzzle of a neighborhood that no longer existed. These were my people and we belonged to each other. Because many of my grandmother’s closest friends were from Passo di Regano in Sicily, I hoped someone would claim me as a relative. People questioned my motives for asking questions from their past. If I was writing a cookbook, they asked, why did I ask for their memories? Many were uncomfortable in sharing anything with me. There were others

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who were willing, but they were intimidated by the miniature tape-recorder collecting every word and attitude for study later when I was alone. Some trusted me with stories unacceptable for cookbooks, yet were eager to help me understand the overall picture of each Greenbush decade. Everything discovered and anything shared was vital to me. The bonus for the hours, days, and months of research and interviews came in the form of friendships that continued to aid in my quest to preserve the past. It was an emotional four months. I thrived on stories about my grandmother, even if just a fragmented memory. One woman remembered how my grandmother held her on her lap and sang songs to assure her of how precious she was, even though she felt homely after being hit by a car. Another remembered seeing my grandmother on a hot summer day, carrying bags of groceries on each hip as she walked down West Washington Avenue toward the deteriorating three-flat building she called home. I smiled as I pictured her, poor, yet so proud. I learned of things I had only dreamed of and of morbid events one would rather forget. But I will never forget the morning I visited an elderly couple, ever anxious to reach back as far in time as possible. The man, well into his nineties, remembered my grandfather. I hadn’t expected to find someone who remembered him as he had been shot to death in 1915 alongside the Gwinette Court dwelling where he lived. Who was alive to remember that far back? My father was twelve years old at the time and refused to discuss any details from that traumatic time. When I heard the old man tell me that he knew my grandfather, I broke down and cried. Limited knowledge about the murder was gained by studying microfilm at the library, but I did learn from one front-page newspaper article that four bullets from two guns entered my grandfather’s chest and face that cold night of December 15, 1915. It seemed to be the beginning and end of a chapter as the men were never caught. And here was a man who remembered what changed my father’s life. Indirectly, it had affected mine as well. After the old man’s wife consoled me, tears were quickly replaced with laughter as they shifted to happier times from the past. They invited me to stay for lunch, a quick hearty meal created from a loaf of crusty homemade Italian bread removed from an uncovered bowl on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet. To accompany it, a Mason jar of caponatina, my father’s favorite snack. The pint jar with an old, rusty lid had been discovered the day before on a shelf in the basement. Although claiming that it must have been at least two years old, the woman overlooked any possibility that it might be unfit to eat. After admitting to them my own fondness

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for the Sicilian medley of eggplant and other summer vegetables, how could I refuse something when they were eager to share what they had grown in their garden and canned—whenever. They set a small bowl before me and, although it looked deliciously ‘‘old world,’’ I made the sign of the cross and said the act of contrition to myself as she stood at the stove to make coffee. My rewards for compiling a Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush’’ cookbook in an effort to preserve an old neighborhood filled every ethnic void in my life. As the same time, I had also secured a niche in the Italian community. When the 410-page book of treasured recipes, memories, and photographs debuted at our Italian festa in June 1988, I became an overnight hero. A savior. My innocent attempt to capture the beauty of the misunderstood neighborhood was embraced while the Bush’s bad reputation had finally been erased. Unprepared for the response that awaited me, I was in awe as people lined up to purchase the book. The next morning, they reappeared at the festa with tears in their eyes. Many, claiming to have ‘‘read until three in the morning,’’ bought additional books to give to friends and family who lived elsewhere. Needless to say, it was an experience that tugged at everyone’s heartstrings, especially mine. As I was pressured by other Italian families that wanted to share their own recipes, memories, and photographs, writing a sequel was imperative, and two years later, in 1990, 550 pages continuing to explore Greenbush’s past were completed, A Taste of Memories from the Old Bush, volume 2. Then two years after that, I compiled A Taste of Memories from Columbus Park, featuring an Italian neighborhood in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Commissioned as a fundraiser by a young Italian priest to beautify his old neighborhood before he died of cancer, the compilation secured yet another niche for me, this time in a town fifty miles north of Chicago. From those giant steps, climbed by little legs with tiny feet back in the early 1940s, I had reached the pinnacle of my dreams, achieving prestigious awards and recognition. Then another door opened for me when the Wisconsin State Journal called in March 1992, asking if I’d like to write ‘‘Cooks’ Exchange,’’ their new weekly food column, which I accepted. By 1995, another cookbook, this time featuring favorite columns and recipes, was compiled and published. In October 1996, I returned to Greenbush and published another cookbook, which featured women who had been mothers during the first quarter of the century and became the future grandmothers of the neighborhood. Grandmothers of Greenbush, 1900–1925, documents seventy-five women with a photograph of each accompanied by vital statistics, dates of arrival in this country, experiences, remembrances by family members, and a favorite family recipe of ethnic origin.

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I’ve often wondered if I would have been overwhelmed during my first efforts if I had known that writing a historical cookbook about Greenbush would trigger all that followed. I doubt it. What is important is that the neighborhood and its people will never be forgotten because it has been carefully preserved in a treasure of a cookbook that will nourish us with favorite recipes for a lifetime of Italian celebrations. What is equally important is that the dark side of the old Bush has been replaced with colorful descriptions of la famiglia, picnics, Sunday gatherings, prolific gardens, grapevines and arbors, winemaking, drying tomatoes on boards, and music played on street corners by immigrants who were genuinely contented to be in America and who waved Italian and American flags, one in each hand, during downtown parades. The gap between the old Greenbush neighborhood and the rest of Madison no longer existed. Thirty-five years after the first house came tumbling down, there seemed to be more tolerance for what existed within the confines of the neighborhood. Only those who lived there understood the warmth that threaded paths through the streets, avenues, courts, and alleys of the old Bush. The neighborhood was a diamond in the rough, waiting to be polished. The Bush was not without fault, but what neighborhood is? Maybe we didn’t realize just how special it was until it began to disappear. My accomplishments have become more than I could ever have imagined. The neighborhood has been preserved in those cookbooks. A connection has been made with the grandmother I never knew. I’ve become an offspring of the neighborhood where my father grew up and I glow with pride of a heritage that warms the depths of my heart. Contentment accompanies having nothing more to wish for than my father’s favorite toast, ‘‘To good health and happiness. Salute!’’

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The Italian Immigrant Kitchen A Journey into Identity cassandra vivian 1998

If Saddam Hussein had not invaded Kuwait, I may never have gone in search of my ancestry. I was too busy and happy unraveling life in Egypt’s Western Desert. The day my book on the desert and its oases was published, the Kuwait war began. My small publishing venture did not last long after that. Tourism hit bottom in Egypt. After seventeen years, I was forced to return to the United States. During the frantic period between my publication date and my departure date, I kept asking myself, ‘‘What am I going to do in the United States?’’ Finally, I wrote my mother and told her to gather the family’s recipes. Three years, a few pounds, a few debts, and an amazing number of eye-opening experiences later, Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian hit the market. I had met my past head-on, and I would never be the same again. My grandparents, Nazareno and Santa Carolina Parigi, came from Quarata, a small village three kilometers north of Arezzo in Tuscany. In America, they kept alive the traditions of their village. I am the happy benefactor of warm memories: sipping wine in Nonno’s wine cellar, helping Nonna make ravioli, and buying the Christmas panforte at Colangle’s Italian store. Most of my memories of my grandparents revolve around food. Logistically, a cookbook of old recipes requires a lot of effort. In gathering all the recipes, I reproduced our calendar year: lentils for New Year’s Day, rice fritters on Saint Joseph’s. Next, I did seasons: bean soups in winter, artichokes and lamb in spring. Then I focused on the chores, such as butchering hogs and canning fruits and vegetables. Finally, we had them all. It became apparent that women were not the only food providers in the family. Men played a major role in immigrant households. They planted gardens, butchered hogs, and made the wine. It took the entire family to 150

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manage the preparation of Immigrant’s Kitchen. The men brought the food to the kitchen; the women took it to the table. Our book would not be complete without the male contributions to our heritage. Next, we tested. The written instructions had to produce the culinary excellence we always enjoyed. We worried about everything from oven temperature variations to the cooking experience of the reader. We enlisted the help of our cousin Vivian Pelini Sansone of New Castle, Pennsylvania, whose family also came from Quarata. Her mother, Sandrina Parigi Pelini, was my Nonno’s cousin. We had shared many holiday meals together. The work moved at a snail’s pace. My mother would begin to make a dish, and as she picked up her ‘‘pinch of this,’’ I would collect it in a measuring cup. Then we would move on to a ‘‘pinch of that.’’ Once we had the correct amounts, I would rewrite the recipe. Then we made the dish following the instructions, changing them again. Finally, we enlisted a volunteer. Our instructions were clear: follow the written recipe (which they did not always do), then deliver the final dish to us. We would look at color, texture, and taste. We did this for every recipe. There are over 260 in the book. It took a long time. On one Sunday in New Castle we sat down at table and taste-tested three different soups: pasta grattata, stracciatella, and passatelli alla Toscana. Then we continued with endive, parmesan, and stuffed escarole. A few weeks later we repeated this taste fest in Monessen: cannelloni with bechamel sauce, cotechino with lentils, stuffed veal pocket, and pork loin in porchetta. As we tasted and tested, the stories flew. We were reliving the past: Remember the time Nonna cooked the baccala in Joy liquid detergent? Remember how Nonno’s eyes would shine when he tapped the new wine or cut the first slice from a new prosciutto? There is more involved here than good eating. Food is the fabric that holds our traditions together. Food celebrates all rites of passage: births, communions, confirmations, weddings, and deaths. We labor over it for every holiday, at every season. Oftentimes a specific dish is made only on a specific holiday—once a year. We spend more time over the gathering, preparation, and consumption of food than we do over any other aspect of a holiday. The culinary threads weave us into the tapestry of the past. Any book about our foods must be a tribute to our ancestors. Once I realized this, I had to research how we fit into the culinary experience of Tuscany and how Tuscan foods fit into what Americans called Italian cooking. The next phase in preparing the book was the production. I had contacted a university press and they offered me a contract but I had to decline

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it. I had spent three years full-time on the project. Although the offer was generous by university press standards, it was too meager. The average bookseller offers the author 10 percent of the wholesale price of a book. If the book sells for $10.00 and discounts at $4.50 (45 percent), the author realizes 45 cents per book. If the book sells 10,000 copies, a huge number by university press standards, the author gets $4,500 for three years of work. You cannot eat porchetta on that. As a former marketing manager of the American University in Cairo Press, I know the ropes. So I wrote a contract for my mother and my cousin. Then I hired an editor and completed the editorial process. I proceeded to get an ISBN and register the copyright. For the production process, I solicited estimates from three printers and did the layout. I hired an artist for the cover, another for the interior line drawings. Turning to distribution, I checked out the competition at the local bookstores and set the price of the book knowing that major bookstores only buy from distributors (distributors want 55 percent of the retail price of the book: 45 percent for the bookstore, 15 percent for themselves). The game is to get the printing costs below $2.00 a book, balancing quantity with realistic sales potential. If you order 10,000 copies of a book, you should sell them within a year or two. You must balance the number of pages, number of illustrations, amount of color inside and out, and quality of the paper against the unit cost, keeping the magic $2.00 in mind. (This figure holds only for a standard six-by-nine-inch book with limited or no color illustrations.) Whatever the unit cost, you multiply by eight to get the retail price of the book (which must be competitive on the market). Now all discounts and expenses are covered and the book covers costs at 50 percent sold (at discount). For Immigrant’s Kitchen we had 300-plus pages, 160 illustrations, and a full-color cover. We sacrificed a second color on the inside and accepted average paper to keep the cost under $2.00. We printed 6,000 copies, what we could afford and sell in two years. For pricing, two times eight is sixteen. The book sells for $16.95. While the book was in final production, I began the promotion. First I mailed promo copy to one hundred newspapers in the United States. Food editors receive dozens of books a day and independent publishers are lost among the giants. On a local level, I followed up the mailing with a telephone call. We were in Pittsburgh Magazine and most local newspapers (another mailing of one hundred). The biggest plum in our area is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Gazette does not write about self-published authors and

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offers limited coverage to local small presses, but I was lucky; the food editor did an article on community cookbooks and included mine. She was very kind. I also launched a prepublication mail order campaign, which offered the book at a discount of 25 percent if ordered before publication. This I mailed to family, friends, and Italians in and around our hometown. In mail order you can expect a 1 to 2 percent return on your effort. If you mail a hundred flyers, you will get one order. On this mailing we averaged about 10 percent. It was terrific and helped me pay the printer. I did this every couple of months. I obtained the telephone pages for Allegheny and Westmoreland counties and simply went through them name by name, adding every Italian-sounding name to the mailing list. I got many orders this way: it was a bonanza. Plus, I was able to keep the full amount of the book by eliminating the distributors and bookstores. The more I promoted, the more I sold. The minute I stopped promoting, sales plummeted. It is now more than four years later and the book is still selling. And I am still promoting, but on a limited basis. What have I learned from all of this? A lot! For instance, I now believe that Italian Americans are not Italians. We are Italian Americans and there is a difference (which widens with each generation). For the most part, Italian immigrants arriving in America eighty-odd years ago brought regional Italian manners, customs, dialects, and foodways with them. For most, life was easier in America and they could have quickly discarded the time-consuming traditions. Many did not. They maintained their food patterns because food helped define them and forge their ethnic and regional identity in an alien land. The garden could have been discarded, but it was not. Where would they get cardoons, or flat Italian parsley, or rich, red tomatoes? The maialatura (butchering of the pig) was no longer necessary; yet, who would give up salami, prosciutto, and sausage? Italians wanted Italian things to eat, and they wanted them from their own region. Eventually, the Italian food on our table in southwestern Pennsylvania represented the food cooked in Tuscany around 1913. We preserved the traditions that accompany the foods, too. Our relatives in Italy did not have such rigid rules; they modernized. We did not. Whereas they simply changed some of the food traditions, we fixed them into ritual. The giants of Italian cooking—Ada Boni, Giuliano Bugialli, and Lorenza De Medici—as excellent as their books are, approach our cooking from an Italian point of view. I never find our family recipes in these cookbooks. The major cookbook publishers in the United States like Morrow and

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HarperCollins have never understood our identity either. They offer the cookbooks of foreign countries to ethnic America. How many Italian Italians would buy a U.S. cookbook in Italian about the cooking of Italy? Italian Americans buy these cookbooks because that is all the market provides. There are twenty-five million Italian Americans in the United States today, nearly 50 percent of the population of Italy (fiftyeight million), and most are looking for lost recipes mamma used to make. They seldom find them. Providing us with something that is not ours is the culinary equivalent of viewing world history as a white man’s experience. Frustration has created a publishing subculture. A subindustry of small publishers devoted to regional topics has emerged who recognize ethnic differences and produce books like mine. In addition, there are specialized publishers who deal exclusively in community and church cookbooks. There is also the world of ‘‘do it yourself.’’ Families have created their own cookbooks which they produce at OfficeMax and Kinko’s. None hit the bookstore market. They are too expensive to produce, are priced without considering distributor discounts, and are seldom promoted. I have learned two other things: many scholars do not take the study of food and foodways seriously, and those who do are defining Italian-American food patterns as we once defined world history, in Anglo-Saxon terms. After reading a folklore dissertation by Janet Theophano (‘‘It’s Really Tomato Sauce but We Call It Gravy’’),1 I posted a query to H-Italy, one of the H-Net discussion groups on the Internet. The use of the term ‘‘gravy’’ was new to me, and I wanted feedback from other experts in Italian-American studies. At first, a healthy discussion began. But then a subscriber expressed contempt and amusement that such a ‘‘trivial’’ issue was under discussion. He fumed, ‘‘Mention politics (cultural or otherwise) and the net goes dead. Throw a meatball out and they come out of the woodwork.’’ In response, another subscriber urged him to lighten up! . . . When I read the first entry on the subject last week, I also thought it was somewhat silly. However, it was after I read a few more letters that I was able to loosen up myself and appreciate the silliness and humor of it. Unquestionably, there are a great many serious subjects we can, and should, be discussing as a concerned and interested faction of our distinct cultural group. However, let’s be careful not to take ourselves so seriously that we are unable to have some fun with a little trivia, every now and then. . . . Gravy and sauce is obviously trivial and I can have fun with something like that.

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Obviously, not all Italian Americanists think that the study of food is a serious dimension of our social history. Why not? Are we trivializing food or are we trivializing woman’s work? Food is the road map of Italy’s many regions leading to an Italian-American identity. If you tell me what food you traditionally prepare on any holiday, including saints’ days like Saint Joseph’s Day, or how you make your sugo (pasta sauce), I can probably tell you the region of Italy you call home. In the future, after we share more about our lives, we will know the region in America that nurtured your Italian spirit. We all need to think more about Italian regionalism in the United States. Theophano and her colleagues have gone on to identify a ‘‘basic ItalianAmerican group’’ with the following culinary criteria: Italian Americans call red tomato sauce ‘‘gravy,’’ cook in one pot, do not cook platter foods (roasted meat with vegetables), serve pepperoni sandwiches at weddings from bushel baskets, and eat all holiday foods buffet style.2 Does your family traditionally fit into this basic Italian-American group? Mine does not. What is to be done? All I can say is read my Tuscan-American cookbook, Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian,3 or Vincent Schiavelli’s Sicilian-American cookbook, Papa Andrea’s Sicilian Table,4 or Elodia Rigante’s Apulian-, Basilicatan-, and Calabrian-American cookbooks, Italian Immigrant Cooking.5 Then perhaps we can begin to write culinary history from an Italian-American, rather than Italian, point of view. Notes 1. Janet Theophano, ‘‘It’s Really Tomato Sauce but We Call It Gravy: A Study of Food and Women’s Work in an Italian-American Community,’’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1982. 2. Judith G. Goode et al., ‘‘Meal Formats, Meal Cycles, and Menu Negotiation in the Maintenance of an Italian-American Community,’’ in Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities, ed. Mary Douglas, 143– 218 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); Judith Goode, Janet Theophano, and Karen Curtis, ‘‘A Framework for the Analysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Sociocultural Rules for Food Use: The Italian-American Pattern,’’ in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, 66–88. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). 3. Cassandra Vivian with Vivian Pelini Sansone and Elizabeth Parigi Vivian, Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian (Monessen, Pa.: TREE Publications, 1993). 4. Vincent Schiavelli, Papa Andrea’s Sicilian Table: Recipes from a Sicilian Chef as Remembered by His Grandson (New York: Carol Publishing, 1993). 5. Elodia Rigante, Italian Immigrant Cooking (Cobb, Calif.: First View Books, 1995).

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Literature

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Transformation in the Verbal Art of Clementina Todesco carole brown knuth 1986

The volume upon which the present discussion is focused comes to us as part of the Wayne State University Folklore Archive Study Series. Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, authors of Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman,1 have centered their study on folk artist Clementina Todesco and have effectively redeemed from oblivion the tales and talent of this heretofore unknown emigrant from the village of Faller in the Veneto. Who was Clementina Todesco, and how did this unusual book come to be written about her? The volume had an interesting genesis. In 1941, a young coed studying folklore at Wayne University in Detroit embarked on an ambitious project. Encouraged by her professor, Emelyn Gardner, and armed with memories of how her childhood had been enriched by the tales told to her by her mother, Bruna Todesco set out to collect material from the vast repertoire of her mother, Clementina: When she returned in the evening from classes at Wayne University, she sat by Clementina in the kitchen as she prepared dinner or washed dishes and wrote down word for word what Clementina recounted to her in the native dialect of Faller. Then Bruna would translate the tales into English, frequently checking with her mother for accuracy. In the final stage of her project, Bruna refined the oral transcriptions, making stylistic changes and additions which transformed the natural cadences and tones of the folk artist into something more closely resembling a literary text.2

When complete, the entire collection was deposited in the Wayne Folklore Archive. Bruna nurtured the dream of someday seeing in print, as a tribute to her mother’s folk art, the material which had been so meticulously garnered. With the untimely death of Bruna Todesco Baroni in 1961 at the 159

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age of thirty-nine, the project, which had already lain so many years in the university archive, was all but forgotten. In 1974, when the Todesco papers were rediscovered, their unique value was at last defined: The documents formed the first ethnographic study of a storyteller from northern Italy. It was at this stage in the history of the Todesco collection that Italian Folktales in America began to evolve toward its present form. Folklorist-ethnographers Mathias and Raspa decided to build their book around a core of twenty-two ma¨rchen, legends, and religious tales which constituted Clementina Todesco’s narrative repertoire; these texts are presented intact, exactly as they were recorded by Bruna. As the authors’ research progressed, the scope of their project expanded to include scrutiny of both texts and contexts, tales and teller. Mathias and Raspa sought to place the folktales in their cultural matrix and to follow the transformations which the immigrant experience effected in Clementina’s narrative art. To accomplish their task, the authors spent ten years gathering information from a host of sources. They interviewed the residents of Faller; they consulted collections of tale variants in Italy; they tracked down analogues in published and archival materials in Detroit and Rome; and they conducted extensive interviews with Clementina Todesco herself. The results of this thorough research have been fashioned into an enlightening book that acquaints us with one taleteller and her repertoire, tracks her personal odyssey from a rural Italian village to three urban centers in America, and focuses for us the changing patterns of her art over the course of a lifetime. Clementina Todesco was born in 1903 in Faller, a remote Alpine village characterized by an extremely rich oral narrative tradition. Within the Fallerese way of life, the stable provided the setting for many of the work and social activities of both family and community. Villagers would gather in the evenings in the stables, where men might repair tools and women could do their spinning or embroidery. In such an atmosphere of shared labor, storytelling was a natural source of entertainment. As Mathias and Raspa point out, villagers ‘‘referred to the gatherings in the stables as the filo, from filare (to spin wool or hemp)’’ and the stables ‘‘also provided the framework for artistic expression’’—the tales spun by local raconteurs.3 Such was the tradition of the filo into which Clementina Todesco was born. Clementina recalled two very different Fallerese storytellers, one from her childhood and one she knew as a young adult, who greatly influenced her tale-telling style and provided the building blocks of her narrative repertoire. When she was a child, Faller’s most celebrated storyteller was Patrizio

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Zampieri, known affectionately among the villagers as ‘‘Zio Patrizio.’’ Clementina remembered him ‘‘sitting down with a pipe, one knee over the other, trying to be formal and to give the essence of the story as if it happened right there.’’4 Many of the children would fall asleep during the storytelling, but Clementina would sit with her attention riveted to Patrizio, fascinated by his tales, absorbing every word. The child’s retentive memory soon impressed the veteran raconteur: whenever she was asked to repeat a story, she never failed to meet the challenge. She grew up repeating the tales again and again to her younger brothers and sisters. Clementina’s childhood memories of storytelling sessions in the stable all too soon gave way to the brutal realities of World War I. The war ended in 1918, but Clementina, then fifteen, had been prematurely thrust into adulthood for the sake of sheer survival. Four years later she married John Todesco, who not long afterward left his wife and native village to seek his fortune in America. Clementina remained behind in Faller, gave birth to their daughter Bruna, and waited seven years for her husband’s return. During these years she lived with her in-laws and was influenced by another talented teller of tales. This man, one of her husband’s uncles, Giuseppe (better known as Zio Bepi), was quite unlike Clementina’s earlier storytelling model. Where Patrizio had been a solo performer in a more formal mode, Bepi was a jokester and natural comic who allowed the audience to join in the storytelling process by adding details and comments. A more flamboyant personality, Bepi told not only tales from the narrative tradition of Faller, but often embellished his repertoire with personal-experience stories as well. Clementina Todesco learned invaluable lessons from these two distinct folk artists from her native village. They provided contrasting models of storytelling style, yet both helped pass on a wealth of ma¨rchen and legends to a woman who would carry her share of this rich narrative tradition from Faller to the New World. The contents of the folk narratives from Faller merit special mention. If these ma¨rchen, legends, and religious tales were read in isolation, they would probably kindle in most of us childhood memories of stories with similar themes. Somewhere along the way, titles from Clementina’s collection such as ‘‘The Cats under the Sea,’’ ‘‘The Ducks That Talked,’’ ‘‘The Gourd of Blood,’’ ‘‘The Stone of Gold,’’ or ‘‘The Bloodred Evil Elf ’’ are bound to stir recollections of our own incursions into the realms of adventure, suspense, and magic framed by stories heard in childhood. While Clementina’s folktales are certainly enjoyable in their own right, an enlightening dimension is added by the authors’ analytical comments and annotations to the tales. In their introduction, Mathias and Raspa discuss the folk

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narratives as dynamic structures of the local environment and demonstrate how they reflect accepted attitudes, appropriate codes of behavior, rules governing day-to-day rural life, and the religious ethos of the community. Filled with recognizable details of village life, the narratives function as instructions for children and reminders for adults. The Fallerese perception of life is readily visible. Mathias and Raspa make the following assertion about how this section of northern Italy’s social and political backgrounds have combined with geographic isolation and an unrelenting agricultural cycle to influence local narrative tradition: Ma¨rchen and legends developed in a social and political atmosphere historically characterized by devout belief in the supernatural, polemic distinctions between good and evil, and belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs. People believed that divinity would assert itself, either in punishment for wrongdoing or in assistance to holy people in the presence of evil. This world view furnishes the basis for the plots of the legends, permeates the ma¨rchen, and finds its way into the personal experience stories.5

People listening to stories such as those Clementina learned in the stables of Faller received both entertainment and enlightenment, and all the while the narratives were being ever more closely woven into the fabric of individual and community life. In 1929, John Todesco returned to Faller as a United States citizen, and in June of the next year the family sailed for New York. The New York of 1930 was as unlike Faller as one could imagine, and like so many immigrants who arrived here during the Depression, Clementina had to cope with the gap between her dream of America and the reality of what she encountered. The family’s scenario was a familiar one: apartment life in an Italian neighborhood of congested Manhattan, constant worry over money, and the ever-present pressures of adapting to new rhythms of life in a strange country. Clementina had proven herself a survivor in the face of adversity during World War I; now she simply applied her survival skills with renewed vigor. Her own comment best sums up her philosophical outlook: I . . . arrived in America in 1930, when there was nothing so special there. But no matter where you go, life’s troubles are everyday things for everybody.6

The Todescos had originally planned to go on to Chicago, where John had previously worked as a bricklayer, but instead they remained in New York for eight years. During this time Clementina met the demands presented by

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the shift from the agrarian community of Faller to the industrialized society of America, from an isolated environment to a pluralistic one. She reared her children, helped the family make ends meet by taking sewing or cleaning jobs, and continued to practice her verbal art by telling the tales learned in Faller to family and friends. In the ethnic neighborhoods of New York, immigrants were easily cushioned from the necessity of using English as an everyday language. This was certainly true for Clementina, but she seemed less interested in taking the easy road than in answering the challenge of change: ‘‘I just used to go [only] where I could express myself. . . . [They] all [spoke] Italian in all the buildings. So I said, ‘John, I would like to move from here, because we’ll never get a chance to learn English.’ ’’7 Clementina got her wish in 1938, when the family moved to Detroit. There the Todescos rented a house and planted a vegetable garden. John worked in construction, while Clementina held a job at a Chrysler plant during World War II. It was while they were in Detroit that Bruna recorded her mother’s folktales. Then in 1944, the family again moved in a westerly direction, this time settling permanently in Phoenix. When Clementina was interviewed by Mathias and Raspa in 1977, she had lived in the United States for nearly half a century and had naturally become an American in many ways. The picture presented by the authors is of a woman who wore double-knit pantsuits and drove a Honda, who served American cuisine more frequently than Italian, but who remained an animated and artful storyteller despite the years and miles that separated her from the place where she first learned and practiced her craft. Clementina Todesco died in 1982 at the age of seventy-nine. How did the verbal art of this woman from the Veneto evolve as she lived and worked in the urban centers of America? Mathias and Raspa note a shift from one narrative genre to another, and they view this transformation as a function of immigration.8 As long as occasion and audience warranted it, Clementina continued to tell the traditional ma¨rchen and legends from Faller; eventually, however, personal-experience narratives began to dominate her tale-telling. Personal-experience stories had long been told in Faller (for centuries villagers had departed in search of work and had returned to tell of their experiences), so Clementina was no stranger to the genre. In New York, Detroit, and Phoenix, she discovered audiences that displayed interest in hearing about her life, and so she told stories that chronicled experiences of life in Faller, of World War I, and of settling in America. In these narratives of personal experience, Clementina had a dual role: she was both narrator and a central participant in the action, for the

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tendency in this genre is for the raconteur to become the hero or heroine. The authors have collected in the final section of their book some of Clementina’s personal-experience stories, and these function as a fine supplement to the ma¨rchen and legends recorded by Bruna in 1941. The patterns of transformation in Clementina’s verbal art as delineated by Mathias and Raspa can perhaps be most neatly summarized by what they term a shift ‘‘from fiction made believable by tradition and time to fact that changes each day as new experiences color and shape individual memories’’; this shift ‘‘continues from a communal experience represented in traditional tales to an individual experience represented by personal memories.’’9 Though her outpourings of creative energy underwent inevitable changes in form, Clementina Todesco remained, from childhood through old age, a talented verbal artist whose repertoire tapped richly diverse sources from both the old and new worlds. Italian Folktales in America rather naturally evokes memories of the book by Marie Hall Ets, Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant.10 Almost fifty years before Clementina Todesco set foot on American soil, Rosa Cassettari (who is given the surname ‘‘Cavalleri’’ in Ets’s book) arrived in the United States from her native Lombardy. She, too, was an accomplished storyteller who had first learned her craft in the stables of her native village, and like Clementina, she was fortunate enough to find someone to record her oral memories. The friendship between Rosa and Marie Hall Ets developed in a settlement house known as the Chicago Commons, where the immigrant cleaning lady would often regale her social worker friend with storytelling. Ets tells us in her introduction to Rosa that she was very strongly motivated to chronicle her immigrant friend’s life (that is, her personal-experience narratives), plus ‘‘the fears and superstitions and beliefs of the people of her village.’’11 Of the traditional folk narratives from Rosa’s childhood, Ets says, ‘‘when written down these stories held little that would interest moderns.’’12 The unfortunate decision to omit these tales from the text necessarily diminishes our knowledge of Rosa’s repertoire, whereas in the case of Clementina, it is precisely the native folktales that Bruna Todesco chose to record and which Mathias and Raspa chose to study and supplement. We must not lose sight of the fact that while there are certainly very meaningful points of similarity between the histories of Rosa and Clementina, the authors’ different purposes have produced two very different books. Rosa is an immigrant autobiography, which, except for the simplifications and corrections inserted by Mrs. Ets, is told in the uninhibited style and zesty language of the uneducated lady from Lombardy who says of herself and her talents:

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Transformation in the Verbal Art of Clementina Todesco 165 Me, I was always one that liked to entertain the people. . . . And oh, I wish you could see how they laughed when I told the funny stories! . . . I loved to tell the stories. I never said no.13

While Folktales in America captures a similar talent and love of storytelling in its subject Clementina Todesco, it is a work more formally structured as a scholarly study of one teller and her tales. The book encompasses a daughter’s tribute to her mother’s folk art and the thorough, professional research of two established folklorist-ethnographers. Some fifteen years after the publication of Rosa, we should welcome the volume by Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa as an edifying and enriching addition to the field of Italian-American women’s studies. Notes 1. Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985). 2. Ibid., 4. 3. Ibid., 3–4. 4. Ibid., 45. 5. Ibid., 10–11. 6. Ibid., 271. 7. Ibid., 277–78. 8. Ibid., 60. 9. Ibid. 10. Marie Hall Ets, Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970). 11. Ibid., 7 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 234–35.

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The Novels of Mari Tomasi alfred f. rosa 1975

From two published books we are able to learn more about Mari Tomasi’s writings. The first of these books is Vermont Literature: A Sampler, an anthology of regional writing edited by Arthur W. Biddle and Paul A. Eschholz, which includes Miss Tomasi’s short story ‘‘Stone.’’1 The second book is Rose Basile Green’s comprehensive study, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures, which includes a four-page critical analysis almost exclusively concerned with Miss Tomasi’s second and last novel, Like Lesser Gods.2 It is fitting as well that each of these books emphasizes one of the two major concerns of her life and writing. The first places her in the Vermont tradition; the second concerns her place in the history of the Italian-American novel. Mari Tomasi was born February 1, 1909, in Montpelier, Vermont.3 She went to school there before attending Wheaton College and Trinity College in Burlington. Both of her parents came from Turin, her father settling in Vermont after a tour of South and Central America convinced him that the Green Mountains of Vermont closely resembled the lake region of northern Italy. Mari wanted to study medicine; her sister was a nurse, and her brother and four of her cousins practiced medicine in Vermont. But when her father died she abandoned that goal and decided instead to become a teacher. Writing, however, seemed to be her major interest, and before she took her degree, she left Trinity College to become a freelance newspaper and magazine writer. Later, in 1940, she published her first novel, Deep Grow the Roots.4 The next year she won a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference fellowship. She also worked at this time on the Vermont Writer’s Project and served as the city editor of the Montpelier Evening Argus. The most interesting work to come out of the Vermont Writer’s Project was ‘‘Men Against Granite,’’ 166

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a collection of stories (in manuscript) in which she bared her feelings of guilt and shame concerning the Italian involvement in World War II.5 ‘‘Men Against Granite’’ also deals with the history of Barre, Vermont, and the granite industry, two subjects that serve, in part, as the basis for Like Lesser Gods. Mari Tomasi apparently continued to write after the publication of Like Lesser Gods, but little, if any, of this work was of a creative nature.6 For many years she was a very active member of the Vermont Poetry Society. She died, after a brief illness, in Burlington on November 10, 1965.7 Favorable comments by three prominent women novelists of the day— Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Ellen Chase, and Faith Baldwin—appeared on the dust wrapper of Tomasi’s first novel, Deep Grow the Roots, but the reviewers were too kind. They implicitly passed it off as a slight production by praising its lyric qualities even though the book ends in tragedy. Structurally, the book is overly long for the simple tale it tells, and it ends not only in too contrived a manner but also too quickly, in comparison with the earlier, more laconic pace of the exposition. Luigi, a young man of Ibena, Piedmont, nurtures his chestnut grove with the expectation that it will provide him a handsome-enough income to marry the beautiful Nina. Just as all appears to be headed for a happy ending, Mussolini, whose foreboding footsteps are heard throughout the novel, makes his presence felt in the remote hilltown, and Luigi is drafted into the army to fight in Ethiopia. Luigi attempts to avoid the army by smashing his foot with a large stone, but ironically the wound turns gangrenous and kills him. For reader appeal, the novel relies almost entirely on the beauty of the love affair between Luigi and Nina, an affair that has a delicately balanced tension between its outward actions and a sexuality and coyness that run beneath the surface. More importantly, the novel is a clever attempt on Miss Tomasi’s part to present even native Italians as innocent victims of Mussolini and in so doing to further dissociate Italian Americans from Mussolini’s actions and Italy’s involvement in the war. Whatever strengths Deep Grow the Roots has, they lie outside the area of story and plot. The sense of place that Miss Tomasi creates is almost symbolic, but it is neither overdrawn nor overly abstract. It is an Illyria and is as idyllic as pastoral Vermont; the characters that people the setting are durable and interesting, even if at times they appear stereotypic. The village priest, Don Paolo, and the witchlike Tonietta are well contrasted as both of them strive for the position of spiritual leadership within the community. One of the more interesting characters in the book is Luigi’s little friend Gobbo,

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Splitting granite using feathers and wedges. (Courtesy of Vermont Granite Museum, Barre, Vt.)

who inherits Luigi’s land. Late in the novel Luigi kidnaps Gobbo and ties him to a tree, a method he had seen villagers use to try to cure a sick goat. This is intended to ward off his misfortune—the diabolic Mussolini, the destroyer of his pastoral happiness. As he flees the scene after tying Gobbo to the tree, Luigi stubs his toe; he later speculates that it was no mere accident but an event directly occasioned by his kidnapping of Gobbo. The stubbing of his toe leads him to the conclusion that if he were to damage his foot permanently he would not be drafted. As he lies in a near coma for several days after inflicting the wound on himself, he dreams that he is in the arms of the Virgin—only to awake and find himself in Gobbo’s arms. Gobbo forgives him the kidnapping and Luigi feels that superstition and divine intervention have joined together to relieve him of his problem. The curious mixture of superstition and religion represented in the characterizations of Tonietta and Don Paolo must be the same that Miss Tomasi recognized in Italian Americans in Vermont and in Italians she encountered

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in the hill country during her only visit to Italy. This flavor of authenticity, without ever becoming superficially ethnic, gives Miss Tomasi’s first book the strength that it has. Mari Tomasi’s second novel, Like Lesser Gods, is a realistic story set in Granitetown, a fictionalized Barre, Vermont. The novel is divided into two books: the first takes place in 1924, the second in 1941. In the novel, Miss Tomasi chronicles the growth of the family of Pietro Dalli, a quarrier who came from Ibena, Piedmont, the setting of Deep Grow the Roots. The novel begins with the arrival of an important unifying character, Maestro Michele Pio Vittorini Giuseppe Tiffone, who soon becomes familiar to all the townspeople as Mister Tiff. Mister Tiff, Pietro Dalli’s uncle and teacher in Ibena, moves in with the Dalli family and represents throughout the novel an un-Americanized, old-world morality. Professor Green says that Mister Tiff ‘‘is a symbol of the old frame of culture in Italy, the religious and social morality of southern Europe, the persistent criterion of conscience, which disciplines the behavioral patterns of even some contemporary Italian-Americans.’’8 The major conflict in the lives of almost all the people of Granitetown is narrowly focused in the conflict between Dalli and his wife, Maria. She wishes, indeed begs, her husband to quit the quarries before he dies of tuberculo-silicosis, caused by the dust of the granite he works. He refuses, because working the stone is tantamount in his view to religious devotion. Later in the novel when Pietro goes to young Dr. Gino Tosti to hear the results of his X-ray examination, we hear an exchange that must have been spoken many times in the history of the granite industry in Barre. Gino’s white-clad shoulders shrugged almost imperceptibly. ‘‘That’s up to you.’’ Stonecutters were all the same. Men against granite. They hated to admit defeat. He turned abruptly to the window, hiding the young perplexity in his face. He heard himself ask, even though he knew what the answer would be, ‘‘Why didn’t you find other work when you were younger?’’ His voice carried accusation. He was thinking of Pietro’s family. How each would crumple under this blow. ‘‘I like the work.’’ The older man’s words were spoken with biblical simplicity. ‘‘I like stone.’’ But because Gino wore the look of one who has received only half an answer, and that an unsatisfactory one, he continued, ‘‘Those first years in Granitetown I did not believe all this talk of stonecutters’ sickness. You see, boy, in the old country the sheds were open to the air. And the stone was softer—there was less danger. I could not believe

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170 Alfred F. Rosa it would be different here. Then I began to see one paesan become sick. And another. It was the same with the Irish workers and the Scotch—all of them.’’ Despite himself, he chuckled, ‘‘There were no favorites. Then I began to believe. Maria, all the time she begged, ‘Quit the shed, let us have a store, Pietro.’ But—I always put it off. The children, you know. They come one after another, four of them. I told Maria it would be foolish to take work that paid less. And when the children grew up—then, truly, I had no excuse. But then the sheds were ordered to install the dust-removing equipment. Even Maria has not complained these last years.’’ Gino was transported to his childhood, when Vetch and Denny labored in a miniature quarry. ‘‘You and Vetch, you both like stone. I can’t see why you do. So help me, God, I can’t see why!’’9

Pietro answers, and Dr. Tosti has an epiphany that makes the title of the book clear. ‘‘You have to cut it to know. It is hard stone. Beautiful. Lasting. Always when I carve a name on a memorial, I feel, well, important.’’ A half-smile wiped the earlier fear from Pietro’s face. It was as if, for a moment, he had forgotten the grim reason for this visit to Gino’s office. ‘‘I carve the name and I say to myself, ‘From up there in heaven the Dio creates new life; and when He sees fit to take it away, then we stonecutters on earth take up where He left off. We take up the chisel, we carve the name, we make a memory of that life. Almost, boy, it is being like—like—’ ’’ In Gino’s mind tiptoed a sentence from an old mythology book: On Olympus lived the greater gods; and below, the lesser. He nodded to Pietro, understanding him, and he murmured quietly—‘‘like lesser gods.’’10

In the most poignant scene in the book, a scene that occurs again in Miss Tomasi’s short story ‘‘Stone,’’ Maria awakens from her sleep, rises from her bed, and steals to the shed where Pietro has been working passionately on an ornate cross, the design and execution of which he hopes will be his crowning achievement. Maria enters the shed, sneers at the work being done on the tombstones of those she neither knows nor cares about, and proceeds to smash the cross. In so doing she actualizes her fears and vents her anger on a symbol so rich that it defies explication. The cross is a symbol of her love for her husband, her marriage, and her religion. Working the stone is killing her husband, but the cross represents all of Pietro’s artistry and inspiration as well. The cross that Pietro has designed is entangled in vines smothering other vines in a baroque-like ornateness symbolizing the

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complexity of the life/death struggle. Professor Green recognizes that the vines are ‘‘smothering’’ each other but feels that ‘‘the stone, wreathed by the leaves of the grapes that are the source of wine, represents Pietro’s faith in the universe.’’11 Maria slips back to the house and into bed and never tells Pietro that it was she who, in desperation, tried to discourage him from working in the sheds. The strategy fails. Pietro continues to work in the sheds, but he never finishes his cross. However, Maria’s fear of an early death for Pietro is unfounded. As expected, he contracts the disease and endures considerable pain, but he lives to see his family grow. After a stay in a mountain retreat, he is admitted to the sanitarium for stoneworkers, situated on a Granitetown hilltop. One day he dreams that the four o’clock whistle blows and that work for the day is completed, and then he dies contentedly. His beloved cross is reintroduced as plans are made to have it completed and erected as Pietro’s cemetery marker. Thus, Pietro and Maria are finally reconciled by the stone and symbol that had been the cause of the major tension in their otherwise happy relationship. With the publication of Like Lesser Gods, Mari Tomasi’s novelistic talents showed remarkable improvement. Her sense of story, now more panoramic

End of the work day. (Courtesy of Vermont Granite Museum, Barre, Vt.)

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and detailed, and her recognition of the need for a plot and a unifying theme lead one to believe that if she had produced any subsequent work and had continued to show the same refinement of her talents, we would still be reading her today. But perhaps this is too facile. In Like Lesser Gods she uses a beautifully rich, unifying symbol for the story that she tells, but it is one that, if exploited thoroughly, she could not use again. The question remains then whether or not, in any subsequent novels, she could have found as easy a vehicle for the expression of the human condition as she had found in the granite of Barre. She was extremely knowledgeable about the quarrying of granite, and it was as if her whole life had prepared her for the working out of the symbolism attached to granite. She had grown up in her father’s grocery store listening to tales of the old country told by the quarriers: tales of excavating marble from the Carrara quarries, where marble had been quarried in the days of the Romans. She later worked on the history of the granite industry for the Vermont Writer’s Project and still later, in an even more scholarly way, she gathered information for ‘‘The Italian Story in Vermont,’’ an article she published first in The Stone Cutters Journal, a trade publication, and then in Vermont History.12 Her notes, correspondence, and bibliography for ‘‘The Italian Story in Vermont’’ show how comprehensive and meticulous she was in gathering information that went beyond her own reminiscences.13 For her second novel Miss Tomasi used her youthful reminiscences and her later research in a fictional account of the granite story. The first Granitetown quarry, he told them, was opened by a war veteran after the War of 1812. At first only simple necessities like door sills and window sills were made; but soon cutters were making memorials and stone blocks for building. And by the end of the nineteenth century a rising tide of Scotch cutters with Italian cutters and carvers from the Como area, Carrara, and other stone-working districts of Italy flowed into Granitetown to contribute talent and brawn to the work. And if Petra wondered aloud where all the granite came from, the man let them sip generously from his cup of newly acquired knowledge. Here in the granite area, he told them, millions of years ago the hot, molten center of the earth was forced to the top. Intruded into this were masses of molten, glass-like matter containing highly heated water. The enormous weight of the rock above caused this granite to crystallize very slowly into its most beautiful and lasting form. It cooled, he told them, into the fine, tiny crystals which were the delight of true artists like Ronato.

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The Novels of Mari Tomasi 173 Nor did it occur to the children to question Mister Tiff ’s words, nor to wonder why these things had not been told them by their father and mother who had lived in Granitetown much longer than this little man. Mister Tiff, they told themselves, was a teacher, wasn’t he? He was expected to know such things, wasn’t he?14

Mari Tomasi was deeply aware of the treachery of the granite that brought Italians to Vermont. She knew the torture of the tuberculo-silicosis or ‘‘stonecutters’ T.B.,’’ as it was called, that lay in wait behind the incredibly durable and stately granite. The hardness of the stone allowed it to be polished to a mirrorlike finish. Unlike marble, however, its hardness necessitated methods of tooling it that created a fine granite dust, which lacerated the lungs of the workers. It was, then, the hacking coughs of the older workers, coupled with their devotion to their jobs, which must have entered Miss Tomasi’s consciousness early in her life and later compelled her to attempt, in Like Lesser Gods, to actualize the great irony of the quarriers’ calling. The ironies are heavy here. The more the workers dedicated themselves to the stone, the more they created their own figurative and literal tombstones. But it was this aspect of their lives, as Miss Tomasi embodies it in her title, that gave the workers their almost godlike power to achieve immortality. The tombstones they had excavated and carved were the very markers of their own passing. In a startling and profound way, Mari Tomasi realized that the granite workers continually celebrated and memorialized their own deaths. As a symbol, the granite is even more interesting. It is not merely sawed, hoisted out of the earth, and shipped to far-off places. Certainly, the granite is reminiscent of the ice in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, which in winter is cut from the top of the pond and sent all over the country and the world. The granite, like the ice, celebrates the region, but also, by its distribution, achieves a level of actual and symbolic universality. The granite is more than this. It can be artistically tooled into sculptures that are unique in the mixture of the boldness and mysticism they reflect. The granite workers were not, however, artists in the true sense of the word. Their interest was not in brilliance of conception in dealing with the artistic possibilities of the granite; rather, it was in a true understanding of the substance and the techniques used to work it. They were dedicated craftsmen and artisans in a far more literal sense than we use these designations today. Melville’s whale hunters surrounded themselves with the functional and artistic by-products of the bones of the whales to serve as symbols of their

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love of whale hunting and the necessary dangers of that calling; in a similar fashion, the quarry workers used granite for windowsills and doorsills, for roads, and sometimes in personal ways. Pietro and Maria, in yet another symbolically interesting way, used a large block of the stone as a step to their bed. The stonecutters are also described, in images reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s wasteland in The Great Gatsby, as being completely covered with the stone dust, thus looking like the stone they worked. Like New England transcendentalists, who considered water the universal element because their very bodies were comprised largely of water, the stonecutters were obsessed by stone, since it too became a part of their bodies, but with vastly different and sadly ironic consequences. There is much to admire in Miss Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods. In addition to the strong characterizations, the rich symbolism of the granite, and the strong story, there are passages reminiscent of the works of her contemporaries—Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in particular. She is especially good at portraying small-town life and the importance of the automobile as an American institution, which not only provides adventure but also frequently causes death. Professor Green places her discussion of Like Lesser Gods in the ‘‘Counterrevulsion’’ section of her study. Here is what she means by the term. When they discovered both the inadequacy and the distortion in the themes that represented our national literature, American writers of Italian descent returned to Italian-American subjects for their fictional materials. This phase corresponds more exactly to Robert E. Spiller’s third division in which the settler, homesick for his racial past, went back to the ‘‘old sources of wisdom and beauty’’ in order to improve his condition. Because they were for the most part second- and third-generation Americans, the writers during this phase, in their looking backward, were able to do so with the advantage of a more firmly achieved cultural integration than that exercised by those who went before them. Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, they identified their views with those who were not only of a different age, but also of a more advanced technological period, making possible an extended cultural attitude in the national scene. Among others, the group includes Guido D’Agostino, Jo Pagano, Mari Tomasi, Jerre Mangione, George Panetta, Jimmy Savo, Pietro DiDonato, and John Fante.15

It is important to understand that Professor Green does not make any judgments concerning the historical realism of these writers. She places Like

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Lesser Gods in this phase of her history of the Italian-American novel because she sees Mister Tiff as the moral center of the novel. She also notes that the townspeople make him their spiritual leader, their lay priest. Significantly, as a nomenclatural symbol of Americanization, the former instructor’s pseudonym is derived from his bona fide name, Maestro Michele Pio Vittorini Giuseppe Tiffone. This erstwhile maestro is now an umbrella mender, his new role emphasizing the material aspect of the rectifier of errors. Meanwhile, everyone around him gravitates to him for advice on making the decisions engendered by trivial or important events. Mr. Tiff is a refuge in the storms of love, hate, revenge, conciliation, and tolerance. Efficient in his role, he is instrumental in Petra’s ‘‘integrated’’ marriage to Danny Douglas, the most eligible member of the town’s formidable ‘‘WASP’’ establishment; he maneuvers the successful solution to the local political chiefs illicit love; and he implements (to the bafflement of the parish priest) the purchase of a stained-glass window for St. Michael’s. He thus personifies Mari Tomasi’s theme that the strength of endemic concepts in Italian character regenerates what might be corrupted in America.16

Notes 1. Arthur W. Biddle and Paul A. Eschholz, eds., Vermont Literature: A Sampler (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973), 312–20. 2. Rose Basile Green, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974); Mari Tomasi, Like Lesser Gods (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1949). 3. Professor Green erroneously gives Miss Tomasi’s date of birth as February 1, 1895. 4. Tomasi, Deep Grow the Roots (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940). 5. Mari Tomasi Papers, Library of the Vermont Historical Society, Montpelier, Vermont. 6. In a recent interview with the author’s sister, Marguerite Tomasi, she told me that her sister had an extensive library and actively followed literary trends and developments, that she had compiled several Vermont Legislative Yearbooks, and that she was the director of the Vermont Census in 1960. 7. Professor Green is also in error in giving Miss Tomasi’s year of death as 1968. 8. Green, The Italian-American Novel, 136. 9. Tomasi, Like Lesser Gods, 165. 10. Ibid., 166. 11. Green, The Italian-American Novel, 135. 12. Tomasi, ‘‘The Italian Story in Vermont,’’ Vermont History 28 (1960): 73–84.

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176 Alfred F. Rosa 13. Drafts of this article, as well as copies of The Stone Cutters Journal, are among the Mari Tomasi Papers in the Wilbur Collection at the Bailey Library, University of Vermont. 14. Tomasi, Like Lesser Gods, 30–31. 15. Green, The Italian-American Novel, 128. 16. Ibid., 136.

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Breaking the Silence An Interview with Tina De Rosa lisa a. meyer 1999

When Tina De Rosa wrote her novel Paper Fish, the room where she worked was haunted. Not by ghosts and goblins, but by childhood memories. To write the book, she had to let the emotions that came with those memories rush through her. Once again, she had to feel grief, loneliness, and bewilderment. The result is an extraordinary novel. Paper Fish is about an Italian-American family, certainly, but a lot more. It is about unspeakable suffering, discovery and healing, and the process of creating a new reality. It is a book about Carmolina BellaCasa. Her family is in pieces. Its members are overwhelmed by the 1950s socioeconomic forces that have disordered their lives. Carmolina’s father, Marco, is an overworked Chicago policeman who will always be a department peon because of his Italian heritage. Her Lithuanian mother, Sarah, feels disoriented amid her husband’s culture. Carmolina’s grandmother, who emigrated from Italy, escapes through stories. Weaving folklore with Christianity, she spins tales in an effort to order her life. Carmolina’s sister, Doriana, can’t speak. As an infant, she had a high fever that damaged her brain. She can scream, cry, and thrash against the ropes that bind her to her blue-sheeted bed. She is beautiful. She is angry. She is in pain. She represents the dispossession and suffering of De Rosa’s bruised and broken characters. Doriana even serves as a metaphor for the history of the book itself. Paper Fish, too, was silenced for a while. It was published the first time sixteen years ago by a small house. Then it fell out of print, rejected as too literary 177

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178 Lisa A. Meyer

to make money. But devotees kept it alive by photocopying it and giving it to scholars and other writers, until the Feminist Press revived it. The Zora Neale Hurston of Italian-American culture, Tina De Rosa is a pioneer. She has told an uncommon story in a unique voice. An ethnic woman from the working class, De Rosa is no stranger to socioeconomic and literary ghettos. But the story of her upbringing is now in a highly lit arena. She has created a path out of the ghettos so that other writers may follow. De Rosa’s literary voice is lyrical, emotive, and imagistic. Her speaking voice is soft. She is compassionate and playful. She also is serious and opinionated. She is more comfortable chatting with a cab driver than greeting a crowd of her fans. As she talks during dinner, in a busy restaurant just outside of Chicago, she is wearing a forest-green T-shirt that belongs to her sister—the brain-damaged young girl who appears in Paper Fish. [This interview, published in 1999, dates from February 1997.] Lisa Meyer: What did it feel like sixteen years ago when Paper Fish went so quickly out of print? Tina De Rosa: It was painful and disappointing, because the initial publication caused such a stir. I had poured my heart into this book. LM: What does it feel like now that it’s back in print? TD: I can’t quite pinpoint yet how I feel. It’s very moving to see the incredible response that people are giving it. But I feel like a different person now. I am not the person who wrote Paper Fish. LM: Why and how are you different? TD: Well, a lot has happened in sixteen years. A writer really writes from his or her unconscious. To recreate the unconscious I had when I wrote Paper Fish is difficult. LM: Has this recent spotlight on Paper Fish [as a result of its 1996 reissue by The Feminist Press at CUNY] affected your writing? TD: I don’t have much time to write. It’s made me wish that I had more time. I finished another manuscript, about two years ago. For me, there’s at least three or four years between manuscripts. After I finish a book, I’m convinced that I have nothing else to say. It’s like getting pregnant. So far, I’m not pregnant yet. Except for poems. LM: Did you intend to create Paper Fish as a multiperspective, nonchronological text? TD: No. When people called it High Modern, I laughed. It was a style that came naturally. To me, Paper Fish is a long poem that tells a story. When

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 179 I was nineteen, my father and grandmother died, and my childhood neighborhood was destroyed. Except for my sister, I was left literally alone. I felt haunted by the images of my childhood. There was no one I could talk to about what I had experienced. It was like a Holocaust experience. For my own sanity, I had to tell the story. So I wrote to make these people present. And then, they would die. Paper Fish is a book of place. It’s the poetry of geography. I had grown up in a sacred space, with very special people who suffered. LM: How many times did you rewrite Paper Fish? TD: I began when I was about twenty-five and wrote two or three drafts, then threw them out. I didn’t show them to anyone, because I knew they weren’t good enough. I was trying to find a way to tell this story. Then I went to the University of Illinois, not so much to get my Master’s degree as to be with other writers, who were struggling with this process. I had to know I wasn’t crazy. I had nothing on which to base what I was doing and how I was thinking and living my life. When I met other serious writers, I realized, ‘‘Oh, I am a writer. And this is what writers do.’’ I wrote it one more time when I was at the University of Illinois. Michael Anania was my mentor in the writing program. I gave him a 300-page manuscript that I was sure was finished. He praised all the things that were good about it, and then said, ‘‘Take the first 250 pages, throw them out, and start here. This is where you found it.’’ He was talking about my voice. And that’s when I put the book away. I said, ‘‘I can’t rewrite it again.’’ But I knew Michael was right, and that I had found my voice. It was strong and poetic. But I wasn’t sure I could sustain that voice throughout the whole story. I didn’t know if I was good enough. LM: What happened after you put the novel away? TD: I wanted nothing more to do with it. Probably, unconsciously, I realized the challenge that I was facing, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to it. That year, I was hired to teach at the University of Illinois. But while I was teaching, I had no time to write. So I took two jobs. I was freelance copywriting for an ad agency, and I was a part-time typist in a law firm. I only had to work three days a week, which gave me time to write again. And all of a sudden, the voice came back. I wrote every single day that I didn’t work and every single night. I can’t explain it—the book just came. That was an exhausting and amazing experience. I could start writing at ten in the morning and work until one the following morning. I don’t mean continuously, but three or four hours, take a break, go for a walk, eat something, watch television, go back to it. After six or seven years of

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180 Lisa A. Meyer struggling, the book was finally coming. I had to catch it. I almost felt like the receiver. I was living in this horrible basement apartment with two bedrooms, and I used the back bedroom to write. I used to call it the haunted room. LM: Why the haunted room? TD: Because it was so frightening to face that kind of emotion—the power of it. Those emotions that are in the book came through me—grief, loss, loneliness, and bewilderment. It was like a rush. My Yeats professor once said that poets take very large risks. When the things that you’re trying to say finally come, you had better be strong enough to let it come through you. LM: Do you still feel haunted by that material? TD: No. I feel completely free of it. LM: Did the writing of Paper Fish free you? TD: No. I don’t know what freed me. Maybe time freed me. I didn’t write Paper Fish to be free of it. I wrote it to tell the story. I knew that there would be a point in the future when that memory would not be as intense as it was. So I captured it. It was like taking pictures of everybody before they were gone. LM: If you’re not still haunted by the material, do you think your voice has changed? TD: Oh, yes. One of the sad things for me about Paper Fish is I can’t write in that voice anymore. It is gone. The second novel is in a different voice. The book I just finished is in another voice. T. S. Eliot created and exhausted a form with every poem he wrote. Whatever it was I was trying to say, it created its own form. And once it was said, I couldn’t use that form again. LM: Do you have any hindsight on how you developed the voice of Paper Fish? TD: I have no idea. It’s a mystery to me. As far as I’m concerned, writing is an act of God. Because there was a point where the voice of the novel just took over. I had nothing to say about it. LM: You once said that writing Paper Fish was like speaking in tongues. And that reminds me of a comment Peter Carey made once about the writing process. ‘‘When I pick up my work, it’s like some sort of madness,’’ he said. ‘‘I can’t believe that I wrote it. It’s much more intelligent than I, it’s much better than I, it’s smarter. It’s beautiful. So one transcends oneself in some way.’’

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 181 TD: To me, writing is a prayer. I don’t mean that the actual writing itself is a prayer. But the product is. It’s a certain state of mind, where you’re just open to something else, and it comes through you. It has nothing to do with me. And the proof is that I cannot do it again. LM: I’m thinking of two different ways you could ‘‘open yourself ’’: to your unconscious or to some supernatural force. In which way do you mean? TD: Both. Because I think that God uses our unconscious. How else is He, She, or It going to speak to us? LM: So this spirituality must be connected to memories. Because that is what the unconscious is, repressed memories. TD: Our unconscious is healthier than our conscious. Part of the writing process is opening up our conscious mind so that we can hear what is healthy in our unconscious—or what is beautiful. That is why all these complicated dogmatic ‘‘isms’’ that are being read into Paper Fish bother me. Edvige Giunta, the woman who wrote the afterword for the Feminist Press edition, will give you a feminist/Marxist/socioeconomic reading of Paper Fish. And that’s not what Paper Fish is about. You really have to read it with your heart, not with your head. Recently, I’ve given readings of Paper Fish, and women have come up to me crying. They don’t even say anything. They’re just crying. Paper Fish is about loss. It’s about grief. It’s about sorrow. It’s about suffering. It’s about beauty. Now we have feminism, multiculturalism, and this pseudo-Marxist reading of working-class literature. And to me, Paper Fish is this very pure little jewel that came from my heart. People are trying to impose all of these dogmatic interpretations that simply are not there. To me, it’s a misreading of the book. LM: Can you explain the image that appears at the end of the book of the clown, sweeping the spotlight away? Carmolina says, ‘‘It’s only a trick, Grandma. . . . Don’t let it fool you.’’ Is she referring to the fact that life doesn’t really disappear? That it lives on in your memories? But there is something sad about this. Why the sadness? Is it because memory is a futile attempt to retain the life of a certain moment? TD: I still get tears in my eyes when I read that sentence. I’m still not quite sure what I meant when I wrote that. LM: In the novel, a priest thinks of God as a ‘‘trickster.’’ ‘‘Trickster’’ is a term that is applied to Afro-Americans, who, in subtle, deceptive ways, combat the dominate culture that oppresses them. A trickster god is a god for cultures of resistance. Was this the reason you had this priest call God a ‘‘trickster’’?

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182 Lisa A. Meyer TD: It has nothing to do with Afro-Americans. It’s really one of the keys to Paper Fish. The word ‘‘trick’’ appears in two places in the novel. The reason that the priest calls God a trickster is because the priest has cancer and he is about to die and God played a trick on him. The clown scene is the only other place I use the word ‘‘trick.’’ The grandmother is dead and Carmolina is still with her, comforting her by saying, in a sense, ‘‘Don’t be afraid. You are not alone. It’s only a trick. Don’t let it fool you.’’ See, death has not separated them. Paper Fish is about the incredible bonding when love occurs. It’s like Saint Paul saying, ‘‘Nothing can separate you from Christ.’’ Not even death can separate the little girl from her grandmother. It doesn’t matter that she is dead. It’s an illusion. It’s a trick. LM: I had another reading of this scene, which is even more interesting in light of what you just said. The spotlight was associated with the magician, which is Grandma Doria’s name for a guardian angel. TD: There’s a difference between a guardian angel and the magician. LM: I was thinking that was her term for a guardian angel. TD: No. She has a magician watching over her. LM: So what is the magician? TD: I think you are close. The magician is the grandmother. When the grandmother is describing the magician, she is telling Carmolina that she is special and that she has somebody watching over her. But it’s separate from a scriptural guardian angel. LM: In many places in the book, you humanize the divine. For example, you associate Grandma Doria with somebody who is holy and yet Grandma Doria is very human. She’s wonderful. She’s strong. But she has swollen feet. She’s very mortal. She’s in the flesh. You give the divine human attributes. I thought the magician was another example of that. You were taking this divine image of a guardian angel and you made it somehow imperfect. You put a frog on its head. TD: Here is where I would make a distinction between how I think you are using ‘‘divine’’ and how I would use ‘‘divine.’’ To me, only God is divine. I don’t think I would call anyone in my book divine. But I would agree that they are holy. LM: In the prelude to Paper Fish, Carmolina’s conception is juxtaposed to Marco’s death. Why? Is it because the representative of the patriarchal culture needs to die before Carmolina’s voice can be born? In a sense, that is what Paper Fish is about: how Carmolina finds her voice. She identifies with Doriana, who is mute. When Carmolina runs away, she

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 183 screams at a policeman—a symbolic figure for her father. I want to take this feminist reading of Paper Fish one step further. Could you say that Carmolina is expressing anger at a representative of the patriarchal culture that has silenced her? TD: There are no feminist themes in Paper Fish. They are read into them. I don’t subscribe to any mindset that is going to hand me a set of answers for everything. LM: You began with a wonderful statement about the poetics of space. Paper Fish is dramatizing a neighborhood, a group of people. What I’m trying to do is put those people and put you, as the writer, into a larger context. TD: But I think the larger context is American literature. Not feminism, nor Italian-American female writing. I’m a writer. I happen to be a woman. I happen to be writing about the Italian-American experience. I am uncomfortable with being defined by my sex and ethnicity. A hundred years from now, [if] Paper Fish [is read], it will be . . . part of the canon of American literature because it is beautiful. Not because it is written by a woman. Not because I am an Italian American. Beauty is inherently eternal. LM: I don’t see American literature as this monolithic category. I see it as various. There are writers. Of course, you are a writer. But you are also a woman. And our society treats women differently than they treat men. And because of that experience, they are going to write differently. TD: I have never allowed myself to be treated differently because I am a woman. There is a point where the critic is reading into the text something that is simply not there. LM: Of course. The reader is bringing his or her own perspective to the text. Reading is like theater. In the space between the stage and the audience, an imaginative world is created. A similar imaginary space exists between the written page and the reader. That imaginary space is different for each reader. TD: I don’t want the beauty, the simplicity, and the heartfeltness of Paper Fish to be obscured by these intellectual interpretations. LM: Why do you think Paper Fish was silenced? TD: Because it was beautiful and beauty does not make money. At the time I finished this book, corporations bought out many of the good publishing houses that were known for caring about real literature. We now have a corporate culture in American publishing which will decide whether to publish a book on the basis of how much money it will make. Publishers thought Paper Fish wouldn’t sell. There’s no sex. There’s no

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184 Lisa A. Meyer violence. Although things must be changing because all of a sudden people are responding to the book. We have lost so much beauty in this country that people are starved for it. LM: You have created a workspace in your own home that you imagine is separate from capitalistic influences. Is that space more connected to the Italian economic system which is based on community and the home? Do you think that the space is truly immune from capitalism? TD: It is separate from capitalistic influences. Money is not the reason why I write. I never expect to make any. LM: How have you arranged that space? TD: I live in a one-bedroom apartment. I sleep in the living room and have my work space in the bedroom. In one corner is my prayer corner, because I always pray before and after I write. On the other side of the room is my desk. Even though I don’t have time right now to use that space, I visit it. LM: Can the market ruin an artist? Are you aware of the market? Are you aware of an audience? TD: Now I am aware of an audience. The market seems to be open to only certain kinds of beauty. Or beauty mixed with something else— something that makes it not quite as beautiful. There is no place in the market for pure beauty: beauty that has no hidden agenda—beauty that simply tells a story. LM: You once said, ‘‘Writing is a very solitary thing. Me and my soul.’’ Could you talk more about what this means? Is writing so solipsistic? Or, is it more like a controlled conversation between the writer and the outside world? TD: ‘‘Solipsistic’’ has to do with the self. There is a difference between the self and the soul. I don’t really write, I listen. And when it comes, I write it down. There is nothing on earth that would move me to surrender that experience. There’s no price on it. It’s not for sale. It’s like a love experience. It’s holy. I’ve always known from the beginning that money had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even expect publication to have anything to do with it. It’s doing the act for the act itself. LM: Does that take a certain amount of courage? Or is that just what you do? In ‘‘Career Choices Come from Listening to the Heart,’’ you said that you have an internal impulse to write. You couldn’t help but write. A writer has to write, as opposed to someone who writes for a living. TD: Writes to make money? LM: Yes.

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 185 TD: Have you ever read Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke? LM: Yes. TD: That’s what I’m talking about. LM: In ‘‘An Italian-American Woman Speaks Out,’’ you wrote, ‘‘We live in dispassionate times. We live in a time when emotions are questioned, dissected, subjected to control, and relegated to second place in most lives. We live in a time when visions of beauty or creation or self-creation are stunted by the overriding imperative to survive.’’ This is a beautiful observation. Could you tell me more about what you meant by this? TD: I stand by that statement. We live in a very cold world. We live in a money-driven world. We live in a world that thinks everything is measurable. First, we dismantle God. Or we think we can. Now we are dismantling beauty, mystery, and poetry. We live in a cold computerized, technological world that thinks it can explain everything. If it doesn’t fit into a computer, then it’s out. I mean, it’s Brave New World. It’s 1984. We are there. Dostoyevski said that beauty will save the world. I agree with that. The whole center of the Italian-American culture is about beauty. The beauty of the family, of love, and of loyalty. Even the beauty of suffering. LM: I see Doriana as symbolizing all those who are dispossessed. TD: I rile at the questions where Doriana is used as a symbol. I can see how you are thinking that, but you must realize Doriana is my sister. In an Italian-American family, when you say she is my sister, that means I would throw myself in front of a train before I let her be hurt. LM: I want to pause on this point because it is present not only in ‘‘ItalianAmerican Woman Speaks Out,’’ but also in Paper Fish—this battle you experience as an immigrant, stuck between two very different cultures. The Italian culture values the family and emotions. Based on a capitalistic economy, America prioritizes the individual and money. TD: Grandma Doria is coming from a rural background. She’s coming from another language and religion—Roman Catholicism, which helps to form the Mediterranean impulse toward sharing, loving, sacrifice, and beauty. It’s a totally different space. And she doesn’t find that space in America. She came here to escape war and poverty. But she came to a place where money and success are the only concerns. How lonely that is. And Americans don’t even seem to see this, except for blacks. They still have their culture, soul, and spirit. And they know what they are doing, the same way I know. I work for the money and then I go home and live my real life, which is sad. But that is where we are. And that’s

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186 Lisa A. Meyer where this country is bringing us. Most people who stay sane have to do that. Or you become a robot. LM: In your essay, ‘‘My Father’s Lesson,’’ you spoke about just this. You described how your father taught you to be a writer. He taught you how to separate what you do to pay the rent and what you do after. TD: It’s separating what you do from who you are. When I was in college, I began struggling with that question: ‘‘How can I do what I am? How can I express my very being in what I do?’’ My father was an artist. When he came home, he would make jewelry. He would design furniture and listen to classical music. He had the soul and gifts of an artist. But he did not have the education. He was a policeman. That’s one of his primary gifts to me: Know who you are, in your very self, all alone with nobody around you. LM: Edvige Giunta might say that the father in Paper Fish was forced to be a policeman because of his ethnicity. There were very few chances for Italian Americans at that time to become artists. Would you agree with that? TD: I see it as evolution. It’s a selection process. For some reason, it was my turn. I came out the writer. He didn’t. That’s part of the sorrow of the book. And I’m not limiting this interpretation to Italian Americans. We all have something in us that is artistic, holy, connected to God, higher than we are and we all live in a society that is snuffing the light out of us. It is valid to look at that from a sociohistorical-political point of view. He was first generation in this country and Italian and, of course, he could not make it as an artist. If you look at it that way, it’s very sad. Or you could say, ‘‘We haven’t evolved to that point yet.’’ LM: Do you feel any guilt about leaving your childhood world—climbing into a higher income strata? Survivor’s guilt, let’s say? TD: I haven’t gone very far. LM: Your work has been compared to Mario Puzo’s. He is in the mainstream. He is a bestseller. What do you think the difference is between your work and Mario Puzo’s? Why is he spotlighted and you are less so? Is it because he is telling the American public what they want to hear? TD: He fell into the money trap. He wrote a really nice little book called The Fortunate Pilgrim, which reflects the same world as Paper Fish. He wrote it before The Godfather. The American public has bought the stereotypical mafia image. I have a psychological reading of the situation: We need to project our violence somewhere—our inner violence and our violence as a society. And unfortunately for some reason the

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 187 American reading and viewing public likes the idea of having their violence projected onto Italian Americans. No one wants to hear the truth about us. They bought the image. Mario Puzo told the truth. There really is a mafia, but for some reason everybody bought that part of it and no one wants to hear the rest of it. LM: Why don’t you—or maybe you have, I just haven’t read it—written about the Lithuanian side of your family? TD: I don’t know that much about it. If anybody is oppressed in the book, it’s my mother. She is dominated by the Italian family. I thank God that I was. I wouldn’t want to be in the world we are moving toward. I continue to draw from the culture I came from. LM: So do you think Paper Fish is an attempt to capture that world and take it with you? TD: Paper Fish was to give it away. I wanted other people to have it. It’s in me. LM: I think that Carmolina is a heroine in the book because she struggles against various forms of oppression. Running away was her attempt to free herself, to find her voice and discover who she was. When she ran away, she saw herself and her neighborhood in a different light, because she was not in it anymore. And then at the end of that journey, she screams. And it seems as if that was her effort to get her voice out—not be repressed. Of course, I link her struggle with Doriana, who doesn’t have a voice. TD: Carmolina is not repressed. She is terrified because she doesn’t know what is wrong with Doriana. And Carmolina is afraid that whatever it is, she might have it too. And if the family is getting ready to put the sister away, Carmolina thinks that she will be next. She adores the little girl. Carmolina runs away because she is angry at the family for not being able to fix Doriana. Now what happens when she runs away is a good question because she’s different when she comes back. I almost ended the book there. I had to struggle with the epilogue and the wedding dress part. When Carmolina is gone, she has some kind of epiphany. Everything has changed for her. Her childhood world will never be the same. That part of the novel is very elusive, and you’re not quite sure what those little boys did to her. You know that they took her money, that she was crying, that she ran, and that she kicked them, but what else happened to her? By the time she sees the policeman standing under the street lamp, she is so terrified and confused that she just screams.

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188 Lisa A. Meyer LM: What made her so terrified and confused? Was it because she was experiencing a world which was so different from the world she knew? TD: She has nowhere to go. She is a little girl who is growing up in a family with a disabled child who is older than she is, and is, therefore, her model. I’m reading it on a literal level, which is where it is. LM: I believe that we all live in narratives. You live in a Roman Catholic narrative. Other people live in a Buddhist or Jewish narrative. TD: What do you mean by narrative? LM: A story. It’s a way a person perceives the world. Peter Carey wrote a wonderful book called Illywhacker. It is about this man who is a storyteller and throughout the book, he is the only one who survives because he can shift to a new story when the old stories aren’t working anymore. If the people around him won’t accept the story, he just makes up a new story. So what I was thinking when I read the passage in which Carmolina runs away is that she begins to see another world out there that is different than her neighborhood. She looks through the windows of other homes and sees other women who are different from her mother. And so she begins to see herself and her neighborhood in a new way. Someone calls her a ‘‘dago.’’ She discovers prejudice. She sees herself through other people’s eyes and that disturbs her. The way she originally perceived herself is destroyed. TD: My intention when I wrote that scene was to express her desire to go home. Think about it, not on a symbolic level, but on a literal plane. LM: In ‘‘An Italian-American Woman Speaks Out,’’ you write, ‘‘I know now that where I belong is with myself, knowing that I don’t really belong anywhere. That is the inheritance, that is the curse, of being born into a world and into a family that want you to enter another.’’ You were referring to your position between the Italian and the American culture. What does that feel like? TD: It’s like what I said earlier about not subscribing to anybody’s dogma. I make my home with myself. LM: How does that solve the problem? You gain self-possession, but. also permanent isolation. TD: It has to do with my whole psychology of wanting to be accepted by the very thing that rejects you. That psychology would go back to my parents’ and grandparents’ experience of being rejected by the American culture—experiencing discrimination. So, children were encouraged to try to be accepted by the very culture that rejected their parents and grandparents. That way, they could feel a vicarious acceptance. So it is

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 189 very confusing, because there wasn’t anything that I thought was inherently valuable in the American culture. Did I want to be part of this other culture that hurt them so badly and where I felt like a total stranger? After I wrote Paper Fish, I was living in this beautiful apartment in Chicago. It was going condo. I could have bought it. My gut instinct was that I would suddenly be owned by my possessions. If I walked into that door, I would never walk out again. I moved out of the apartment and into a studio. I had been where my father would have probably wanted me to be, and I rejected it. The odd thing is, though, now, I am probably where my father would want me to be, if he were alive. But I got there on different terms. I took a different path. I didn’t sell anything along the way that was really valuable. LM: Is that struggle manifested in Paper Fish? Is this Carmolina’s struggle? TD: She doesn’t struggle with being caught between two worlds, because Paper Fish ends before she leaves that world. I did that deliberately. So in a way, Paper Fish is a completed picture of a part of myself that simply doesn’t change. I wouldn’t want to write about Carmolina after she has left that world. That would be too sad. So in a way, she is a little bit like Doriana to that extent. They are both safely still in that little world. LM: What would bring Carmolina out of that world? Would it be her participation in the American education system, where she would be taught American values? TD: It would be a tragedy that she couldn’t handle. Then she would have to go outside that world to get somebody to help her to deal with it, which is, in fact, what I did when I wrote the book. It would have to be a tragedy of such immense emotional proportions that she would have to leave that world that fell apart and look at it objectively. That way, the world would shatter and not herself. LM: I’m going to go back to that quote—‘‘I belong nowhere, completely, anymore.’’ Do you feel that you are without a culture or through your writing you are trying to find a culture? TD: Oh no, I have a culture. I live in the world of the poet. LM: That’s the only label that you like. TD: But that’s not a label. It’s an identity. It’s a way of looking at the world. It’s your eyes. It’s your mind. It’s a state of being. But if you called me a Catholic poet, then I would say, ‘‘Stop right there. Don’t put an adjective in front of me.’’ People try to label something that is beautiful and mysterious and elusive, thinking, ‘‘Ah ha, I got it.’’ They want control over it. I won’t be labeled that way.

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190 Lisa A. Meyer LM: I think the reason people might want to call you a Catholic poet is because you are a Catholic. They would want to know how Catholicism has formed your poetry. What has worshipping in that way done to the way you write? TD: I perceive that as a valid question, because I have been extremely shaped by Roman Catholicism. The images in Paper Fish are saturated with Roman Catholicism. My very being is Roman Catholic. But I am using Roman Catholicism in its pure sense—not in its doctrinal sense. LM: Many people would say that politics and religion are inextricably linked. The essence of any religion is intertwined with politics. TD: I don’t buy the politics. See, [some] people . . . would disagree with me when I say there’s nothing political in Paper Fish. I know that there is politics in religion, but to me that’s not religion. That’s the church. There’s a difference. We have the church, we have religion, and we have spirituality. The church is a mix of dogma, politics, and the culture that the church happens to be in. Religion is dogma. Now, I believe in some of the dogma. Then there is the spirit—and that to me is the beauty of it. And that’s what I cling to. I wish we could set it free. LM: Do you think written language, either a sentence or a book, is a container of consciousness? TD: But you have to be open-minded enough to read it without trying to capture it in definition. It’s like love. You have to be completely open and fluid to the other person’s consciousness to commit to it. But if you try to define it as it is happening, it won’t happen. LM: When you read a book, do you define it as you go? TD: When I read a book, I don’t want to know anything about it. Sometimes even the title is too much. If the book catches me at all, it will be its honesty and intensity. If I identify with any one of the characters in the book, then I have a good chance of understanding the story. But if I don’t identify with anybody, I will probably put it down. But I don’t bring judgment to it. LM: Do you bring perception to it? TD: I could pick up a book and read maybe ten pages and say, ‘‘Oh that’s too New Age for me,’’ and put it down. Or, I’ll pick something up and say, ‘‘That’s too radical feminist for me.’’ LM: Do you read themes into works? Do you read symbolically as I’ve read into Doriana? TD: I think that I would be labeling it only if it was there.

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 191 LM: How do you feel about the Feminist Press reprinting Paper Fish since you adamantly say you are not a feminist? TD: They knew that when they took the book. One of the first things I said to them was that I’m not a feminist. But they wanted the book. They are having difficulty dealing with me, though. But that’s the beauty of a contract. You don’t have to agree with me; I don’t have to agree with you. I’m very grateful to them. If they find good work done by a woman, they rescue her from oblivion. I have no problem with that. It’s just that we all know that we don’t agree with each other. LM: What do you think about the premise that they work on: Women’s literature has been buried—primarily literature by working-class women? TD: I would make it broader than that and say beautiful literature is being buried. For example, if I were a man and I had written that book exactly the same—I don’t know how I could have—it still wouldn’t have gone anywhere. LM: So the devil is the market? TD: It’s money. The love of money is the root of all evil. LM: Writing makes an interior space exterior. It’s a very private act and if you seek publication, you bring it into a public arena. TD: Yet, the interior space is never completely exterior. When I give readings, I feel naked. In order for the interior to be completely exterior, the reader or listener would have to have my consciousness. And they can’t have that. It’s unsettling to realize that so much of my private space is out there. LM: Does this feeling of nakedness arise when you publish too? TD: Yes. It’s a gift of love to share some of your privacy. It would be untruthful for me to say it’s easy to be open to questions like this. It is giving away some of my privacy. But then my grandmother taught me how to create privacy, and what it’s for, just for me? I don’t think so. It would be selfish of me to have a story this beautiful and not tell it. LM: And privacy is key to writing. TD: Probably one of the reasons that I can’t write now is because I don’t have enough privacy. I don’t have enough sustained solitude. It takes time to create the feeling of privacy. It can take me a week to know what I’m thinking about. But I think the real courage came when I decided when to let Paper Fish go again. Because I knew once it was reprinted that I would be surrendering some of my privacy and that’s not easy. LM: One of the main themes in Paper Fish is silence and the breaking of silence. And the history of the book is about silencing: falling out of print, coming back into print. What do you think about that parallel?

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192 Lisa A. Meyer TD: In reality, my sister is not mute. She’s very verbal. Maybe I made her quiet when I wrote the book because I couldn’t face her suffering yet. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. Actually my father is silent too. But it isn’t because of oppression. It is because they are facing such terrible suffering and they don’t know what to do about it. What can they say about it, really? There’s very little dialogue in the book. They don’t talk even to each other. In the book, everybody explains the suffering through Doriana. For example, if Doriana were well, then maybe we would be a happy chattering Italian-American family. But nobody understands it. And that is the definition of suffering. When you are suffering, there are no words. LM: So suffering is what is mute, because it is unspeakable. TD: All of them are speechless and Doriana is carrying the brunt of their speechlessness. LM: You struggled to get the voice of Paper Fish. Did the completion of Paper Fish bring you out of silence? TD: Three years after I finished Paper Fish, I wrote another book in seven months. Paper Fish just opened the door. LM: Paper Fish is a collage of surrealistic images and concrete descriptions of everyday life. In other words, it is a collection of memories. TD: Memories and imagination. Just as my poem that I used as an epigraph says: ‘‘Our imagination and memory face each other in a mirror. Who’s to solve the mystery?’’ In another book that I’m working on, I’m trying to imagine a different, happier life for my family—which is more painful than facing the life that they lived. Because, I guess, you learn to accept the suffering. And to let yourself even begin to think of what life might have been like without it is unspeakable. And maybe that’s why they are silent. Because they don’t have choices. What choice does Marco have, really? Certainly Doriana has none. Carmolina makes the only choice in the book: she runs away. It’s almost less painful to accept what you have. And yet I’m challenging myself constantly: You don’t necessarily have to accept the suffering. When my mother died and I took my sister out of what was left of the family and set her free, I realized that I could change this. Now, when I read from the book, with seventeen years perspective, I realized, ‘‘Oh, we could have done something at the beginning.’’ So I had to go through a period of anger and sadness at my parents. But then I think to myself, ‘‘Why didn’t somebody else set them free?’’ Nobody ever stepped in and said to my father, ‘‘Hey, you can do it another way.’’

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 193 Nobody ever stepped in and said to my mother, ‘‘What would you like to talk about?’’ So there’s that other level of pain now when I read it. LM: You set your sister free. In what way? TD: Seventeen years ago, I took her away from the family. I put her in a facility that takes care of disabled adults. LM: The family was mistreating her? TD: Not mistreating. At that point, both of my parents were dead. So I was just dealing with very uneducated aunts and uncles. They didn’t understand her. They did not know that a life was being wasted in front of them. So I stepped in. I had to involve the state. That was the most painful decision that I have ever had to make in my life. And now she has her own life. She lives in a little town house. She has a little job. She has a roommate who is also disabled. She loves me to death. We love each other dearly. If somebody ever wants to make Paper Fish into a movie, I’ll probably say no. Because my sister could see it. She can’t read the book. But she could see the movie. There are about three people in my life who would understand it if I turned down the offer of a quarter of a million dollars for the movie rights. That’s what the book is about. Family. I worked for years to make my sister feel accepted and loved, be glad that she was born, even though she is handicapped. And if I thought that I was making a choice that could endanger what I have done for her, I would hope that I would make the right choice and say, ‘‘F . . . the money.’’ That’s family. See what I’m saying? That’s the Italian-American family. So I haven’t lost it. LM: At the end of the book, Carmolina makes a symbolic marriage to Doria, or to a maternal lineage. In Italian culture, a young woman customarily enters adulthood by marrying a man. You undercut this tradition in this last scene. Did you intend this? TD: No. She’s marrying her future. She knows that her life will not be traditional. She’s not necessarily going to have a man at her side. And when Grandma Doria gives Carmolina those three little coins that she used the first time to run away, the grandmother is telling her to run away. ‘‘This time I give them to you on purpose,’’ the grandmother says. ‘‘But you have to do something too. You keep the fire inside you.’’ Even now, when I get stuck in life, I reread that last chapter. Carmolina is standing in front of a mirror, and what does she see in the mirror? She sees herself dressed as a bride. She sees the grandmother briefly. She knows the grandmother is going to die soon. And she sees this little shadow that is her sister. Carmolina knows that eventually she is going to have to come back

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194 Lisa A. Meyer and set her sister free. She can’t leave her. But she has to leave—as the way you would put it—the narrative. She has to leave the family and that world, and find a way to come back and set her sister free. So it’s difficult for me to hear you talk about Paper Fish in terms of metaphors because I lived it. LM: Perhaps Carmolina screams because she can’t save Doriana. TD: Maybe she screams because she realizes that she is going to have to. It really is an evolutionary process. You are chosen to do this. The grandmother certainly knows that Carmolina is going to have to do something very unusual to help save the whole family, in essence. But she is going to start, in reality, by saving the sister. Nobody else in the family is capable of making that decision. LM: I was curious about the first sentence of the book: ‘‘This is my mother.’’ Did you choose to have it set apart like that on the first page almost as if it were a subtitle? TD: Carmolina plays this little game where she’ll look at her mother and she’ll say over and over again, to herself, ‘‘This is my mother,’’ until all of a sudden her mother is totally detached and she looks like a stranger. That’s where it comes from. I know people are reading that, ‘‘Does that mean the text is your mother?’’ And I certainly never intended that. Obviously the text gave birth to me as an accomplished writer. LM: I thought the phrase described the neighborhood that nurtured you. The people who brought you up. Collectively, these people are your mother. TD: Now, that’s a nice reading—given the ambivalence that Carmolina feels toward her mother. She has to have her mother somewhere. LM: How do you think the reprinting of Paper Fish has changed the literary world? TD: If it does, it’s going to do it slowly and in small concentric circles. It hasn’t touched major publishing. I hope it gives people more courage to tell their stories in whatever voice they have. LM: Did you learn from other Italian-American writers? TD: No. I wasn’t approaching the process as an Italian-American writer. My motive was just to tell the story. Anyway, there was nothing to read that could substantiate my experience. But I wasn’t looking for substantiation. I was looking for peace of mind. I had to get the story out of me. Then everybody took it and suddenly it was an Italian-American novel. LM: In your essay, ‘‘Career Choices Come from Listening to the Heart,’’ you wrote that your call to become a writer was like a secret. Why did you use the word ‘‘secret’’?

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 195 TD: In Paper Fish, there’s a section where the grandmother talks about secrets. Every person who is born is given a secret by God, she says, and if you tell the secret, you will die. You are never supposed to tell the secret. That’s how I meant secret. Secrets are sacred. But how can you keep a secret if you are a writer? That’s the risk: sharing the secret. LM: One of the most powerful things that I thought Grandma Doria gave to Carmolina was the power to tell stories. It is a power because you can evoke, shape, and change your past. TD: Storytelling is a power because it creates another reality. So you don’t have to be stuck in the reality that has been given to you. LM: Can you change the world with your stories? TD: Can you change the story? I am always wanting to know if you can change the story. I don’t know about changing the world. LM: In a previous interview, you said, ‘‘I’d never realized all the beauty that was there until I started to write about it.’’ You were referring to your childhood neighborhood. You went on to write, ‘‘In fact, I never realized my own truth until I started putting it down on paper.’’ This is an interesting insight into how writing can be a process of discovery. TD: It is a process of healing too. You have to take whatever reality or pain or whatever it is that’s inside you and put it outside you. Make it objective. It’s like if you are choking on something, you had better cough it up. And then you can give it the discovery of truth. LM: I would like to explore how carpentry is used in the novel as a metaphor for the writing life. Doria’s father, Pasquale, is a carpenter who tries to shape the world and control it through building objects. Writers use words, and carpenters use wood and nails. The description of Pasquale’s profession also sheds light on the fact that we all live in narratives, as I said before. Societal narratives shape our view of ourselves. Pasquale often searches for the places where the world is put together. When Carmolina runs away, Marco thinks of his grandfather’s profession and searches for the cracks in the world through which his daughter may have slipped. What narrative did Carmolina fall out of, and what new narrative does she fall into? TD: That scene is heartbreaking because he’s looking for her as a cop. His job is to find people and he can’t find his own daughter. The carpentry thing wasn’t anything that I ever thought of. LM: I would like to talk about the two images that appear in your poem ‘‘Jerome’’—dominos and dice. You use them to describe the writing

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196 Lisa A. Meyer process. A person sets up dominos one after another and then pushes them. TD: The trickiness of it. The gamble. You never know. You are not in control of this. Step one: I acknowledge that I’m powerless over writing. LM: Let’s turn to your poem ‘‘Miriam.’’ I love that poem. TD: I do too. LM: This poem reminded me of the work of Emily Dickinson. Many of her narrators are often ironic about their roles in public life and the narrator of your poem seems to be playing with this idea too. Anybody who enters the public world needs to put on a persona. The narrator of ‘‘Miriam’’ is also saying, in a sense, ‘‘I’m a writer, but they don’t truly know what writing is. They say that I’m the lady with the hat. But I’m the woman who puts her blood on the pages.’’ Again, that juxtaposition of the very public act of publishing and the very private process of what a writer goes through. TD: Maybe that’s the point. That they don’t know the stress, the blood on the paper that I call words. They only know the lady. This poem really has to do with loneliness. LM: We all go through this whether we are writers or not. Every morning, you need to dress. You put on your public persona to go out, and that persona is somebody who is very different from who you are in private. You become a stranger to yourself. TD: It’s the old thing about, when I’m alone, do I have a face? LM: Oh, the mirror dynamic: You see yourself only through someone else’s reflection or perspective of you. TD: That’s interesting because I read that as when I’m alone, do I need one? When I’m alone, do I have a face? You only need a face to go out. A face is only what people see or think they see, which brings us back to the end of Paper Fish. What does Carmolina see when she looks in the mirror? I still don’t know. I struggle with the last two sentences of that book. Maybe then I didn’t realize that she doesn’t need a face until she looks in the mirror. When you are alone, you don’t need one. And basically in the world of the family, she doesn’t need a face yet. But when she goes out into the world, she had better have one. LM: I want to pick up a point that Mary Jo Bono made in her article. She said that Doriana’s illness is used as a comment on the prevalence of sickness in underprivileged communities and as a metaphor for the immigrant experience. For example, Doriana’s condition is a result of her parents’ position. They are caught between two cultures, unsure about

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 197 which one will answer their questions. Marco and Sarah decide to put the feverish Doriana under cold water, rather than take her to a doctor. Doriana’s illness is used as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in the sense that these people have broken and bruised psyches. TD: Mary Jo also said that what I had to finally accept in the writing of Paper Fish is that illness is. Period. And that’s the truth. Illness simply is. You can’t change it. You can’t erase it. It’s an existential fact. I never intended that as a metaphor for anything. Although I can see how Doriana can be a little mirror inside the book reflecting everybody else. And they can’t face it. LM: What happened to your sister? TD: Brain damage. And because she was never taken care of properly, she became socially retarded. I tried to get her after our father died. But she was only twenty-two and my mother stood in the way. I waited for my mother to die, then I went back and took her away. She was in her thirties. At that point, she was very retarded. LM: Is Paper Fish a home for you? TD: How do you mean home? LM: In the book, the theme of leaving home and returning home recurs. Was writing Paper Fish a return to the world that nurtured you? TD: If you want to use that image, it was saying goodbye to home—after the home was already gone and the people were already dead. I was finally letting go. LM: In Paper Fish, you write from the perspective of Carmolina, a child, and Doriana, a brain-damaged child. How did you prepare yourself to do that? Was it something that happened naturally? Did you read something? TD: For Doriana, the only preparation that I consciously made was to read the Benjy section in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Other than that, I didn’t prepare myself consciously in any way. LM: Why is Carmolina so fascinated with the gypsies? TD: The grandmother is also fascinated with the gypsies. It’s just the beauty of them. Their exotic nature, clothing, and mystery. They cannot be explained. LM: Does she identify with them? TD: Yes. The gypsies are doomed to wander. They don’t have a home. So it’s a foreshadowing of what Carmolina’s destiny will be like. She has a gypsy soul. She’ll be wandering for a long time before she finds her home. LM: I want to take a look at the scene where Carmolina beats up the doll. People have made associations between the doll and Doriana. Does

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198 Lisa A. Meyer Carmolina beat up the doll because she is so mad about what happened to Doriana? Or is it because she doesn’t want to become like Doriana? TD: That is the one scene where you see anger in the book. It’s just everything. The sister. You don’t really know what’s going on with the mother. Carmolina is expected to be so perfect. There’s this Italian myth of being the chosen one in the family, the one that will go on to do great things in your name. And Carmolina is already beginning to feel that role. She never does anything in the book that she is not supposed to do, other than run away. It’s just an eruption of her feelings. Whenever I read that section, I’m uncomfortable. Sometimes I wish I had taken it out. What really fascinates me is that she doesn’t do it on purpose. She does it accidentally. She realized that she can hit the ceiling with the doll. And then she does it over and over until her anger comes out. But the really moving part of that scene for me is not so much Carmolina throwing the doll up until the stuffing comes out, but what the mother does. That’s one of the cruxes of the book that very few people ever even ask about. What is the mother doing here? What is the problem with the mother? That scene epitomizes the relationship between the mother and daughter. The mother comes in and folds up the face and looks at her, and again Carmolina doesn’t know if there is something wrong with her, or her mother. LM: Because the mother never responds? TD: She never responds. Her mother had the question in her eyes. The question being, as Carmolina thinks, ‘‘What’s wrong with you?’’ But Grandma Doria doesn’t have the question in her eyes. Grandma’s eyes are as blue as the sea. In the grandmother’s eyes, Carmolina can do no wrong. So it’s not so much the outburst of anger as how that outburst of anger is received. LM: Maybe that’s why you had the symbolic marriage. Because the grandmother is the little girl’s foundation. TD: If you want to use the word ‘‘marriage’’ loosely in the sense that Carmolina is about to be wed to the future that is as unusual for her as the grandmother’s future was for her. The grandmother had to leave Italy and forge a whole new life for herself in America. She had to make difficult choices. The real power in that scene is that when you are dressed as a bride, you are supposed to be wed to the man that you love and Carmolina is all alone. She’s doing it for the family. Human connection, warmth, sexual love, bonding—everything that a wedding dress signifies—is a costume for Carmolina.

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 199 LM: I see this book is also about resistance to dominate narratives or about the creation of resistant narratives. The text puts forth a counternarrative: Carmolina writes on the bag backwards. She does this deliberately and she gets joy out of it. TD: She’s a little trickster, isn’t she? LM: It’s as if she’s saying, ‘‘I’m a mystery, figure me out.’’ She’s creating her own counter-narrative. She’s forcing her parents to think in a different way. In a sense, she’s saying, ‘‘I’m not really who you think I am. I’m somebody different.’’ TD: When I was about five years old, I did teach myself how to write backwards. I was trying to understand what it was like to be my sister. I wanted to know if there was anything that I could do that would help me see the world the way she sees it. I was trying to teach her how to read and she was having such a hard time reading that I taught myself how to read upside down and backwards. Then I read about Leonardo da Vinci. So I taught myself how to write backwards. I used it to give people a hard time. It was as if I was saying, ‘‘I know something you don’t know.’’ LM: Do you see Doriana as a heroine? TD: I do. Just because she survived. How could anybody survive that kind of loneliness and that kind of being totally misunderstood, totally misread, never having your needs even guessed at, let alone met? It’s heroic to survive that. LM: I saw Grandma Doria as carrying the same heroic stature as Doriana because she suffers through her difficulties and endures and continues on. I think that is how a heroine in your book is defined. It also made me think of Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘‘Howl.’’ In that poem, he says the holy are those who have been downtrodden. I thought that you are doing the same thing. I also thought it was interesting that the working title for Paper Fish was ‘‘The Saintmakers.’’ TD: I guess I would look at the sister as being holy, but not holy for being downtrodden. LM: Holy because she suffers? TD: Not holy because she suffers. Because I don’t think everybody who suffers is holy. But I think that suffering can lead to holiness. LM: A Christ-like suffering? TD: What other kind of suffering is there that leads to holiness? I don’t think that there is any other religion that tells us that. The only way to holiness is through suffering.

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200 Lisa A. Meyer LM: Returning to my idea about resistance—I saw Doriana as a mystery, the same kind of mystery that writing backwards produces. At the center of the book is a mystery: Doriana. Here is a counter-narrative. TD: You could say that Doriana is God writing backwards. You could say that Doriana is a little mystery in the middle of the book, written backwards. LM: Does she represent a narrative of resistance? TD: I wouldn’t use the word ‘‘resistance.’’ Because that is a political term. But you might say that she is sending a message out there backwards and the only one in the book who cares to read it is Carmolina and the grandmother. And the grandmother is trying to teach Carmolina how to do that: She tells her that story about how Doriana got lost in the forest. LM: The music of Carmolina’s family gives her pain, but she can’t turn it off. It makes her want to scream. TD: Ironically enough, she wants silence. Your metaphor is interesting now. If you want to say that the core of Paper Fish is silence, the only person who doesn’t have any silence in the book is Carmolina. And she needs silence. LM: So she envies Doriana. TD: At the end, Carmolina does say to Doriana, ‘‘I think you are the lucky one.’’ But it’s not envy. It’s sorrow. Because Carmolina realizes that she is the one who’s going to have to carry the burden, not Doriana. Carmolina is the one who is dressed as a bride all alone. Of course, Carmolina is wrong. She won’t find it out until later—in another book I wrote. But in terms of consciousness, Carmolina thinks that Doriana has the simpler role. Because in Paper Fish, Doriana is not conscious of what’s going on around her. But you really put your finger on a good way to read the book. There’s an Italian concept of silence called omerta. It is a sacred silence that you never break. You never tell anybody outside the family anything that’s going on inside the family. When I wrote Paper Fish, I was breaking omerta. So if you want to talk about courage—the real duality in myself is not the cultural duality, but an ethical duality. I was not suppose to write the book. LM: What was the other principle that won? Was it just the need to tell the secret? TD: No. I think it was my own sanity. I had to tell the story. I had to deal with all that sorrow and loss. Remaining silent was not the way to do it. LM: You have called Paper Fish ‘‘a song from the ghetto.’’ Do you think Paper Fish transcends ghettos, both literary and literal?

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Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Tina De Rosa 201 TD: The emphasis there is not on ghetto, but on song. I came up with that in a conversation with Edvige Giunta. I identify with Anne Frank. On certain levels, I experienced the same thing she did. And I said to Edvige that I thought that ‘‘A Song from the Ghetto’’ would be another good title for Paper Fish. She picked it up for the afterword. But the emphasis is not on ghetto but on song. That in the midst of all of this, the human spirit can still sing—whether it’s my spirit, my sister’s spirit, my father’s spirit, anybody’s spirit. In the middle of the fire you can always sing. Just for the sake of singing, rather than being consumed. LM: In what ways do you identify with Anne Frank? TD: Being singled out. Experiencing terrible trauma. Experiencing devastating loss. Experiencing being a child and not understanding what’s going on around me. When the city came and started knocking down the buildings of my old neighborhood, my father was very resistant. We were the last family to leave the block. As the buildings were being torn down, the city would mark a yellow X with paint on the next building to go and that’s what I said to myself, ‘‘I feel like I’m in Nazi Germany.’’ It was unspeakable sorrow. LM: By bringing your story out of the ghetto, have you allowed other writers to enter through the door that you opened? TD: I hope so. LM: On one level, this book is about identifications and mirror images. Is Paper Fish a mirror image of you? TD: This is the honest to God truth. I have absolutely no idea what I look like. So if this is a mirror, it’s what I looked like then. It’s a mirror of a culture, time, and family. It is a mirror of certain people suffering. But I don’t think it’s a mirror of me. I have a terrible problem with cameras and mirrors. I don’t understand them. In the responses that I’m getting from Paper Fish, I feel like people are telling me who I am—which is a blessing coming back from the book. LM: In the acknowledgments of Paper Fish, you wrote, ‘‘Time is so mysterious. Blessing and robbing.’’ TD: That is what the book is about. Time blesses and robs. It blesses you and it robs you. Paper Fish was the robbery. But now it is a blessing.

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Lucy Mancini The New Woman paul levitt 2009

By the end of The Godfather, only one of the three principal women embraces the modern world and therefore truly transcends the mores of the old country: Lucy Mancini. Mamma Corleone, a model of the Sicilian wife, remains untouched by American life. Connie Corleone may have gone to college, but her education does not prevent her from submissively accepting her husband’s beatings; and although she marries a second time, she does so as a conventional Italian wife. Kay Adams, the quintessential independent New England Protestant, ends the novel on her knees in a Catholic church subscribing to the values of the old world. Only Lucy Mancini, ‘‘thoroughly Americanized by three years of college,’’1 achieves freedom, though she must first, in fairy-tale fashion, rid herself of the bodily defect, a pelvic malformation, that presumably issues from the genes of her Sicilian family, and that functions as a metaphor for her transit from Sonny’s puttana (whore) to a Jewish doctor’s wife. Lucy’s arc of passage crosses that of Kay Adams, who is heading in a different direction. Kay is moving toward the role of an acquiescent Italian moglie (wife), even though Michael Corleone, her emotionally inaccessible boyfriend, admits that I won’t be telling you what happened at the office every day. I won’t be telling you anything about my business. You’ll be my wife but you won’t be my partner in life, as I think they say. Not an equal partner. That can’t be. (359–60)

Kay, like Mamma Corleone, will be valued for her childbearing and maintenance of the children. Michael candidly says he will marry her ‘‘because I 202

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Lucy Mancini: The New Woman 203

. . . want a family. I want kids’’ (361). Any hopes that Kay had for an American marriage—a union of equals—are dashed by Michael, who holds fast to his father’s old-world belief that women are children. Her capitulation is complete when she converts and realizes that the only role she can play in her husband’s life is to pray for his safety, as Mamma Corleone does for the Don. The exception to the vita matrimoniale italiana (marriage Italian-style) is Lucy Mancini, who not surprisingly crosses cultural borders to marry Jules Segal. As Rich Cohen points out in Tough Jews, a history of crime in the first half of the twentieth century, alliances between Italians and Jews were common, especially in underworld activities. It was a marriage of convenience. They were in the slums at the same time; they went against Prohibition at the same time. It was a marriage of the three M’s: moxie, muscle, money. The Jews put up the moxie, the Italians supplied the muscle, and together they split the money.2

Lucy Mancini’s affair with and subsequent marriage to Dr. Jules Segal unites the Italians and Jews in the city of the future, Las Vegas. But before this union can take place, Lucy has to undergo a transformation from ‘‘Loose-y’’ to Lucy Mancini. This voluptuous and pulchritudinous Italian girl is initially attracted to Sonny Corleone because in college a lover had told her that she was ‘‘too big down there’’ (27), and Sonny is reputed to have an enormous penis. Their affair begins at Connie’s wedding and ends only with Sonny’s death. In the apartment that Sonny has rented for her, Lucy and her lover live like voluptuaries. Sonny had visited her once a week, sometimes more, never less. The days before she saw him again her body was in torment. Their passion for each other was of the most elementary kind, undiluted by poetry or any form of intellectualism. It was love of the coarsest nature, a fleshly love, a love of tissue for opposing tissue. (302)

They would make love standing up or lying down, sometimes for as long as sixteen hours. He often stayed the night in the apartment, which she had stocked with food and drink, and functioned as Lucy’s surrogate husband, treating her tenderly. Lucy completely sheds her sexual inhibitions and is even driven to excesses because in her young, sexually unfulfilled life, Sonny ‘‘had been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love’’

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204 Paul Levitt

(301); consequently, she enjoyed her ‘‘complete sensual enslavement to his body’’ (303). Eighteen months after Sonny’s death, however, we discover her in Las Vegas living as a new Lucy. ‘‘She [had become] thinner and this improved her figure. She was still voluptuous but more in the American than the old Italian style’’ (304). When she meets Dr. Jules Segal, who courts her and surgically corrects her pelvic malformation, she becomes a new woman physically. The role of surgery as a metaphor for reconstruction, mentally and bodily, cannot be fully understood until we remember that Michael also undergoes an operation: to correct his facial deformity. Both Michael and Lucy are born again psychologically before they are remade physically. Michael grows into his father’s son, experiencing a Telemachus-like conversion, and Lucy stops ‘‘playing around,’’ abandoning her loose behavior. Michael’s plastic surgery, an operation that Kay urges her husband to have and that the Sicilian-born Don Corleone subsequently dismisses with the remark, ‘‘What’s the difference?’’ (394), completes Michael’s metamorphosis. He will now take a scalpel to the Corleone family and reshape it through excisions and additions. Just as Michael’s face needed to be reconfigured, so too does the structure of the Corleone family. Doing business in the manner of the Mustache Petes (old-time gangsters) is no longer possible. Unless the family wishes to get into the drug trade, with its attendant misery and turf wars, the only means for the Corleone family to secure the future is through operating Las Vegas hotels and casinos. With the move to Las Vegas, the family not only embodies John B. L. Soule’s advice, ‘‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country,’’ but also realizes Moe Greene’s (Bugsy Siegel’s) dream of a legitimate gangster haven. Once Lucy has tightened her morals, she has the floor of her pelvis tightened, rendering her mentally and physically fit for a suitor, a Jewish doctor, with whom she joins the great American melting pot, where races and religions mix. But whereas Michael’s changes point toward the past, hers point toward the future. Although both Lucy and Jules work for the family in Las Vegas and are indebted to them—she receives an annuity and does public relations at Freddie Corleone’s hotel, and he serves as a hotel physician and doctor to the underworld—neither one of them is a legitimate family member. In a manner of speaking, by effacing their sordid pasts, they have gone straight. She is no longer a puttana nor exclusively Italian, and he is no longer an abortionist nor parochially Jewish. They realize, as Rich Cohen argues, ‘‘that they [the Italians and Jews] were more alike than different.’’3

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Lucy Mancini: The New Woman 205

For all the Odyssean voyaging in the novel, Michael’s is undoubtedly the most telling. But among the women, the longest and most difficult is Lucy’s. In Italian, mancino means left-handed; mancini is the plural. Left-handed people in America were often discriminated against, and in some cases, children had to suffer the indignity, even pain, of sitting through classes with their left hand strapped behind them and of being forced to write with their right hands. The left-handed were the outcasts, the pariahs; they were metaphorically the Italians and Jews. It is by no means accidental, then, that Lucy Mancini, through reconstruction and assimilation, transcends the prejudice against Italians, while retaining her ties to the family, and rises from puttana to the new woman. In Puzo’s vision, she represents the future of America. Notes 1. Mario Puzo, The Godfather (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1969), 21. Subsequent references are given parenthetically. 2. Rich Cohen, Tough Jews (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 61. 3. Ibid., 55.

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Foodways in Italian-American Narrative rose de angelis 2005

Food is not only fundamental to our survival but also integrally connected with social function and identity. What, how, and where we eat often tells us who we are or who we are not. Food and eating, as Sarah Sceats notes, are ‘‘essential to self-identity and are instrumental in the definition of family, class, and ethnicity’’ (Sceats 2000, 1). Encoded in food and eating practices are varied meanings, which categorize, delineate, and explicate diverse behaviors, attitudes, and ideas of selfhood. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 observation ‘‘tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are’’ certainly underscores the symbiotic relationship between food and identity (quoted in Gabaccia 1998, 5). For Italians and Italian Americans, food is the most common example of what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘‘symbolic ethnicity’’1 and very often serves as the mediating force between personal and social relationships in and outside the home. Helen Barolini notes that ‘‘food is the medium of . . . remembrance’’ (Barolini 1988, 13). What first-generation Italian Americans remembered was their homeland, their family, and their compatriots, and what they forgot were the broken promises of the American Dream. Whether at family parties, Sunday meals, or simple weekday table gatherings, food concretized family ties and turned the meal into a sacramental gathering. As Caroline Walker Bynum notes in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, ‘‘Eating [is] . . . an occasion for union with one’s fellows and one’s God, a commensality given particular intensity by the prototypical meal, the eucharist, which seems[s] to hover in the background of any banquet’’ (Bynum 1987, 3). For first-generation Italian Americans, especially the women who served as the priestesses of the home, nurturing body and soul, ‘‘the passionate faith in food as a soul and body builder was . . . an expression of their philosophy: If you ate well, you felt well. And if you felt well, all was well with the world’’ (Mangione 206

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1942, 131). Still today we are reminded that ‘‘cultural traditions are reinforced and transmitted in Italian-American kitchens and at their dinner tables’’ (Gardaphe´ 1990, 25). For Italian immigrants, food was (and still is) a symbol of affection that protected their Italianness in American life, solidified their ties to their immediate and extended families, and reinforced the projection of that Italian identity to the outside community. For some immigrants, food became the port of entry into the American lifestyle, and while Americans might have had a hard time digesting the Italian immigrant, they had no problems ingesting their food. In addition, the sending, sharing, and exchanging of food established reciprocal obligations for the receipt of hospitality, creating a social network of familial and affinal ties that become connected through the cultural imperatives of reciprocity. Yet food could—and did—create tensions between first-generation immigrant parents and their American-born children and grandchildren. In Italian-American women’s literature, food often manifests itself as the signifier of Old World nurturing in the face of New World hardships; however, while ItalianAmerican female writers note food’s successes and its moments of empowerment, they also preview its failure as a vehicle of unification and communication and its ensuing potential for disempowerment as one generation gives way to the next. Umbertina, Helen Barolini’s tripartite, transgenerational novel, dramatizes the journey food takes through the generations starting with first-generation Umbertina. The family matriarch who arrives in America circa 18832 demonstrates the manifold ways in which food allows the first-generation Italian immigrant, especially the woman, who is traditionally and culturally associated with food preparation in the private sphere, to control the world outside the confines of the home.3 In this novel, food ‘‘become[s] the occasion or the pretext to affirm or establish positions of authority and subordination’’ between Umbertina and her family and provides alternative possibilities for the Italian woman’s place and position (Biasin 1993, 15). Umbertina prepares homemade panini, small sandwiches with vegetables and meat, daily for her husband Serafino’s lunch. This and other designated wifely duties establish Umbertina inside the home as the traditional nurturing mother and outside the home as the no-nonsense businesswoman who challenges the gender-specific role of capo famiglia (head of the family) when she replaces her husband as provider. Food preparation becomes the stepping stone toward autonomy and self-fulfillment and redefines the Italian woman’s purpose in the New World.

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When Serafino’s wrapped delicacies titillate the palates of his coworkers, who offer payment for similar lunches, Umbertina immediately sees the financial implications and capitalizes on their offer, turning lunchtime into a flourishing family business. Umbertina takes the ‘‘Italian wife’s clearly defined household responsibility . . . [of] preparing and purchasing food’’ (Yans-McLaughlin 1977, 108) and turns it into a business venture, one which establishes her family’s present and future social and economic status. Umbertina’s homemade lunches become at first the Longobardi groceria and later a multifaceted wholesale business. In Cato, Umbertina ‘‘gave orders and directed the family’’ and the family business (Barolini 1979, 93). For Umbertina, food links family and business: it becomes the source of her empowerment, the focus on which she centers, manages, and controls her family, financially and emotionally, and the medium for showcasing the Italian immigrant woman’s potential. In Louisa Ermelino’s novel The Sisters Mallone, a novel that spans more than two decades, 1929–1953, Anona, another first-generation matriarch, acts on the immigrant woman’s potential. Like Umbertina, Anona makes food and the kitchen table the hub of family life. Seated at the kitchen table—or near it—Anona conducts business and presides over the lives of her granddaughters, the Mallone sisters, Mary, Helen, and Gracie, whose lust for power and independence outside the home she has nurtured. ‘‘No one walked into Anona’s without sitting at her table with a cup of coffee’’ (Ermelino 2002, 138). At Anona’s kitchen table, ‘‘bread and coffee with hot milk,’’ a cup of espresso, a glass of anisette, a bottle of whiskey, or ‘‘olive paste on bread’’ fuel the discussions of what to do with Gracie’s husband Frankie, how to resolve Mary’s pregnancy, and how to minimize the consequences of Doreen’s kidnapping (119). Anthony T. Rauche writes that ‘‘the symbolic power of food is celebrated in the expression, A tavola mai s’invecchia (At the table no one ever grows old). Food has power to stop time and the normal passing of life’’ (Rauche 1998, 208). Anona’s table provides physical and spiritual sustenance: ‘‘So it was the three of them and Anona, like the prayer . . . ‘as it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen’ ’’ (Ermelino 2002, 36). At Anona’s kitchen table, time stopped; she and her granddaughters were as they always were; and in that timelessness, they would resolve their own problems: ‘‘It would all work out in the end. They would make sure of it’’ (101). Anona’s table is the site of learned resistance for the Mallone sisters who return there to refuel and regroup, to renew and recover themselves, so that they can get what they want, when they want it, and from whom they want it.

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In the second part of Helen Barolini’s Umbertina, food takes its usual second- and third-generation shift. Umbertina’s daughters are all relegated to the traditional roles of wife and mother—none of them inherit their mother’s adventurous spirit nor is it nurtured. Umbertina’s children are governed by the present and influenced by the lure of the Americanization process: they live in the right neighborhood, wear the right clothes, and acquire the right things—and one more thing: they leave their Italianness behind— including the food. It is not surprising that Umbertina’s granddaughter, Marguerite, a third-generation Italian American, corrupts the first-generation notion of the woman as nurturer and the role of food. In Marguerite, her grandmother’s nurturing desire translates into an erotic appetite gone awry. ‘‘Sex was a way to unpeel,’’ she says (Barolini 1979, 161). ‘‘Unpeel’’ belongs to the language of edibles, and, as Sarah Sceats notes, the link between food and sex is ‘‘constantly reinforced in western culture’’ in imagery such as ‘‘the almost routine comparison of breasts with fruit’’ and in language such as the way in which ‘‘subject-specific language moves freely between the two areas of food and sexuality, people being described as ‘tasty,’ a ‘dish,’ or a ‘tart’ ’’ (Sceats 2000, 22). Marguerite’s many amorous encounters reveal the connection between food and sex as a manifestation of an insatiable and, for the most part, a malignant eroticism, which will eventually lead to her suicide much later in the novel. Marguerite has severed all ties to the benevolent, traditional association between food and nutrition. She not only wants to devour, but to be devoured, and her monstrous appetite suggests an inner emptiness that can never be fulfilled. She has distanced herself from the humanity of food that permeated the plates and palates of first-generation Italian Americans. The rituals and routines of meal preparation and consumption become impediments for the young girl in Helen Barolini’s short story ‘‘Greener Grass.’’ Instead of providing security and comfort, food intensifies the perceived differences in personal identity and socioeconomic standing for third-generation Stefana Pietrofesso, whose name already serves as a source of ridicule and shame in a school system where teachers grimace when they have to pronounce foreign names. Schools played a pivotal role in establishing difference and creating confusion and isolation among immigrant children, for these children had to cope with the difficulty of being known not only by themselves but by what they were named, what they wore, and what they ate. Mangione and Morreale write that ‘‘the schools were largely responsible for emphasizing the difference between the immigrants and

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their new country’’ (1992, 221). Immigrant children had to deal with a fragmented identity: one private, one public. Lunchtime became just one more occasion when children, like Stefana, would become ashamed of who they were, with food as the source of that shame. Stefana wants desperately to ‘‘become American’’ (Barolini 1991, 20); she wants to redefine herself in a historical present where she can envision a new life, an American life. Sitting with Sallie Shipton and her friends at lunchtime would signal her entry into a world she so covets. When Stefana finally finds the courage to take her lunch and sit with the American girls, the event becomes the vehicle through which her revulsion with her Italianness manifests itself. Instead of bringing her the comfort of knowing that her homemade lunch is prepared with personalized attention and affection, the sandwich brings her discomfort. It creates one more obstacle for her to surmount if she is to become American. ‘‘I hoped [Sallie] wouldn’t notice my sandwich made with Italian bread,’’ she thinks (Barolini 1991, 40). Food, a symbol of her ethnic identity, classifies her as a member of the working class—a descendent of those ‘‘faceless and nameless people’’ whose history cannot compare with Sallie’s WASP ancestors (ibid.). Stefana is so concerned with the American girls’ perception of her that she leaves ‘‘the crusts uneaten as a sign of gentility’’ (ibid.). Bread, ‘‘a material symbol of the [immigrant’s] relationship with the earth,’’ the mainstay of every meal, here acts as one more marker of difference (Eula 2000, 91). Food makes establishing a self-identity for this young woman even more difficult, but, more importantly, it creates a rift between Stefana’s cultural identity, who she is, and her American identity, who she wants to be. For Stefana, reconciling the two becomes a lifelong process. In the autobiographical ‘‘Scents,’’ third-generation Maria Laurino experiences the same feelings of alienation. In response to the accusations of being the ‘‘smelly Italian girl’’ because she is foreign (and we all know that foreigners don’t wash and don’t shave their legs and underarms), Laurino writes: Unprepared to confront my fears, I responded like a criminal who’d do anything to get the charges dropped. If the cause of being called smelly was my Italian roots, then I would pretend not to be Italian. . . . Gone were the tastes of my youth; the sweet scent of tomato sauce simmering on the stove, . . . the paper-thin slices of prosciutto, . . . [the] oil-laden frying peppers. (Laurino 1997, 102–103)

Like so many children and grandchildren of immigrants, Maria Laurino sees food as one of the ‘‘instant markers of ethnicity’’ (103). Food is Laurino’s

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mark of Cain and the reason for her stigmatization; therefore, she ‘‘sanitize[s]’’ herself and ‘‘escape[s] class boundaries by accepting morsels from another culture’’ (ibid.). For both young women, food serves as the impetus for the disenfranchisement and disempowerment they experience as young adults. Only years later, time and education will create ‘‘a nostalgia for familiar tastes’’ (ibid.). The same self-loathing is evident in Louise De Salvo’s memoir Vertigo in which Louise, born to immigrant parents, rebels against the traditional script written for the Italian-American woman, and food is one of the sites for her rebellion. For second-generation Louise, food and the family meal fail as the vehicle for unification and communication. Instead of providing the security and comfort usually associated with communal eating and food, the family gathering at mealtime creates havoc in familial relations. As Louise De Salvo writes, ‘‘The dinner table had become our favorite battleground’’ (De Salvo 1996, 204). Like Stefana in ‘‘Greener Grass,’’ Louise becomes anxious when, at a dormitory meeting in college, she is asked to tell about her favorite home-cooked meal. She thinks, ‘‘I don’t like anything my mother cooks’’ (201). Food is a way to establish more than her ethnicity; it establishes her sense of self, her social status, and her economic standing. As she writes, ‘‘I certainly couldn’t eat, Old World things, cheap things, low-class things, . . . things I was ashamed to say I ate, and that I certainly couldn’t invite my friends over to eat. I wanted to pass for American’’ (204). Food, for this second-generation Italian American, is an indicator of all that she does not want to be. If she can resist ingesting food, she can escape from her italianita`, that Italianness that will distinguish her as the daughter of immigrants. She thinks, ‘‘Fainting is one way of disappearing. Anorexia is another’’ (208). Her resentment of food and all of its symbols, none of which she can see as redeeming, is evident in naming a chapter of her book ‘‘Anorexia.’’ In the third part of Helen Barolini’s trilogy, Tina, Umbertina’s greatgranddaughter and Marguerite’s daughter, a fourth-generation Italian American, prompts the rapprochement that brings food back to the commensality of its past. As the daughter of an Italian-American mother and an Italian father, Tina acknowledges the value of the hyphenated identity by reconnecting with her cultural heritage, spiritually and literally. Carrying with her the tin heart of her great-grandmother’s romantic dreams, Tina returns to Castagna, Umbertina’s homeland, and drinks from the village fountain that was her great-grandmother’s final request. Tina recognizes that her sense of self is rooted in her Italian identity, and food in the form

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of a rosemary plant, the plant Umbertina brought with her to America, becomes the symbol of the identity that will grow and flourish as she does.4 Tina continues the tradition her great-grandmother started: she plants the rosemary plant in the garden of the home she will occupy with her husband. Jason asks, ‘‘What are you doing?’’ Tina responds, ‘‘It’s something I always promised myself. . . . It’s the family women’s quaquaversal plant—wherever one of Umbertina’s clan descends, there also will be rosemary planted’’ (Barolini 1979, 423). The herb will season the food that will mark her as an Italian and as a descendent of those ‘‘faceless and nameless’’ people, and she is proud (Barolini 1991, 40). Fourth-generation Tina reconfigures food as a positive marker of ethnicity. Food in these women’s narratives becomes central, not only as a symbol of family, ancestral community, and religious ritual but also as a demarcation of class, otherness, and oppression; and food’s evolving role is evident in the generational twists and turns it takes. Food holds restorative powers and serves as a bonding agent, but it can impede the Americanization process. For willing participants, the shared meal is the medium for softening the break in the hyphenated identity and for creating a fluid site of give and take, old and new, past and present in the formation of the individual self. As both emotional and nutritional sustenance, food turns the family meal into a sacramental ritual that can unite even as it sacrifices those who will not or cannot partake in the communion, leaving food to a next generation who can more easily digest it if certain recognitions of the past remain. Notes This article is a revised version of my part of an article co-authored with Dr. Donald R. Anderson and published in Italian Americana 23, no. 1 (2005): 48–68. I would like to thank him for permission to publish the excerpt. 1. See Gans’s article ‘‘Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 1 (1979): 1–19. 2. The Longobardi family became one of the thousands who made the journey to America. ‘‘At the end of the 1870s, an annual average of 117,596 Italians, chiefly farm workers, emigrated to other nations’’ (Mangione and Morreale 1992, 69). 3. It is interesting to note that in the African-American community, food preparation created a similarly complex situation: It provided opportunity for selfadvancement and, at the same time, reinforced the woman’s role in the private sphere. During slavery, the African-American cook enjoyed some status among the other domestic servants; and after slavery, food preparation brought with it higher wages. At the same time, it demanded longer hours, reinforced the social differences, and separated women from their own families. See Rebecca Sharpless’s article

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Foodways in Italian-American Narrative 213 ‘‘Traditional Southern Cooking—Not Gone with the Wind,’’ Forum 82, no. 3 (2002): 10–14. 4. According to Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs, rosemary symbolizes love, friendship, and remembrance, but more importantly, it signifies that a woman heads the household (1987, 428–29). The planting of the rosemary plant links past and present, Italian and Italian American. Food becomes once again a unifying force.

Works Cited Barolini, Helen. 1979. Umbertina. Reprint edition. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. ———. 1988. Festa: Recipes and Recollections. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1991. ‘‘Greener Grass.’’ In From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphe´, 39–45. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. 1993. Introduction. In The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel, 3–28. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1987. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Salvo, Louise. 1996. Vertigo. New York: Dutton. Ermelino, Louisa. 2002. The Sisters Mallone. New York: Simon and Schuster. Eula, Michael. 2000. ‘‘The Failure of American Food Reformers among Italian Immigrants in New York City, 1891–1897.’’ Italian Americana 18.1:86–99. Gabaccia, Donna. 1998. Introduction. In ‘‘Food, Recipes, Cookbooks, and ItalianAmerican Life.’’ Special issue of Italian Americana 16.1:5–7. Gans, Herbert. 1979. ‘‘Symbolic Ethnicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America.’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 2.1:1–19. Gardaphe´, Fred L. 1990. ‘‘Autobiography as Piecework: The Writings of Helen Barolini.’’ In Italian Americans Celebrate Life: The Arts and Popular Culture, edited by Paola A. Sensi Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 19–27. New York: AIHA. Kowalchik, Claire, and William H. Hylton, eds. 1987. Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press. Laurino, Maria. 1997. ‘‘Scents.’’ In Beyond the Godfather: Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, edited by A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini, 97–106. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England. Mangione, Jerre. 1942. Mount Allegro: A Memoir of Italian American Life. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. 1992. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: HarperCollins. Rauche, Anthony T. 1988. ‘‘Festa Italiana in Hartford, Connecticut: The Pastries, the Pizza, and the People Who Parla Italiano.’’ In ‘‘We Gather Together’’: Food and Festival in American Life, edited by Theodore C. Humphrey and Lin T. Humphrey, 205–17. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press.

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214 Rose De Angelis Sceats, Sarah. 2000. Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharpless, Rebecca. 2002. ‘‘Traditional Southern Cooking—Not Gone with the Wind.’’ Forum 82.3:10–14. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. 1977. ‘‘Italian Women and Work: Experience and Perception.’’ In Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, edited by Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, 101–19. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

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In Our Ears, a Voice The Persistence of the Trauma of Immigration in Blue Italian and Umbertina mary ann mannino 2002

Approximately 80 percent of Italian Americans in the United States today can trace their roots to a southern Italian immigrant escaping the poverty and lack of opportunity in his or her own country. Most of the four-and-ahalf million Italians arrived in America between 1880 and 1924, with a smaller wave emigrating after World War II. While the economic implications of migration have interested social scientists and politicians for some time, the long-term psychological consequences have only recently been explored. Migration necessitates a psychological dislocation as well as a physical uprooting, with ramifications for the children and grandchildren of immigrants who left behind basic support systems, a familiar environment, and a customary method of expression.1 Researchers, in observing previous generations of immigrants, noticed that this personal upheaval led to symptoms such as a numbing of responsiveness, a silence about the immigration experience, irritability, panic, distractibility, and anxiety—symptoms not unlike those found in post-traumatic stress disorder. The massive changes in moving from a familiar rural environment in southern Italy to a hostile urban one in the United States, coupled with poverty, was a traumatic event for those who migrated.2 Recent research further suggests that the symptoms of trauma did not end with the immigrants themselves. Their children and grandchildren currently seek psychological counseling to relieve symptoms of anxiety, which according to clinical psychologist, Elizabeth Messina, can often be traced to the original immigrant and the trauma of migration.3 215

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The psychoanalytic term ‘‘transposition,’’ described by Judith Kestenberg, explains this process whereby trauma is transmitted cross-generationally.4 Messina suggests that her second- and third-generation patients ‘‘bear no visible manifestation of their trauma,’’ yet they have psychological wounds that are ‘‘palpable’’ (Messina 2000, 3). Messina believes that the immigrants survived the original trauma by focusing on their day-to-day struggle to make a living. They wanted to look forward and, in so doing, denied or minimized their personal responses to their many losses and the trauma experienced. Messina and psychiatrists such as Kestenberg, who study psychological problems related to immigration, claim that children recognize and absorb their parent’s discomfort and pain even if the parental losses are never discussed. The progeny of immigrants often manifest symptoms of depression and anxiety which bring them to treatment. Messina supports this hypothesis with a case study from her practice. A sixty-eight-year-old female patient explored her relationship with her mother. She discovered that the mother’s loss of her own mother through death, the loss of her remaining family in Italy through forced migration when eighteen, and the subsequent ill-treatment by her mother-in-law in America resulted in depression and feelings of ‘‘devaluation, inadequacy and failure’’ (Messina 2000, 7). Although the patient, when a child, did not recognize the causes of her mother’s anger and depression, Messina argues that ‘‘the patient absorbed it all’’ (6). Although the patient’s mother encouraged her to attend college and even hit her because she didn’t want to go, Messina states that ‘‘the patient’s mother unconsciously ‘transposed’ her feelings of devaluation, inadequacy and failure to her daughter’’ thus preventing her daughter from achieving her potential (7). The daughter never attended college. She felt that she ‘‘couldn’t do it’’ (ibid.). Because the daughter absorbed ‘‘an image of herself as inadequate and unlovable’’ her life was limited and she failed to achieve (ibid.). Messina suggests that the mother’s depression and low self-esteem made it impossible for her to ‘‘provide the patient with the psychological caregiving she needed’’ (ibid.). The daughter acknowledges that her mother was ‘‘ahead of her time’’ because she went to school to learn English, encouraged her daughter to improve herself, and, also, dressed in beautiful clothes. Still, she could not provide what the daughter needed: ‘‘I just wanted to be loved and accepted, but how could she give me what she never had herself ?’’ (ibid.). The mother’s affect was numbed by the losses she had suffered and she could not express love for her daughter by hugging or kissing her. It seems clear that without intervention the pattern of transposition could continue cross-generationally for an indefinite period of time.

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I would like to discuss two recently published novels by Italian-American women. Blue Italian by Rita Ciresi and Umbertina by Helen Barolini demonstrate the ways in which the experience of immigration is manifest as illness (anxiety and depression) in the lives of the assimilated granddaughters who are very much removed from the migration experience. I believe that Rosa Salvatore in Blue Italian and Marguerite Longobardi Morosini in Umbertina, both of whom graduated from American colleges, have relationships with their mothers that illustrate the theory of transposition, similar to the problems of Messina’s patients. In both novels, the women are limited by depression and/or anxiety. They have unconsciously absorbed their secondgeneration mothers’ low self-esteem and depression, which was originally absorbed from the immigrant, in much the same way as Messina’s patient. Both Rosa and Marguerite complain about the lack of affection in their family of origin. They especially complain about their mothers who are numb to physical and emotional closeness, unable to give hugs or kisses. Rosa comments on her mother’s coldness by saying, ‘‘She likes her dog better than me’’ (Ciresi 1996, 251). Marguerite questions her own ability to love, wondering ‘‘if she were not able to receive or return love because she wasn’t familiar with it’’ (Barolini 1999,164). This inability to express affection toward their daughters resembles the ‘‘psychic numbing’’ Messina sees as a defense mechanism. Researchers have long recognized the importance and complexity of the mother–daughter relationship and its impact on the daughter’s healthy development. Ideally, daughters need empathy and closeness from their mothers, but they also need their mother’s support in their attempts to forge a separate and, frequently, a quite different life. Mother–daughter relationships run into trouble when there is no empathy or when the mother takes differentiation as rejection. Then individuation is seen as threatening, and merger is maintained. Depressed and anxious mothers who have limited lives are most likely to cling to their daughters. Because the mothers are unhealthy themselves, they cannot provide the needed psychological caregiving, that is, both empathy and separation. This makes it difficult for the daughter to have both empathy with her mother and a separate life. For Rosa, the absence of empathy leads to anxiety about separation. For Marguerite, the absence of empathy makes her quest endlessly for a loving relationship. The transposed anxiety suffered by second-generation Antoinette Salvatore in Ciresi’s Blue Italian and passed to her daughter, Rosa, is clearly manifest when Rosa falls in love and attempts to develop a relationship with Gary

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Fisher, a wealthy Jewish law student from Yale. She meets Gary at Yale University Hospital, where she works as a social worker. He immediately plunges Rosa into a world very different from and threatening to her mother’s Catholic working-class life in Pizza Beach. Rosa has long desired to escape from Pizza Beach and her mother, whom she believes is both entrapped and entrapping. Yet she feels uncomfortable and inadequate in situations that take her away from that enmeshment. Wherever she goes, she imagines herself as deficient and, significantly, lacking in the same ways as her mother. Rosa sees her mother’s and her own connection to an immigrant past as distancing them both from the mainstream and preventing full access to a pleasant, satisfying American life. Because Rosa, to her own delight, realizes that Gary represents all that is different from Pizza Beach, she also recognizes that her mother will see him as a threat to that environment. When Antoinette discovers the ongoing relationship, she says to her husband, Aldo, ‘‘I told her, when she took that job, I said, you better watch out, at Yale Hospital they do abortions’’ (Ciresi 1996, 69). Antoinette projects all her anxiety about the separation from her daughter that Gary represents and Rosa’s movement into the larger world onto the fact that abortions are performed at Yale University Hospital. For Antoinette, abortions become the symbol of all that is different and dangerous in the world outside the Italian-American enclave of Pizza Beach. Antoinette’s remarks produce anger and anxiety in Rosa because her mother has subtly attempted to keep Rosa attached through fear, instead of encouraging her necessary but frightening journey to an identity that is distinct and uniquely hers. Psychologist Mary Walsh Donovan argues that a mother’s protectiveness at various stages in a daughter’s life is ‘‘often experienced by the daughter as inhibiting of her independence and sexuality, and as pressure to be like her’’ which leads the daughter ‘‘to pull away adamantly and angrily in order to assert her authority’’ (Donovan 1998, 144). Rosa’s response to her mother’s remark is to leave the table and throw the rest of her ravioli in the trash basket. When the tomato sauce splashes onto her new pink lace sweater, Rosa becomes anxious to return to her own apartment to wash out the stain. The point of Ciresi’s novel and Messina’s research is that the stain of an immigrant past, and the guilt and anxiety it causes, cannot be so easily cleansed. Researchers have long acknowledged that the primal mother–daughter bond places daughters in the difficult position of having to disidentify and

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psychologically separate from the person who has a tenacious hold on their identity. Donovan further suggests that if the mother ‘‘has seemingly not been able to achieve a measure of happiness and if mother appears to have no pleasure in her life, then feeling happy or experiencing pleasure can feel dangerous to these women [the daughters] . . . causing anxiety and a pulling back from these experiences’’ (1998, 142). Rosa’s mother had absorbed her immigrant parents’ sadness and loss. Her own marriage has been unsatisfactory in many ways. Ciresi writes, ‘‘For their entire marriage Aldo had put everything worth having out of Antionette’s reach—a nice vacation, a wad of cash, a little love, a happy family’’(1996, 226). Antoinette, therefore, cannot provide the empathy and support her daughter needs. Rosa, who is in love with Gary, assumes that he has read magazine articles indicating that mothers represent what daughters will become and that he will judge her mother and, thus, herself as inadequate and unlovable. She believes that if Gary meets her mother, he will ‘‘turn tail and run. Just run’’ as she herself wishes to do (70). When Rosa sees her mother, she cannot look beyond the immigrant, working-class characteristics that separate her from the assimilated American woman whom Rosa would like to be. To Rosa’s eye her mother is fat, harsh, and unattractive with ‘‘a hard knot of tension, dark and ugly as a mole’’ at the back of her neck. Rosa notices with disgust that her ‘‘ankles [are] swollen from water retention,’’ and she has ‘‘rings that circle her throat like a choker’’ because she does not use moisturizer. Rosa thinks ‘‘Antoinette’s harsh voice and bossy commands would grate on Gary’’ (ibid.). He would ‘‘realize this specter of a woman—a battle ax right off of prime-time TV—would haunt him for the rest of his days, and he would turn tail and run’’ (ibid.). Despite her thinking that meeting her mother will make Gary abandon her—the last thing she wants—Rosa agrees to bring him to dinner the next Sunday. Traveling to her parents’ house with Gary, Rosa feels so uncomfortable that she develops ‘‘a throbbing headache, an aching bladder, a sore throat, and the initial abdominal rumblings that always signal the prelude to a spastic colon attack,’’ all symptoms of anxiety (71). She imagines her discomfort will lead to a hospital visit where she will confess that her illness is caused by having Italian parents. Later when Rosa visits Gary’s parents’ home, she imagines that his parents see her in the same negative way that she sees her own mother. She believes that they see her as uncultured and poorly dressed and that they associate her defects with her being an Italian American, connected to the

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immigrants. She imagines that the little black dress, for which she paid $220, is not becoming: ‘‘The model in the catalog had looked chic and thin and elegant. Rosa looked like something out of steerage, a paesana walking down Grand Avenue to seven o’clock Mass on a summer morning, who had to don a black crocheted sweater to cover her flabby upper arms before she entered the church’’ (168). Sitting by Gary’s family’s pool, Rosa was afraid she would spill something on her clothes and was all too aware that she had neither worn the right outfit nor had she brought the proper wardrobe for tomorrow. . . . Rosa felt like a slob, some kid from the Fresh Air Fund brought in to get a taste of the more genteel life. Rosa was not exactly shining in this conversation. Better clothes might have made her feel more confident that she could hold her own. (ibid., 105–6)

When Gary’s dad praises Rosa for the selflessness of her career as a social worker and suggests that her parents must be extremely proud of her, Rosa instantly imagines her mother on the phone with someone, deprecating her job and complaining that her daughter has failed in the only area that counts because she has no boyfriend. Rosa internalizes her mother’s attitude and responds to Gary’s dad by denying the importance of her career. ‘‘I push papers,’’ she says (ibid., 107). Rosa’s mother has implied that Rosa does not ‘‘fit’’ because in Rosa’s attempt to separate from her mother, ‘‘she refused to stand at the sink’’ with the other women cleaning up the Sunday dishes, ‘‘watching the world go by’’ while the men went out on the steps and smoked cigars (ibid., 237). Like Messina’s sixty-eight-year-old patient’s mother, Antoinette has transposed her feelings of inadequacy to Rosa. In Helen Barolini’s Umbertina, the parents of Marguerite Longobardi Morisini have encouraged her to assimilate and, like Rosa, she has feelings of inadequacy in many situations. The Prologue delineates her problem: She has been married for eighteen years to an Italian intellectual, but she is unhappy and wishes to achieve personal fulfillment by finding ‘‘another part in another theater, with other actors’’ (Barolini 1999, 1). She is very uneasy with her desire to leave her husband, Alberto, and feels compelled to ask her psychiatrist, ‘‘Am I right to go ahead with this divorce?’’ (ibid., 3). Marguerite’s actions during her trip to Florence to look for a job and a place to live, should she actually leave her husband, demonstrates her lack of self-confidence and the anxiety that independence and choice produce. She goes to two places to seek employment but leaves before she speaks to

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anyone; she goes to the office of the housing agent and then leaves before she sees him; and she depends on the man who collects tickets on the bus to tell her where to get off, and when he forgets, she misses her stop. The only time she feels significant on her trip is when a successful male friend of her husband talks to her at dinner. Marguerite was raised by her second-generation upper-middle-class parents to assimilate. One way she learned about American life was from attending Saturday matinees where ‘‘films in the shabby theater seeped their culture into Sammy and Marguerite . . . imprinting indelibly on their minds the look and feel of American life. . . . Real American lives were effortlessly happy ones’’ reinforcing ‘‘the odd quality of her own life’’ (ibid., 151). She remembers her childhood as a place where she never felt comfortable although she never lacked material things. Like Rosa Salvatore, she has difficulty accepting her parents’ definition of happiness, which Carol Bonomo Albright suggests appears to Marguerite to be ‘‘economic ease, marriage, respectability achieved through acquiring the accoutrements . . . and without substance or emotional connections’’ (Albright 1985, 134). She remembers reading a library book, What Every Girl Should Know about Sex, which said that ‘‘if your mother was loving and kind and you learned to love her, you learned to love’’ (Barolini 1999, 164). The book further suggested that this love between mother and daughter was ‘‘the greatest asset’’ in a girl’s life (ibid.). Marguerite is concerned about the girl, who like herself, has parents who attended to basic ‘‘parental duties,’’ but withheld ‘‘the very sweetness of life’’ (ibid.). She wonders if ‘‘her capacity for love had shrunk, atrophied from disuse’’ (ibid.). Marguerite has problems finding a place where she feels at home: She has very little empathy with her own mother, she does not feel comfortable in college, her first marriage lasted only a few weeks, and she wishes to divorce her second husband. Her life is in sharp contrast to the life of Umbertina, her immigrant grandmother who is portrayed as decisive, whereas Marguerite is ambivalent. Umbertina looks to the concrete world for answers; Marguerite is enmeshed in abstractions. Umbertina creates wealth and Marguerite is financially dependent. Messina has suggested that the immigrant denies or minimizes the trauma suffered and that the ignored grief is recognized and absorbed by the children and grandchildren.5 Umbertina herself is never weak or sentimental about the loss of her parents, village, country or even her dead child. Barolini tells us that ‘‘on the day they left the village of Castagna, Umbertina did not look back’’ (1999, 49). Later when the banker to whom Umbertina has

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given her nickels and dimes absconds with the money, she is only temporarily delayed in her plan to remove her children from the tenements of New York City. To acquire the needed money, she sells her most prized possession, her handmade marriage spread, her coperta matrimoniale. Although she is saddened by yet another loss, Barolini tells us ‘‘Umbertina . . . decided again that sentimentality would have no room in her life in this country; what was done was done, and no good would come of looking back’’ (ibid., 76). The losses Umbertina refuses to dwell on and the feelings of devaluation and inadequacy they engender are unconsciously transposed to Carla, Umbertina’s daughter, who is unable to express affection for her daughter, Marguerite. The pain caused by the trauma of migration continues crossgenerationally, passed down from mother to daughter. Much research had been done on the importance to both women of the mother–daughter relationship. The mother sees herself in her infant daughter and the daughter sees herself in her mother. In her essay on the struggle of adolescent girls to establish an identity, Anna Aragno argues that a mother and her habits of being have an enormous impact on a daughter’s development: ‘‘No matter how separate, how individuated and different, how distanced or removed from her mother a daughter may believe herself to have become, throughout a woman’s life, at the periphery of female consciousness at the core of her psyche there continues to loom the long shadow of mother’s influence’’ (Aragno 1998, 86). If the mother suffers from anxiety, the daughter is very likely to absorb it and respond to the world in the same anxious way. Both Rosa and Marguerite are Italian Americans whose relationships with their mothers are fraught with feelings of lack of love. In both these novels, although the granddaughter has assimilated into middle-class or upper-middle-class American life, has attained a college degree, and is functioning in her environment, she is overcome with feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, and low self-esteem that cripple her in so many ways. She has absorbed the pain of immigrant losses that made her mother unable either to give empathy or encourage separation. Notes 1. Psychiatrist Carlos E. Sluzki, among others, suggests that the physical act of dislocation necessitates a psychological shifting of essential systems. To fit into the new environment, the psychological identification of what has been possible in a lifetime must be defined anew with a significant amount of loss.

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In Our Ears, a Voice 223 2. Italian immigrants faced discrimination and poverty as documented by Italian American historians. See Salvatore La Gumina, Wop!: A Documentary History of AntiItalian Discrimination in the United States (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973); see also Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974). 3. David Williams, James Jackson, Yan Yu, and William B. Anderson explored the effect of socio-economic status, stress, and discrimination on mental health and concluded that daily instances of minor discrimination such as poorer service or discourteous treatment caused increased physical health problems in the people who continuously were exposed to this kind of treatment. 4. See ‘‘Transposition Revisited: Clinical, Therapeutic and Developmental Considerations,’’ in Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors and Their Families, ed. Marcus P. Rosenberg (New York: Praeger, 1989), 67–82. 5. According to Louise Kaplan, one of the defining features of trauma is silence about the incident causing the trauma. See No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 216–18. Messina claims that the immigrant’s silence about his/ her losses, rather than suggesting that none exist, confirms the traumatic effect of the experiences.

Works Cited Albright, Carol Bonomo. 1985. ‘‘Definitions of Womanhood: Class, Acculturation, and Feminism.’’ In The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, edited by Helen Barolini, 126–39. New York: Shocken. Aragno, Anna. 1998. ‘‘ ‘Die So That I May Live!’: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Adolescent Girl’s Struggle to Delimit Her Identity.’’ In The Mother-Daughter Relationship: Echoes through Time, edited by Gerd H. Fenchel, 85–134. New Jersey: Jason Aronson Barolini, Helen. 1979 Umbertina. Reprint edition. New York: Feminist Press, 1999. Ciresi, Rita. 1996. Blue Italian. New Jersey: Ecco Press. Donovan, Molly Walsh. 1998. ‘‘Demeter and Persephone Revisited: Ambivalence and Separation in the Mother-Daughter Relationship.’’ In The Mother-Daughter Relationship: Echoes through Time, edited by Gerd H. Fenchel, 135–54. New Jersey: Jason Aronson. Kaplan, Louise. 1995. No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost. New York: Touchstone. Kestenberg, Judith. 1989. ‘‘Transposition Revisited: Clinical, Therapeutic and Developmental Considerations.’’ In Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocuast Survivors and Their Families, edited by Marcus P. Rosenberg, 67–82. New York: Praeger. Messina, Elizabeth. 1999. ‘‘The Recovery of Traumatic Memories: Revisiting Italian Migration.’’ Unpublished essay. ———. 2000. ‘‘L’Isola Sommersa: A Personal and Transpersonal Journey of Migration.’’ Voices in Italian Americana 11.2:129–39.

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224 Mary Ann Mannino Sluzki, Carlos E. 1979. ‘‘Migration and Family Conflict.’’ Family Process 18.4:379–90. Williams, David R., James Jackson, Yan Yu, and William B. Anderson. 1997. ‘‘Radical Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socio-economic Status, Stress and Discrimination.’’ Journal of Health Psychology 2.3:335–51.

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Mary Caponegro, Prize-Winning American Writer in Rome blossom s. kirschenbaum 1995

Mary Caponegro’s ‘‘Materia Prima’’ (1987) opens in the land that celebrates Thanksgiving on a Thursday in November. Relatives are visiting for a weekly family dinner, and the narrator remarks casually, proverbially, ‘‘when in Rome they did as we did.’’ In 1991 Brooklyn-born Mary Caponegro went to Rome. A prestigious literary prize that cannot be applied for, but only conferred, was awarded to her by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York. She had been to Rome before, but not with the financial and other support she received during her year at a palatial complex on the Gianicolo. From this institutional base, while continuing to write, she also absorbed impressions of a great capital city layered with more than two millennia of acknowledged continuous habitation. She studied Italian, met other artists, attended lectures and concerts, went on guided tours, and traveled to give readings. Of Italian descent on her father’s side, Mary Caponegro is typical of Italian Americans who sojourn in Italy to reconnect with ‘‘roots’’ and to revitalize and extend a binational life. Quite extraordinary, though, is the fiction she writes and the career that it has earned her. Mary Caponegro went to ‘‘good schools’’: she received a bachelor’s degree from Bard College in 1978 and a master’s degree from Brown University’s Graduate Writing Program in 1983. Her writing has been praised by distinguished literary innovators like John Hawkes and Robert Coover as well as poet Robert Kelly. ‘‘The Star Cafe´,’’ included in her master’s thesis and published in Mississippi Review, is cited among ‘‘100 Other Distinguished Short Stories of the Year 1983’’ in the 1984 Best American Short Stories. It was included in Tales from the Next Village (Lost Roads, 1985); chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for the 1987 International Book Fair in Buenos Aires; and reprinted as the title story in The Star Cafe´ (Scribner’s, 1990; reprint ed., paperback, Norton, 1991). ‘‘Materia Prima,’’ first 225

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published in the fifth anniversary issue of Conjunctions (1987) and included in The Star Cafe´, won the 1988 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers. Mary Caponegro taught various genres of writing at Brown University, 1982–1986, and composition and literature courses at Rhode Island School of Design, 1987–1989. To go to Rome, she took leave from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where since September 1989 she has been Assistant Professor of English.1 The American Academy in Rome functions as a composite of resident arts colony and cultural embassy. How well it does so depends on the temperament of its directors; the loyalty of those whom it has benefited; the attributes and ‘‘mix’’ of current fellows and guests; its stance toward and reception by Romans; and the base and extent of its financial support, which trustees have been trying to expand. Unlike its French model, the American Academy was not governmentally founded. Rather, it grew out of the Columbian Exposition a century ago, starting as a school for training architects, and it has long considered itself a private institution. The fellowship for writers, begun in 1952 and suspended between 1963 and 1976, allows the designee accommodations, studio space, introductions, and the society of other artists. Yearnings of mind and body, rather than naturalistic characterization, focus Mary Caponegro’s fictions. As one reviewer put it, her tales ‘‘are a lavish and deadly banquet in which women discover their oppression in male society and emancipate themselves from it.’’2 Thus in ‘‘The Star Cafe´,’’ Carol, an ordinary woman, prepares for bed and then descends a stairway much as Alice goes down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Doors open, doors close in a labyrinthine hide-and-seek mirrored funhouse, as the woman at once escapes from and seeks out the same man, learning thereby to feel at east with her naked self, to manage her own sexuality, and to enter the wider world previously represented by travel posters. Preparation for bed here is readiness less for sleep than for awakening; the bed represents action rather than repose. It is a tour de force; the only comparable work I know is the Hungarian film My Twentieth Century,3 in which, however, the lost-in-the-funhouse protagonist is doubled—to identical twins. There, the pursuing male must learn to recognize the earnestly ‘‘good’’ and the seductively ‘‘bad’’ women as sisters really alike, though kept apart, by men. In ‘‘The Star Cafe´,’’ it is Carol who is tempted to ‘‘split’’: ‘‘she was still trapped underneath him: this man she was not with despite his presence. It was happening to someone else, he was inside someone else, who only happened to be Carol.’’4 Integrity arrives through conjunction: ‘‘She’d come outside

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herself to meet him through the medium of body, through the act of letting him inside her, and yet never felt so fully in her body, in her self, as when she had.’’5 Thus integral, she practices to possess her own sexuality. In ‘‘Materia Prima,’’ the 1987 story already mentioned, precocious Clara feels her parents’ pride in her gradually change to anxiety, disapproval, sorrow—while her own spontaneous love for her grandmother and for sisterlike cousin Laura are tampered with, stifled, and manipulated through training at home and in school. Her parallel love for information turns pedantic and consuming, with metaphoric fixation on birds and insects. Exclusion of children from adult conversation at regular Thursday family dinners gives way during adolescence to compulsory attendance and compelled eating at Thanksgiving. Distraught Clara reflects: ‘‘Irreconcilable alienation. Only in reading and in dream did I find solace.’’ Her mother witnesses, uncomprehending, the daughter’s metamorphosis that has nothing to do with her own womanly or maternal needs. Clara’s fascination with a fossil, with ‘‘the origin of a bird such as Archaeopteryx, which was not a fully developed flyer, from a Pseudosuchian reptile,’’ and her imaginative ascension and song, are perceived by the mother only as ‘‘unavailability. Even annihilation.’’ Other works are ‘‘far out’’ in other ways. Tales from the Next Village, for instance, takes a quite up-to-date outer-space ‘‘Love Your Mother’’ perspective on earth while pulling back to a more ancient calendar. The effect is challenge to a merely American insularity and a ‘‘Now Generation’s’’ posture of innocence. This fiction incorporates a new paganism of magic, animism, and folk wisdom with hints of cargo-cult and fire-next-time sci-fi religion, bursting through conventions to explore relationships between man and woman as well as other primary ties. Sebastian, full of self-conscious wordplay, explores a male character’s relationship to his live-in ‘‘fiance´e.’’ He is English, she American; he is Christian, she Jewish; he is a businessman, she an artist. When he needs her, she is unavailable to him; when she has sent him away and he tries to return to her, he gets stuck in a freight elevator. His errand to pick up a pair of pants from the tailor’s before driving himself to the airport results in impasse and entrapment: he still needs the woman who is too independently busy for him. Caponegro’s techniques do not work unequivocally well for reviewers, who, while praising her, also caution her readers. Peter Finn in the New York Times Book Review calls her prose ‘‘poised’’ but also at times ‘‘too studied,’’ adding, ‘‘at their best, however, these little fables have a tone that echoes Italo Calvino.’’6 Publishers Weekly calls her work ‘‘uneven’’ while admiring the psychology and wordplay.7 In Booklist, Mary Banas concludes

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her review: ‘‘Those seeking a good read had better look elsewhere, for these intense stories aim to shake up our intellectual universe—not take us away from it or set it straight. Heady fiction by an unusual writer.’’8 In the San Francisco Chronicle Susanna Shoham likewise praises the achievement while cautioning readers that this fiction ‘‘demands a reader’s complete concentration’’ because the author ‘‘lays the burden of figuring out her intentions solely on the reader’’; yet she concludes by advising, ‘‘Caponegro’s authority and range are so impressive that readers will await her next work with anticipation.’’9 Richard Eber, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, finds Mary Caponegro’s voice and vision ‘‘talented and individual,’’ and her feminist stories ‘‘feminist art, not feminist polemics,’’ but feels finally let down. He works around from a consideration of the commercially successful popular-culture figure Madonna, who ‘‘in a pointed metal bra writhes through a sexual pantomime, all sexuality extinct,’’ to Caponegro’s surreal eruptions, which, he says, ‘‘don’t quite serve, they break off; they shiver, like Madonna, in disembodied lust. They bounce like rubble.’’10 Both author and reviewers, it seems, feel ambivalent about the cultural context in which they are writing. Also they are dealing with entities other than the familiar novel, novella, or story—as Steven Moore makes explicit in the Washington Post. Caponegro, he says, ‘‘avoids the well-trod path of the wellmade story for the yellow-brick-road of Borgesian ficciones.’’11 She incorporates myth, dream, allegory, psychodrama, and other kinds of irrealism to get at her elusive meanings. Following her is an adventure not everyone would find rewarding; yet commentators do not doubt that she will be followed. How Rome will affect Mary Caponegro’s fiction begins to be seen. During her year’s residence, she wrote the Academy’s Christmas play in English. It was performed again, translated into Italian. The tale she read there on Ash Wednesday, called ‘‘Golden Importunities,’’ was retitled ‘‘The Priest’s Tale’’ when she read it at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in February 1993. It features a priest gravely responsible, at a wedding, for instructing the bride and groom about implications of the phrase ‘‘till death do us part.’’ The priest keeps the coffin in view as the honeymooners settle into domesticity and start a family—as though to beget and bear a new life were to acknowledge mortality and, by bringing new life into the world, to bring also new death. This inversion of convention, this life-as-death, has a certain logic but seems perverse and sadistic. It has old antecedents not only in the carpe diem theme but especially in the image of Death in Arcadia: ‘‘Et in Arcadia ego.’’ So clumsy is the priest, so blundering as he imparts his truth to

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the vulnerable young, who are both innocent about and resistant to his messages, that the reader is provoked to question not only the priest’s appropriateness but also his reliability. He seems bizarre. Like the fiction of John Hawkes, with whom she studied, Mary Caponegro’s tales treat categorically pleasurable events in a ‘‘photo-negative’’ macabre subversive way. Displaced emphasis, distortion, and deconstruction produce weirdness but allow emergence of truths too often glossed over or suppressed. Collaborations in Rome, even when they did not result in publication, were ‘‘very inspiring, stimulating,’’ said Mary Caponegro.12 She referred particularly to generating narratives with sculptor Rita McBride and to working on an indoor installation with landscape architect Eric Fulford. One book that did take shape is in the special category of hand-printed, expensive, limited-edition art books. This is The Change, the story of Daphne and Apollo told from a feminist perspective.13 The art work is by Gunnar Kaldewey, husband of composer Bung Ching Lam, who was at the American Academy of Rome during the year of Mary Caponegro’s fellowship, and whose press published the book. Meanwhile, written after the year in Rome, ‘‘The Complexities of Intimacy II’’ has already been read to a Providence audience.14 This story is about a motherless ballet dancer whose father, an architect, has abused her; yet she, alone of all his daughters, goes on living in the house he built, the space he shaped. Only she is ‘‘faithful.’’ His space is her limbo, however, and his stories are no help to her. He and she are concerned with very different kinds of ‘‘elevation.’’ Counterpoised to verticality of her leaps is the horizontality of his swimming. He could ‘‘steal from Pompeii and other conserved sites, while condemning the corruption of those that do, unaware of his hypocrisy.’’ The piece ends with a meditation on drowning. Since it continues to evolve, Caponegro would not speak definitively about it except to say that both it and its predecessor are ‘‘deconstructions of domesticity.’’ She warned that it is ‘‘not comic except in the darkest sense.’’15 Working in the English language, Caponegro emerges from AngloAmerican traditions like those detailed in Ellen Moers’s Literary Women: ‘‘Jane Austen’s precise concern with money, Mary Shelley’s creation of a birth myth, . . . Harriet Beecher Stowe’s access as a woman to the matter of slavery, Willa Cather’s access as a woman to the drama of landscape, Emily Bronte¨’s access as a woman to the savagery of childhood . . .’’16 That is, she writes out of concerns of writers raised as girls, living in women’s bodies, assigned social roles and regulated by laws which differentiate women from men. With such consciousness Caponegro encounters a Rome that, like

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Italian cities generally, has a strong women’s movement along with research centers, journals, and bookstores. She is moreover there at a time when works by internationally acclaimed writers like Margaret Mead, Simone de Beauvoir, and Isak Dinesen—and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer—are known in both Italy and the United States; and when Italian fiction by women has been coming into Anglo-American translation, profoundly controverting Italian stereotypes from Hollywood and the advertising industry. Caponegro’s new work reveals a finely tuned sensibility playing over traditional materials and radically, eclectically recycling them into images and cadences for our time. Mary Caponegro is not the first Italian American to be awarded the Rome Prize in Writing; that honor went to poet John Ciardi, 1956–57. She is, however, the first Italian-American woman recipient at an institution that has had far more men than women as Writing Fellows. (The first woman named Writing Fellow, Sigrid e Lima, published several novels before receiving the award but during her year at the Academy (1953) wrote the novel that proved to be her last.) Typically, Italian-American writers are discussed as bringing an Italian heritage into the American mainstream. As the American future unfolds, the protagonist (of the immigrant or firstborn native generation) lives through culture conflicts, initiation rituals, and unprecedented opportunities along with overt and subtle prejudices. Fortified and frustrated by the old culture, growing up to a composite identity, the protagonist assimilates, or at least acculturates, learning at last to celebrate the generations. This is the immigrant novel, traditional and still appearing—but in a constellation of innovative works by younger artists. These new Italian Americans, acquainted with earlier achievements, realize that Italy has been changing, the United States has been changing, and the implications of being Italian in America have been changing. They know how easy it is to travel between the two countries; they may feel at home in both, actually keep homes in both, and even have two patrie. They know proliferating examples of binational and even bilingual poetry and fiction, and they often write anticipating translation into other world-languages. They may also forgo naturalistic conventions in favor of postmodern techniques including the cinematic. Apart from book-club adoptions, the film rights offer the greatest financial return— though strategies borrowed from other media also allow for avant-garde experimentation and more doubtful immediate rewards. Not only are the terms Italian American and fiction in flux, but so is the designation writer. And

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the context is global, with hot debates over the canon and even the possibility of a canon, while all literature can be regarded as comparative literature. Into this picture has entered a new and early successful Italian-American writer. Notes 1. Caponegro now teaches at her alma mater, Bard College. 2. Michael Chorost, review of Tales from the Next Village, Issues (Winter 1985– 86): 13. 3. En XX. Szazadom, 1989. Dir. Ildiko´ Enyedi. With Dorothea Segda, Oleg Yankovsky, Paulus Manker. In Hungarian; English subtitles. Courtesy Aries Releasing, 100 minutes. 4. Mary Caponegro, ‘‘The Star Cafe´’’ in The Star Cafe´: Stories (New York: Scribner, 1990), 31. 5. Ibid., 33. 6. Peter Finn, ‘‘In Short: Fiction,’’ New York Times Book Review, September 16, 1990, 22. 7. Sibyl Steinberg, Publishers Weekly, May 11, 1990, 246. 8. Booklist, May 15, 1990, 1777. 9. Shsan Shoman, ‘‘Tales of Transformation,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1990. 10. Richard Eber, ‘‘This Is Not a Book Review,’’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, July 1, 1990, 3, 9. 11. Washington Post, August 23, 1990. 12. Conversation at the Meeting Street Cafe´, Providence, Rhode Island, Sunday, February 28, 1993. 13. Mary Caponegro and Gunnar Kaldewey, The Change (Poestenkill, N.Y.: Kaldewey Press, 1992). 14. This story was presented on Friday, February 25, 1993 at Brown University’s ‘‘Unspeakable Practices II,’’ a four-day celebration of vanguard fiction organized by Robert Coover that featured current and former graduate members of the Writing Program. Other writers included Kathy Acker, Samuel Delaney, and members of the Fiction Collective; filmmakers; hypertext pioneers; and guests from abroad, including Marc Che´netier (who is Caponegro’s translator into French for Seuil’s Editions A. M. Metailie). 15. Conversation, Providence, Rhode Island, February 28, 1993. 16. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, xii.

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Mary di Michele’s Elegies nathalie cooke 1991

In her poetry, the Italian-Canadian Mary di Michele explores various issues of marginality, asking questions about the language and forms she must use as a doubly marginal writer, and questions about her audience. As I have argued elsewhere,1 these concerns figure prominently in her confessional poems, where she defines center and margin in terms of her own personal experience. But if confession is one answer di Michele provides to the question, ‘‘How must a marginal writer speak?’’ elegy is another. Together, these two forms dominated her earlier poems, especially those personal poems that dealt with her legacy as an Italian-Canadian. However, it is elegy that emerges as the central form in Luminous Emergencies, her sixth volume of poetry. In this collection, the poet is no longer one who speaks the confession, but one who listens to it. She bears witness to atrocities against humanity in poems that mourn the loss of life and contemporary violations against human decency. In this paper I want to trace the elegiac strain in di Michele’s poetry, from its focus on personal loss to its more recent focus on broader political issues. Early on, the focus of di Michele’s narrative of loss is specific: on family and Italy, the family home and homeland. Gradually, however, the narrative’s focus becomes broader until, in Luminous Emergencies, the elegiac form is transformed from the poet’s mourning the loss of a specific person or place, to her mourning a loss that is so universal, so enormous in its scope, that the poet’s task is to personalize it.

Nostalgia In her earlier work, di Michele uses elegy to articulate the immigrant experience. For instance, the parents of the speaker in di Michele’s poems see 232

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their lives in terms of the loss of paradise. Italy—for all the difficulty of life there: the hard work, the poor pay, the tipping of one’s hat to ‘‘Don Soand-So/in order to eat or get a job’’2 —is the Land of Mimosa. It is their first paradise, lost to them because of their quest for a better life for their children. A second paradise is the home they make in Canada with their two young children. Described as a garden in such poems as ‘‘Bread and Chocolate’’ and ‘‘Mimosa,’’ the comparison between the poet’s childhood home and a paradisal existence is made explicit. ‘‘There is only one heaven,’’ the poet explains, ‘‘the heaven of the home.’’ However, their new-world paradise is soon tarnished by time and circumstance: their child is transformed from a ‘‘golden girl’’ into a prodigal daughter, and they, in turn, become tired and dissatisfied. The shift from the descriptive to the elegiac is signaled by a shift from the present to the past tense. There is only one heaven, the heaven of the home. There was only one paradise, the garden that kept them little children even as adults, until one angel, Lucia, his luckless offspring fell, refusing to share in his light. (M, 1, emphasis added)

Of course, Lucia (the prodigal daughter) leaves the family paradise just as her parents before her had left the land of Mimosa—consciously. As the verbal echoes of Milton’s Paradise Lost suggest here, both generations undergo a ‘‘fall’’ as a function of some conscious decision. For the first-generation immigrants in these elegies, however, there is also a sense of exile. As Vito finds, sitting under the heaven he has made of green fiberglass in contemporary Toronto, paradise is somehow lost to the inhabitants of the new world. Nostalgic, he remembers the sweetness of Mimosa, and of days gone by. The loss felt by his poet daughter, Lucia, is different, and parallels the central concern of all di Michele’s elegies: despite her rebellion, she mourns the lack of communication in her family. In particular, Lucia is troubled by her own inability to communicate with her father. I have to settle things with my father before the year is dead. It’s about time we tried talking person to person. More than a tired man, my father is such a lonely, disappointed man.

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234 Nathalie Cooke He has learned through many years of keeping his mouth shut to say nothing. (M, 14)

Even when Lucia does talk to her father, they do not fully understand each other. For instance, she recalls his telling her: ‘‘These are good poems you have here Lucia, but what you think about Italy! ‘a country of dark men full of violence and laughter, a country that drives its women to dumb despair.’ That’s not nice what you say, you think it’s very different here? You got to tell the truth when you write, like the bible. I’m your father. Lucia, remember, I know you.’’ The truth is not nice, the truth is that his life is almost over and we don’t have a common language any more. (M, 15)

The doubleness of Vito’s message is made explicit by di Michele’s juxtaposition of those two words, ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘nice.’’ To Vito, they seem to mean the same thing, to Lucia they do not. Ironically, then, what angers Vito is precisely that she does tell the truth—her own truth. Further, the similarity between Lucia’s own description of her father in her monologue—‘‘More than a tired man, my father is such a lonely, disappointed man’’ (M, 14)—and the narrator’s description in the poem’s introductory section—‘‘Even more than a tired man, Vito is a sad man’’ (M, 1)—suggests a link between Lucia and the narrator. Lucia seems to be both a poet within the poem and the poet of this poem. ‘‘Mimosa’’ is her confession of love for her father; it contains what she wants to tell him ‘‘person to person,’’ but can only tell him in a poem.

Celebration For the most part, however, the poet’s story is not one of loss, but rather it is one of gain and growth, of coming to terms with difference. As a child she rejected her Italian background, ashamed that her ‘‘dinners were in a language she couldn’t share/with her friends: their pot roasts,/their turnips,

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their recipes for Kraft’s/dinners you glimpsed in TV commercials—/the mysteries of macaroni with marshmallows.’’3 As the adult poet who writes this poem, though, she sees the richness of her cultural heritage: to the adult (and to the reader ) Kraft’s most inventive recipes seem insubstantial when compared with real dinners in the oven, ‘‘melanzane al la parmigiana,’’ bubbling in Pyrex, eggplant ‘‘with the dark sensuality of liver’’ (IG, 45). In ‘‘Life Is Theatre or O to be Italian in Toronto Drinking Cappuccino on Bloor Street at Bersani and Carlevale’s,’’ di Michele’s speaker feels no nostalgia for a childhood filled largely with discomfort. For a young girl, wanting desperately to be ‘‘normal’’ so as to be liked, the differences of character and cultural heritage proved troubling. A ‘‘fat girl with good grades,’’ Catholic in a ‘‘largely Jewish high school,’’ she was ‘‘as popular as pork on Passover’’ (IG, 46). Of course there is discomfort for the adult poet as well. Still wanting desperately to be liked, still acutely aware of her difference, the adult within these poems begins to find a new independence. Early signs occur even in this poem. When faced with someone who does not love her, for example, she is able to walk away—first. But the strongest signs of her independence occur in the last poem of Immune to Gravity. Here, she walks the city of Rome alone (‘‘To test myself as I am’’ [IG, 117]), whereas in the first poem of the volume she traveled only with a male guide. Further, as the act of writing poems about her personal legacy as an Italian-Canadian suggests, the poet of these poems also gains a pride in her heritage. As an adult surrounded by those who encouraged her to explore that heritage (Robert Billings, Bronwen Wallace, Roo Borson, Carolyn Smart, Robert Priest and Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, among others),4 di Michele charges her work with explorations of her relationship with her own cultural and narrative legacies. Ironically, with this pride also comes a sense of loss; for the poet has journeyed far from the Italy of childhood memory. She finds that her ‘‘tongue has been un-/Mothered,’’ that it ‘‘has thickened/ with English consonants and diphthongs,/mustard and horseradish. That burning./That burdened.’’5

Tribute Di Michele pays tribute to some of those who encouraged her literary explorations in the more formal elegies of Luminous Emergencies. Published in 1990, after a period of great loss on the part of the Canadian literary community, this collection includes poems written for Robert Billings and Bronwen Wallace, among others.

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236 Nathalie Cooke

I say more formal elegies, not so much because of their tone, which is casual—and, in the case of ‘‘Angel of Slapstick’’ written for Wallace, even humorous—but because they contain elements that we have come to associate with the elegiac form. After all, these poems mourn the loss of a particular individual, which the poet puts in a larger context before providing a closing consolation. ‘‘Are you among those who commune with rocks,’’ she asks Robert Billings, ‘‘and shelter in the stillness behind the waterfall/ where the maenads wait and whirl?’’ (LE, 65) For her close friend, Bronwen Wallace, di Michele writes this moving passage, incorporating elements of the pastoral elegy: You are Orpheus scattered among your friends. Many. You are many. Now even with the best acoustics in the world, without wood, without the body of the violin, where is the music? The bow saws to the applause of one hand. Harmonious instrument When all we who miss you want is what was heard off-key. The woman. (LE, 101)

These are both complex poems worthy of much more detailed attention. But here, in this general introduction to a central form in di Michele’s oeuvre, I want to concentrate on an elegiac sequence she has written for the Chilean dead; for this sequence is both the culmination of di Michele’s experiments with elegy, and a radical departure from the way she has used the form to date.

Witness Entitled To Inherit the Earth, the Chilean poems were written after di Michele visited Chile with Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, and Gary Geddes on a poetry-reading tour. They are most obviously a radical departure from the way she has used elegy previously because they neither describe her own experience, nor that of her family or countrymen. Instead, they deal with a cause that di Michele adopts as her own. ‘‘How are the atrocities committed here in Chile mine?’’ she asks.

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Mary di Michele’s Elegies 237 In transit, I view them. Victims of the military regime tell me their stories because they believe poetry tells the truth, because here even the military believes in books enough to burn them. . . . They count on the poet, part angel/part animal, to be the one who has not forgotten to feel. (LE, 44)

Adopting such a large cause, the loss of millions of lives rather than of one particular life, as the subject of an elegy has implications for the form of the poem. Most obviously, whereas the poet mourning a single friend seeks to generalize the significance of that particular death (‘‘You are Orpheus’’), the horror in Chile is so enormous that the poet’s task is to personalize it, so as to make it comprehensible. Consequently, ‘‘To Inherit the Earth’’ is divided into five prose sections: a foreword, an afterword, and three narrative sections. The narratives are clear, for the poet relates stories she has heard directly. Tragically, they illustrate the fact that it is easier to be the one who is dead (the one who inherits the earth) than to be those who are left behind. Despite the differences between this elegiac sequence and di Michele’s earlier elegies (the prose format, the Chilean subject matter), there is one thing that remains consistent: the importance of communication. You will remember that I began this essay with a discussion of the poem ‘‘Mimosa,’’ and that was due to its emphasizing di Michele’s concern with dialogue. The greatest loss (for Vito and for his daughter, Lucia) is the loss of human contact—not only physical contact but emotional as well. And the only possibility of recuperating from that loss is through the words of love they find it so difficult to speak to each other, in a common language. Of course, in the Chilean sequence, communication becomes infinitely more important. Many of the Chileans in di Michele’s poem have either lost their own lives or the lives of loved ones; all Chileans, however, have lost the freedom of speech. Indeed, as one woman explains, she has lost the right even to mourn. In a military regime, talking too much can get one killed. My husband has been missing since ’76. I can’t speak of it here. Not to my colleagues. Not to anyone. . . . He talked too much, you know. A psychoanalyst, he talked, then he disappeared. I have to keep my mouth shut about it. . . . I can’t afford to mourn him publicly. They might conclude I am one with him in opinions! My husband. I want a funeral for him. (LE, 49)

Indeed, for this woman, telling her story inside a locked bathroom is itself a kind of consolation. Not only is she able to tell of her grief, to speak of it aloud, but she communicates her story to a poet who, she believes, might be able to bring about change.

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238 Nathalie Cooke

This Canadian poet, however, knows that she does not wield such power; words in her own country have lost their potency. ‘‘Listen,’’ she writes in the concluding section, whatever I write here, what you read, is safe. It’s between us. In North America writers don’t disappear. They are not tortured. They are ignored. People are not arrested. They are illiterate. (LE, 51)

And this too is the subject of di Michele’s elegies. What I am suggesting, then, is that the loss mourned by di Michele in both her earlier elegies, and in her more recent ones, is not so much a particular death or deaths, but rather the loss of human interaction in general. Her elegies stand as a stay against the erosion of the linguistic and emotional bonds between individuals; her poems are both about consolation, and they are a kind of consolation. The poet’s dilemma, of course, is that if words have lost their potency, then how effective can dialogue be as a source of consolation? Although she provides no solution to this question in Luminous Emergencies, I think we see di Michele working through the problem when she uses a narrator who is both a speaker and a listener, who is aware of her role in an ongoing dialogue. She suggests that listening is as important as speaking. This is particularly evident in the Chilean sequence, where the poet’s role is to be a conduit for the truth: she must first witness the horror in Chile (either firsthand, or by listening to those she encounters), and next, communicate it to the outside world. Sadly, the poet knows that her willingness to listen in silence will ultimately ease their grief as much as her speaking to the jaded audiences of North America. In turn, I think, di Michele implies that reading is as important as writing. Certainly, by reading these Chilean poems, we too bear witness to the atrocities against humanity. And, if we choose not to communicate them to others, to participate in the dialogue, we too become implicated. Paradoxically, di Michele seems to be suggesting that the words themselves are not as important as the dialogue. She—and we—have a responsibility to engage with the words and with each other: as speakers and listeners, writers and readers. It is no coincidence that di Michele calls herself a ‘‘reader/writer’’ in her author’s note; this dual role identifies her as a participant in an ongoing dialogue. Notes A version of this paper was presented at a conference on ‘‘Pluralism and Literature: Italian Canadian Writing in a Multicultural World’’ held at Carleton University in

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Mary di Michele’s Elegies 239 Ottawa, October 1990. The author would also like to acknowledge the support of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship in the writing of this paper. 1. Cooke, ‘‘Mary di Michele: On the Integrity of Speech and Silence,’’ Canadian Poetry 26 (1990): 43–53. 2. Mary di Michele, ‘‘Mimosa,’’ in Mimosa and Other Poems (Oakville, Ontario; Mosaic Press, 1984), 3. All subsequent references appearing in the text will be cited as M. 3. Mary di Michele, ‘‘Life Is Theatre,’’ in Immune to Gravity (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 45. All subsequent references appearing in the text will be cited as IG. 4. For a more detailed discussion see Robert Billings, ‘‘Contemporary Influences on the Poetry of Mary di Michele,’’ in Contrasts, Comparative Essays on Italian Canadian Writing, ed. Joseph Pivato (Montreal: Cuerntra Editions, 1985), 123–52. 5. Mary di Michele, ‘‘Luminous Emergencies,’’ in Luminous Emergencies (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 94. All subsequent references appearing in the text will be cited as LE.

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert christina bevilacqua 1992

Sandra M. Gilbert is, with Susan Gubar, the co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 1979), a study of the woman writer and the literary imagination of the nineteenth century, and No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, in 3 volumes, all from Yale University Press: Volume 1, The War of the Words (1988); Volume 2, Sexchanges (1989); and Volume 3, Letters from the Front (1994). The two also edited Shakespeare’s Sisters (Indiana University Press, 1979) and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (Norton, 1985). Sandra M. Gilbert has also written Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Cornell University Press, 1972) and three volumes of poetry, In the Fourth World (University of Alabama Press, 1979), Emily’s Bread (Norton, 1984), and Blood Pressure (Norton, 1988). She initially presented her essay ‘‘Piacere Conoscerla’’ at the 1989 Italian American Historical Association Conference. She is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis. We spoke by phone in April 1992. Christina Bevilacqua: I really enjoyed reading all your work, although I enjoyed it in a very ambivalent way. I’m assuming that it must be very exciting to be doing the work, but I wondered also about how you and Susan Gubar felt to be steeped in that kind of history that is so, so . . . Sandra Gilbert: Full of pain. CB: Yes. SG: You’re speaking of The Madwoman in the Attic in particular? CB: Well, actually, No Man’s Land also. SG: Well, when we began working on Madwoman we were so astonished to find that there was such a history that we were simply seized by excitement; it was an amazing, unbelievable, overwhelming conversion experience. It was like St. Paul, you know, the scales fell from my eyes. 240

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert 241 We saw something that had been invisible because we hadn’t been taught about it. I think that that exhilaration was so intense that it helped us to deal with the pain, the way you don’t feel pain when you have a great surge of adrenalin. At the same time—I can’t speak for Susan here—I do think that I personally did brood a lot on the pain. A lot of the poems in Emily’s Bread come from the time when I was working on The Madwoman in the Attic. They were almost part of the project of Madwoman; they were a way of confronting and coming to terms with the pain of The Governess, The Fallen Woman, you know, women in history that I had not attended to as an undergraduate. CB: In the criticism and the poetry and in the little bit of memoir, ‘‘Piacere Conoscerla,’’ the thread that really jumps out is the notion of looking for antecedents, looking for ancestors, looking for something in the past that helps to define who you are now. SG: I think that was very important to me. In fact, it seems to me that I understood years later that there were ways in which our work on Madwoman—with its idea that there’s a subplot, a subtext, a secret somewhere in the attic of women’s writing—was also deeply tied to our personal lives, even though neither of us had origins in 19th century England, or America, for that matter. We both come from immigrant families, but we come from immigrant families where it’s very hard to know what the secrets are. CB: It was interesting to read about your relatives really not wanting to disclose a lot, and obviously women’s history was something that no one even knew existed . . . SG: That’s right. Well, women’s history was, as it were, secret, it was certainly suppressed. And as immigrants—Susan’s family is a German Jewish family that came in the late 1930s, and they had in many ways an experience that paralleled my family’s; my family came here earlier in the century. But my cousins and I, on my mother’s side, the Sicilian side, could never figure anything out, never find anything out. I mean, gradually over the years various bits of information were sort of reluctantly disclosed, but it’s still very hard to put them together. And there’s such a sense of loss of history, and pain: for everything we know, we keep speculating that there’s something else we don’t know. And of course it all evaporates very fast; it’s gone as soon as the last uncle or aunt who could tell the stories is gone, because we don’t understand the stories—we weren’t there. And there are very few written records we can find; or when we find them, that we can understand. And to make matters worse

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242 Christina Bevilacqua for me, I was the very youngest of the cousins, all the cousins that I was close to. And most of them grew up in Italian-speaking households, and even though they still felt that they didn’t know anything, for me there was also the alienation of not knowing the language they were speaking. So they could tell secrets to each other in Sicilian—not even regular Italian, but Sicilian—and I wouldn’t even know what they were or what they were talking about. CB: There’s this incredible poignancy in the memoir, because even in just that short piece the bits of information that you do give are so specific—it’s clear that they were remembered and repeated. You know, the white wool dress that your mother had to wear. It’s not like this long story where you tell the whole thing; instead, there are these few little, little bits of the puzzle that have been very carefully looked at, and are very specific, but that just don’t go together. SG: Just little glimpses, and there’s very little that survives even materially. I mean my mother has these two beautiful old chairs that she says were her mother’s chairs—and that’s it! And I never had a clue. I mean, I don’t know where they lived in Williamsburg in Brooklyn. I know where my aunt lived, and my mother and her mother lived there in her mother’s last days. But where they were before that, what they looked like, I just don’t know. I don’t know what happened to some of the uncles; I mean, there are terrible stories. But my mother is very silent about them, and when I wrote a poem about one of them, her favorite brother, she was very distressed by the poem. And I said, ‘‘Would you mind if I published this?’’ And she said, ‘‘Not while I’m alive!’’ Which is very Italian. CB: The male relatives in the poetry and the memoir are much shadowier, while the women are so immediate and so vibrant. Were they more interesting? Or were they just more accessible to you? SG: I think they were more accessible. My mother was very close to her sister; in her family there were two sisters and seven brothers. And it was hard—one of my little tasks as a child was to try to memorize the names of the seven brothers and their wives and their children. And it was very complicated! [laughs] Especially for a kid who lived in Queens; we lived in Queens, rather far away from the rest of the family, and, as I say, there was this linguistic alienation. It was hard to remember who they were. And most of them were much older than my mother, who was the very youngest in the family. So they were daunting, they were shadowy—they were scary. One uncle I saw only once, outside a church when a cousin was getting married. There was some reason why he couldn’t come in,

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert 243 he wasn’t supposed to be there. I don’t know why! I was about five years old, and I remember this very tall, sort of handsome—but for some reason Byronically brooding—uncle standing near a black wrought iron fence outside the church in Brooklyn, and I was brought up to him to be shown to him, and that was it! I mean, why? I don’t know. CB: Well, there’s this notion of silence and secrecy in your family, where a lot of emphasis is placed on that, and certainly women are not raised to trumpet things about their lives. And yet it seems to me that your work is about telling things that haven’t been told. SG: It is about telling, that’s true. That’s interesting . . . I never thought of it that way. CB: How did you dare to do that? SG: [laughs] Well, I mean I never thought about that, that’s an interesting question . . . but maybe what I was trying to do was first of all to tell myself what had happened and what was going on. I myself had perhaps repressed a great deal about what I was feeling about being a woman in our culture and also about being an Italian American in a culture where it was painful to be an Italian American, from my mother’s point of view, when I was growing up. I mean, part of it was during World War II; Mussolini was a bad guy, and so I must be one of the bad guys, too— since, after all I have an Italian last name. So I think I had to tell myself the meanings of a lot of things, and I probably got some of the energy to do that from the fact that my mother did move away. I mean it’s a terrible thing to say, but she and my father had very much moved away from the Sicilian side in particular, so I was rather distant from it. I wasn’t implicated. I was very intensely nurtured as somebody who was going to be the American child, the one who was going to go to college, who was going to either marry a professor or be a professor, be a doctor, marry a doctor, both, all of the above. And that must have been something, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, I assume. CB: You were an only child? SG: Yes. CB: It’s interesting to hear you say that you were raised as an American child and that there were these expectations of you; if you had had a brother would the expectations of you have been the same do you think? SG: I really don’t know. I can remember a couple of things in my childhood—there was a story my mother used to tell, that when I was born, and they found out I was [laughs] a girl and not a boy, my grandfather on my father’s side said, ‘‘Oh, put away the champagne.’’ But he

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244 Christina Bevilacqua turned out to be a wonderful grandfather, and he’s long since dead, so I don’t like telling the story, because he was really a great man. And they were all so full of warmth and support for me that I don’t know that it would’ve made any difference. I think my parents were so—my mother particularly—so eager to have a child or children who would somehow become part of the America that she wanted to become part of, but felt herself somewhat estranged from. She was so passionately eager for that that I think I would’ve gotten that kind of nurturing along with a brother. CB: Was she born in this country? SG: No, she was born in Sicily. CB: And she came here when . . . ? SG: When she was around six or seven. And like many intellectuals of her generation—and she really was and is an intellectual—she started out with this kind of melting pot ideology, feeling ashamed and embarrassed by everything that was Italian, understanding the ways in which being Italian sort of blocked her and balked her in America. And she really did move away from the Italian enclave where her older siblings remained. But then later on in her life she got back into the meaning of her Italianness, sort of when the whole culture came full circle and we began to explore and analyze the meanings of ethnicity, to try to come to terms with the parts of the immigrant experience that had just been repressed or had been seen as shameful. Then my mother, too, became much more celebratory of her origins. CB: Did she go to college? SG: She went to normal school. She never did go to college. And she was a little bitter about that. In her case, in her family, the seven brothers got more education than the sisters. Her older sister got virtually no—I actually don’t know if my aunt went beyond high school. She was expected to stay home and be domestic and get married early. And my mother didn’t want to do that. My mother wanted to be a flapper, a new woman, an independent woman. But the most that she was able to do was to go to normal school, which as you know is a three-year teacher training college, and she became an elementary school teacher. And all the time the family was saying, ‘‘Why is she getting all this education? She’s a pretty girl. When is she going to get married?’’ And so on. But she went on as a teacher for years and years, taking all those in-service courses that teachers take. And I think my mother ended up with enough courses for three different PhDs.

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert 245 CB: So, really, she was a role model, too. Maybe that’s where you got some of your daring? SG: I think so. I mean, she always worked. My father also came from a traditional European family; his mother was Russian and his father was Nicoise. And my parents shared housework at a time when that very concept had not been invented. My father did the cooking. So I think that I did grow up with a sense that even though all around me I saw a world where that wasn’t happening, it could happen, you know, women could work. Actually, as a child I complained about that! I wanted a mother who stayed home and baked cookies—that was what you were supposed to have in the 1950s. You know, The Feminine Mystique. Everything seemed to be all wrong in my house! [laughs] CB: So your mother was unusual in her family. SG: She was seen as the rebellious youngest who had gone off and become much more American. I can’t think of anyone else in that generation who was in any way like her. There was one uncle who would have been, but he’s the uncle who ended up in a madhouse; under other circumstances I think he would’ve been like her, you know, the young Italian intellectuals. And even some of my older cousins, who are almost my mother’s age—which gives you an idea of how much younger my mother was than the rest of the family—even some of them were actually more traditional, more old country in their ways than my mother. CB: Well, it seems that there’s this ambivalence. I mean there’s the wonderful sense of the family, and everyone takes care of everyone else, and you have your relatives all around you. But for the person who doesn’t want that there’s that struggle. SG: Yes. I think it was a terrible struggle. And I think that for my mother it was very difficult. I think that my mother still is very divided in her sense of how you go on in the world. There are parts of her that are, inevitably, very Italian, and, and—how shall I put it?—that are family oriented and committed to a certain kind of silence, and not understanding some things about American culture, even though she inhabited it so deeply for most of her life. But then there are parts of her that are, in that context, rebelliously American. I sometimes have a metaphor for myself, where I say that my mother was on one side of a river as an immigrant, and she wanted to get across the river, but she could only get halfway across. And she had this child in her arms—me—and she threw the child to the other side of the river. It’s kind of sad, in certain ways; she’s always been sort of stuck between the old ways and the new.

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246 Christina Bevilacqua CB: Well, and for her it must have been so much harder; I mean, even to think of an immigrant man in that situation is different. She had the double bind, really; it’s the immigrant experience, but also, even if she were American, what were American women doing at that time? SG: That’s right. But, well, I think that she felt that American women were doing all kinds of wonderful, liberated things, and she wanted to do them, too. And if I think about the kind of work that Susan and I have been doing in No Man’s Land, I have to agree with that. I mean, my mother came of age in this generation of feminism and modernism, and even though she wasn’t a literary woman and was not particularly politically active, although she was very politically conscious, she was, in her way, a feminist modernist. And so she got a lot of strength from what was going on among American women; just things that . . . [laughs] we might now disapprove of, like women smoking on the street, meant a lot to her. You know, she wanted to be free. Women were entering the professions, and she couldn’t really imagine herself entering the professions, because she couldn’t have access to the education she needed. But just the fact that women were doing that meant that she could dream that for her daughter. So oddly enough, the situation of American women gave her a lot of inspiration. And she also was—she still is—very much not the baking cookies woman. I mean, my mother would have said what Hillary Clinton recently said; she would’ve said when I was a little girl that ‘‘I don’t want to stay home and pour tea and bake cookies.’’ CB: In the second volume of No Man’s Land, Sexchanges, you quote a character from a novel by Olive Schreiner, and the quote is: ‘‘To men the world says ‘work’; to women, ‘seem.’ ’’ And the descriptions that come across of the women in your family are not depictions of women who ‘‘seem’’: they come across as women who ‘‘are.’’ But I’m assuming that a lot of the poetry is autobiographical, and the depiction of the character that’s in the poetry, the descriptions of yourself, seem more hesitant and ambivalent. And I’m wondering if that has to do with the age that you were at that time? Is it generational? Is it the country that you grew up in as opposed to the one where they grew up? SG: I think that that’s growing up in American culture. As a kid, it’s true, I saw all these women who were essentially, although I didn’t know it, working-class women, to whom those definitions of a ‘‘lady’’ really didn’t apply. I mean, when Lyndall, in ‘‘The Story of an African Farm,’’ says, ‘‘To men the world says ‘work’; to women, ‘seem,’ ’’ she’s really talking about a certain social class, and my relatives were not a part of that social

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert 247 class. Yet, like most working-class people in America, they aspired to it. I had one cousin who was incredibly beautiful, and everyone sort of idolized her and idealized her beauty. Because after all, we were living in the America of Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe, and we would all say, ‘‘Oh, Virginia looks like somebody in Hollywood, and she should become a model.’’ And as a young girl I read things like Seventeen and Mademoiselle that were very conflicted in their messages to women. I mean, on the one hand they had contests for aspiring writers and, on the other hand, they were full of beautiful teenagers modeling bathing suits. CB: And it’s not much different now, right? SG: It’s not much different now. And you see that kind of conflict in someone like Sylvia Plath, who was a guest editor at Mademoiselle about four years before I was. Even just that Mademoiselle experience, just being in that office, with its absolutely conflicting tensions between, on the one hand, the fashion editors and, on the other hand, the literary editors, was really enough to drive anybody crazy. So I think that may be why I seem more ambivalent as a speaker than, say, my aunts would have been. I think my aunts were at some point content to get all their strength from the pots in which they made their wonderful marinara sauce. CB: The poetry especially is so physical, and so visual; so sensory, I guess. And it’s interesting because the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking about the whole notion of you telling, and there seems to be a sense . . . it’s very grounded, visceral. I mean, the reader physically feels the assertions that you make in the poetry. So I had this sense that this is an Italian-American woman telling what it is, and it’s very clear that you can prove anything that you say in the poetry. SG: Thank you! That’s a very complimentary and delightful way for you to put it. CB: Well, it’s funny, because the work that has to do with your Italian American identity seems most that way. And maybe it’s what we were talking about before, that the physical details were so important. Of course it brought back a lot of memories for me, too, the smell of the basil, the way the light was in the summer, and the things from the garden. . . . And you may not even agree with my assertion that the visceral quality is strongest in the Italian-American poems, but if you do agree with that, do you think that there’s something about the Italian identity that makes the physicality of the description appropriate? SG: Well, it’s hard for me to comment on that in the sense that I don’t know what it’s like to have another identity. I mean, I wouldn’t have an idea

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248 Christina Bevilacqua what it’s like to grow up in the Midwest in a family that would be very different. I probably have the same feelings about WASP families that somebody like Woody Allen has [laughs] . . . they’re fascinating, but utterly alien and strange to me. But yes, I think that Italian-American culture, with its emphasis on food, with the enormous communal kitchen where everybody sits around eating and shouting, drinking wine and looking out at the garden, is particularly sensory. There are such amazing ways that Italian Americans, in particular, seem to duplicate the old country; they seem to try to resurrect it. I’ve been in Italian homes in California or in other parts of the country that are just like my uncle’s: they have the grape arbor in the back, and have made all these efforts to reconstitute what I now know—I didn’t at the time, because I’d never been to Italy—but what I now know to be quintessentially Italian. And of course my mother had moved away, and we were living in this rather genteel, calm, neat, grey apartment in Queens, and I think that I was stunned by the differentness of these places in Williamsburg, particularly the house where my Aunt Frances lived and my mother had lived before she got married. It was so exuberant, so full of life. I mean, I was an only child living in a rather small apartment, a quiet, small apartment in Queens, and here, on the other hand, was this big family with three children and other cousins who came and went, and all kinds of noise and shouting and laughing and fighting. You know, it was one of those big kitchens where my aunt presided over the stove, and there was a huge long dining room table which was in the kitchen, where we ate. And you could look out the window at the garden—this was the upstairs kitchen—and there was a clothesline going out to the garden [laughs], and my aunt would sort of put the clothes on the line from the kitchen window while the sauce was bubbling on the stove, and the children and the relatives were all sitting around the table—it was very glamorous to me. And completely different from what ‘‘real life’’ was like. And I think that’s why it has so much detail. It was as if when you went into that house, or into that world, everything suddenly became Technicolor. CB: Like it’s in higher relief. SG: Right. CB: When is the next volume of No Man’s Land coming out? SG: Well, the next volume of No Man’s Land is due to be finished this summer, knock on wood. I hope we’ll get it done. And I’m also putting together a collection of more poems right now. CB: And what is in the next volume of No Man’s Land?

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Interview with Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert 249 SG: The next volume is again going to deal with feminism and modernism, but in greater detail with some of the major women modernists. So it begins with Virginia Woolf, and it goes on to essays, long chapters really, on Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, H.D., Zora Neale Hurston . . . And then there’s going to be a chapter on World War II and its effect on women. There’s a long chapter on Sylvia Plath and her contemporaries and descendents . . . So essentially it starts in the 1920s with Virginia Woolf and takes us up to the present and ends with the questions that the present pose. CB: And the poetry? SG: I don’t know, I can’t really talk about the poetry. I’m superstitious about saying my poetry’s about this or my poetry’s about that . . . CB: Well, I’m certainly looking forward to both. And I’ve really enjoyed the work, and—ambivalence aside—have really enjoyed being immersed in your sensibility and perspective. SG: Thank you. I’m glad you feel that way.

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Simona Griffo, Detective Hero A Series of ‘‘Troublems’’ blossom s. kirschenbaum 2000

Crime stories are easy money for professionals, says Ed McBain, chronicler of the 87th precinct: I always started a P.I. story with a blonde wearing a tight shiny dress. When she crossed her legs, you saw rib-topped silk stockings and garters taut against milky white flesh, boy. Usually, she wanted to find her missing husband or somebody. Usually, the P.I. fell in love with her by the end of the story, but he had to be careful because you couldn’t trust girls who crossed their legs to show their garters. A Private Eye was Superman wearing a fedora.1

The typical male P.I. (Private Investigator) searched for knowledge, whereas the typical femme fatale was associated with mystery, ‘‘one of the signs to be read.’’ These days, however, there is a reversal, for ‘‘enactment of . . . epistemological power is at the heart of the feminist crime novel.’’2 Not cherchez la femme, or cerca la donna, but la donna cercante! In some murder mysteries, the amateur sleuth created by Camilla T. Crespi is Simona Griffo. She wears no fedora, nor does she talk out of the corner of her mouth. She is a transplanted Italian employed by a small New York advertising agency. Volatile, voluble, energetic, determined, she is also vulnerable and sometimes scared. She loves to cook but worries about her weight. Her author calls her ‘‘a composite of me, my sister, and a few determined but befuddled women I have met in my life.’’3 From the first volume, Simona’s Italian identity is built up through her zest for good food, preference for espresso, intuitive bonding with other Italian characters, experience in dubbing films in Italy, reversion to Italian speech when upset (as when, after discovering that her studio apartment has been robbed and 250

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vandalized, she cries ‘‘Basta. Basta, basta, basta’’4), and especially through recollections of Rome—as when she sees a knife-sharpened little pencil and ‘‘remembered the Roman greengrocers, spare stubs safely secured behind their ears, adding up the bill on rough, wheat-yellow paper.’’5 She likes to sit from time to time on a bench in SoHo overhearing Italian conversation, not from a tourist in new Timberlands, but from ‘‘the old-timers who . . . came over fifty or sixty years ago to sew, to sell vegetables, to knead dough.’’6 Divorced from an unfaithful husband—she walked out on him without asking for anything—she doesn’t earn enough to live on from the job she likes and is too proud to ask for help from her parents. Gradually approaching age forty—her birthday is March 8, International Women’s Day—she is most unsatisfactorily single, and frank about her horniness. The ‘‘boyfriend’’ who works in homicide for the New York City Police, and whom she may someday marry, can be called on for consultation; but he hates her meddling with dead bodies, arguing that he sees enough murders for both of them. He has a teen-aged son by a previous marriage whom Simona Griffo must win over in the process of consolidating her romance. Each of the books featuring Simona Griffo bears a title that starts ‘‘The Trouble with . . .’’ and each book after the first ends with a recipe. Author Camilla Crespi, who did in fact work for an advertising agency, is candid about how the series began: She was angry with her boss and wanted to kill him. When she told him she had committed murder on paper and he was the corpse, his response was, ‘‘A lot of women have written about me’’—a response inspiring her to think about killing him again. In that first book, The Trouble with a Small Raise (1991), Simona Griffo arrives at work one Monday morning planning to ask for a long-deserved raise and finds her boss dead. Though preoccupied with a new perfumeadvertising campaign, she becomes the agency’s liaison with the police— and so meets Stan Greenhouse (who will become her lover) and his partner Rafael Garcia. When she becomes implicated in the murder, she sets out to clear herself and soon is torn between two men: In the space of a week, I’ve met one man whose twinkle makes me rush to the bathroom to dry off, and another, successful and rich, and all the things one should want out of life, who invites me to have lunch with his mother at the Colony Club. (158)

Manhattan background in The Trouble with a Small Raise is etched skillfully. One reviewer complained about far too many characters to keep up with, many of whom had French, Italian, or Spanish names, making for confusion

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when trying to figure out the culprit. Yet so many characters with diverse names is very New York and a forecast for other cities. Vulgarity in the glamour business also rings true. (On page 219 Evelyn tells her lover,’’You vain jerk, I’m not glum about you. I’m glum about the whole fucking situation’’; to which he replies ‘‘Sure you are, sweetlips.’’) Sociopolitical issues also surface. For instance, black Mattie works in the white world and supports an invalid husband, and one brother is on welfare and the other gets intermittent odd jobs. Her nephew, age sixteen, given a job in the mailroom, was caught with cocaine, summarily fired, and reported to the police, ‘‘a scared young black kid’’ (69); even though he is a first-time offender, Simona asks, ‘‘Do you know what chances he has now that he’s got drug pushing on his record?’’ (69). In another example, an advertisement for an ice cream parlor, in English and Spanish with the doctor’s name printed underneath and a nearby address, brings in the question of abortion—and violence from the right-to-lifers. A missing perfume bottle sets off discussions of industrial spying (202, 218). Other issues introduced passim include closeted homosexuality, and the relation between modeling and commodification of the body. Yet, said the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, ‘‘Nothing spoils the fun of this thoroughly engrossing whodunit introducing one of the boldest and most likable of female sleuths.’’7 In The Trouble with Moonlighting (1991),8 Simona uses her two-week vacation to serve as dialogue coach for an Italian film crew shooting New York locations. As Camilla Crespi acknowledges, fictional film director Sara Varni is modeled after Lina Wertmu¨ller and the male film star strongly resembles Marcello Mastroianni. She has worked with them ‘‘often,’’ she says. The aging male star nearly gets electrocuted in the Lincoln Center fountain. Again in this book Simona finds a body. An old friend of hers is accused of the murder. Before the true solution is found, the reader has seen both luxurious and heartbreaking aspects of New York. The Trouble with Too Much Sun (1992),9 set on Guadeloupe, at Club Med and the commercial center Pointe-a´-Pitre, features a nearby waterfall and a volcano. It evokes the lulling beauty and sudden horror of a Caribbean ‘‘island paradise.’’ Simona, in charge of a publicity shoot for a sun product line, discovers a body: ‘‘Her skull had been s[p]lit open like a coconut’’ (36). She stumbles on another corpse. The photographer is morose, the model has rocks thrown at her, and the hired guide turns out to be mixed up with gun runners and voodoo. The aerobic instructor inspires ‘‘impure thoughts’’ (14) but is not above suspicion, while an expatriate seeks the action of Vietnam days. Simona wants to help the commissioner. When he wonders why

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she chooses to get mixed up with violent death, she replies, ‘‘It comforts me to know that if I work hard enough, I can come up with solutions.’’ She needs sense and order to calm herself (54). When the commissioner asks, ‘‘Innocent until proven guilty? Is that not the American way?’’ Simona replies, ‘‘I’m Italian, and our way is ‘To trust is good, not to trust is better’ ’’ (147). Later, Commissioner Beaujoie says unsentimentally, ‘‘The Club may be a paradise on earth, but we cannot expect it to admit only saints’’ (180). Tropical sensuality is well rendered, as are the politics of sugar cane and rum. The character Papa ‘‘La Bouche’’ weaves together folktales and the history of the slaves. In an epilogue, Simona again cooks pasta, which Stan’s son calls ‘‘awesome.’’ He asks, ‘‘Will you make it again?’’ and she is gratified that he imagines her in his future (286). The Trouble with Thin Ice (1994),10 a hardcover after three paperbacks, is set in Connecticut during the winter holidays. It deals with issues of racism and family secrets, and with the delicate balance in relationships. Simona and Stan are on vacation and he has brought along his fourteen-year-old son. Willy stays with Simona while Stan is away. Questions of loyalty, deceit, and betrayal that come up for Willy’s school paper on Julius Caesar come up also in investigation of crime, especially after Simona uncovers a body in a half-frozen lake. Is it ethical to lie in order to obtain information? Simona will often ‘‘butt in, blurt, bluntly ask, instead of waiting for that sensitive moment when the truth is on the edge of a lip’’ (139); she questions her effectiveness. Teen-age culture comes into focus as, in an uneasy alliance, Simona and Willy probe the stories of two deaths and a lesbian liaison between two women whose marriages have failed. In this book, the main villain is the chief of police. Yet the plot emphasizes life that goes on. Both kinds of love win out, eros and agape, as Stan asks Simona by longdistance telephone to move in with him. Of course questions remain of how and whether love will endure, but the wedding celebration at the end seems meant as an inclusive umbrella for all the variations of committed love. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly commented: ‘‘Rich in atmosphere and buoyed by wry wit, Crespi’s briskly paced narrative calls for an encore.’’11 The Trouble with Going Home (1995),12 which followed, takes place in Rome. Simona Griffo expects the usual chaos during her family visit; but when she witnesses the murder of an American art student, her sojourn is off to an ominous start. The murder is more complicated than ‘‘a scippo gone wrong’’ (9). After her ex-husband of the ‘‘equal opportunity penis’’ (6) and even her mother come under suspicion, Simona sets about tracking clues.

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Risotto con carciofi and focaccia cannot fully soothe shattered nerves when close kin evade or even lie and there are implications of art theft, drugs, and blackmail. Suspense is both sustained and made pleasurable through use of local color. Examples include a typical Roman bar, ‘‘an L-shaped room with a rust-colored marble floor and glass-doored refrigerators tiered with icecream cakes’’ (29); a neighborhood near the Vatican called Delle Vittorie, unknown to tourists because it is largely residential and boring (there are no churches or antiquities but courtrooms instead and streets are named for World War I generals); Ponte Milvio, ‘‘the oldest bridge of Rome, where Constantine defeated the Emperor Maxentius . . . nicknamed Ponte Mollo, the soft bridge . . . because it had constantly needed repairs throughout the centuries’’ (86); and the small corner bakery at Campo dei Fiori that sells ‘‘the best white pizza the world can produce’’ (106). Vignettes are quite upto-date: ‘‘Stazione Termini was a party of Somalians. Bare-headed men in European clothes clustered with women in green, orange, yellow, red scarves and pleated headdresses, bolts of bright cloth wrapped around longboned bodies’’ (257). The city’s rhythms are rendered by an insider: Sunday is the sacred day, especially for Romans. The pealing bells of Rome’s more than eight hundred churches send the family—kids, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather—off, not to church, but to the countryside, north or south of the city, or to the sea. Their aim is to take a healthy walk. . . . Their aim is a table in a crowded trattoria with dogs and cats and children running round while everyone overdoses on homemade fettuccine, roast chicken, pork cutlets, baby lamb, all washed down by liters of wine and mineral water. Then a snooze in the car or under the shade of the tree as a radio announcer screams out the fate of a soccer ball and little girls huff with boredom and little boys dream of someday being the soccer stadium star. (82)

Characters are described succinctly and vividly, Prince Maffeo for example: ‘‘Tall and bony, with gray hair still streaked and blond grazing the back of his collar, a long chin, the white skin of an indoor man, and melancholy, shortsighted brown eyes. A little like Vela´zquez’s King Philip IV, sans goatee and mustache. In Italy it’s easy to see everything in terms of art’’ (64). It is this prince who will later say, ‘‘Secrets are the cement that holds up palazzos’’ (185). The last line of the book, quoting Mark Twain, is appropriate to repeat here: ‘‘The surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop.’’ The Trouble with a Bad Fit (1996), a fast-paced fashion mystery, reveals the production as well as the show. It is set in the garment district— emblematized by ‘‘the larger-than-life bronze statue commemorating the

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linchpin of the garment center—the worker, yarmulke on his head, stooped over his sewing machine. Where was woman and her sewing machine?’’ (43). The clothes factory is an update, ‘‘a room fifty feet long, has four rows of sewing machines each operated by a Chinese woman; the owner is a Chinese man’’ (162). This is no sweatshop, he points out, since it is airconditioned; but later Simona learns the reason for the air-conditioning: ‘‘Hsu’s girls handle silk. Sweat stains silk.’’ Designer Roberta Riddle remarks, ‘‘In fashion, there is not truth. Only entertainment’’ (170). Her employee Jerry knows the score when he says of her, ‘‘She’s an artist. And she’s a salesman. She’s been selling Roberta Riddle all her life, know what I mean? . . . Dress for what you wanna be, not what you are, that’s the shit we sell.’’ As the critic for the New York Times Book Review put it: Everyone has something to conceal. The dress designer Roberta Riddle tries to hide her varicose veins, her failing talents and a dark secret about her husband. The strutting assistant designer Charlie Angelo queens it over Roberta as he searches adoption societies for his roots. A seamstress protects her son’s petty pilfering of designs, as Roberta shrouds her Riddle Nothing creations from copyists and shrugs off the dead rat left on her desk by someone who wants her out of business.

The reviewer concludes, ‘‘Ms. Crespi has an eye for fashion detail that gives the novel a cutting edge.’’13 Along with solving the murder of an aging model named Phyllis and other related mysteries, there is a running theme of two mature adults working out their relationship and deciding to cohabit. The lover’s son by age fifteen can deal with the affair; he says, ‘‘You know, the bed stuff. That’s no big deal with you guys. Not at your age’’ (251). At the same time it is clear that Simona has several men in her life: lover, business partner, good friend. She does not expect to be ‘‘fulfilled’’ solely through marriage. In The Trouble with a Hot Summer (1997),14 the scene is East Hampton in August, Sag Harbor, and the Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner general arts milieu of Springs, on Long Island. The tourist scene is deftly sketched: ‘‘I pushed myself down the wharf between ice cream-eating families decked in various degrees of sunburn’’ (182). So is historical background, as when the author has Captain Comelli say, ‘‘Back in the late 1830s, used to be the third-largest whaling port in the world. . . . Ten years later the whole industry went to the dogs. Whales got too hard to find and the California Gold Rush sounded a whole lot more appealing than ending up like Captain Ahab. Then petroleum came in and whale fat was out.’’ Simona’s Russian

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driver-turned-bodyguard from the previous book is now her partner; he interjects Russian jokes and maxims, for instance: ‘‘Russian maxim say who gets there first does not wait in line’’ (224). About two-fifths through the book, they are questioning a young woman named Laurie about the death of her father, who may have been murdered. She reports the end of a telephone conversation in which her father said, ‘‘You’ve got until Sunday!’’ and then, in a hurt voice, ‘‘I trusted you’’ (139). ‘‘A friend!’’ Dmitri whispered, eyes wide. The author has Simona reflect: ‘‘Betrayal fascinates him. He is incapable of it.’’ The question of trust comes up with regard to Simona’s relationship with Stan as well as in her investigation of two murders. Is she attracted to someone else? or does she love Stan less? As for the murders, maybe one was and the other wasn’t: ‘‘Laurie had lied. Rebecca was keeping secrets. A thief was looking for something he might or might not have found. An arsonist had halfburned Bud’s house. Because he couldn’t find what he wanted? Out of revenge? To destroy evidence?’’ Finally: ‘‘The solution to Bud and Polly’s murder had come down to a matter of trust’’ (340). It is interesting to note that the last of the book’s acknowledgments is ‘‘To Stuart, my love and trust.’’ Stuart Greenspon is Camilla Crespi’s husband. As she told me in an interview on 29 June 1998 over breakfast at Citicorp on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, Camilla Crespi was born in 1942 in Prague; her siblings in Panama. Her American mother had married an Italian civil engineer. He had been building bridges in Colombia and later went to Panama, where she happened to be residing because her father, an earnose-and-throat specialist, was working there. The Italian husband had great charm. With his wife’s encouragement he studied for two years, then entered the diplomatic corps. He was stationed first in Los Angeles, then in Prague (about 1939); the Italian government at that time was Fascist. His wife accompanied him to Europe as an American. After Pearl Harbor, however, the junior diplomat became the ‘‘enemy’’; hence they stayed on in Prague, but Camilla has not gone back there since babyhood. Her mother still lives in Italy; Camilla visited during the summer of 1998 to celebrate her mother’s ninetieth birthday. She is nonchalant about her murder mysteries; they were practice in craft but she has an MFA from Columbia University and, as she told me in San Francisco in November 1999, she has just completed a ‘‘serious book.’’ Yet when asked about future murder mysteries, she lights up: ‘‘I’d love to kill someone at Bellagio.’’ ‘‘Traditionally associated with conservative, occasionally downright sexist gender views and only marginal female characters, the crime novel is now

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redirected to represent a feminist ideology and reconceived with a woman hero at its centre.’’ So says Sabine Vanacker in her essay on three such women heroes.15 One of them, Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, pathologist and coroner, star of nine bestsellers since 1990, is internationally famous, and popular in Italy. There were women detectives earlier: Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple appeared in Murder at the Vicarage way back in 1930. But she was a spinster lady with plenty of time on her hands. Women detectives now are quite different. Sandra Scoppettone’s Lauren Laurano is ‘‘a feisty Manhattan lesbian who packs a Smith & Wesson Chief ’s Special with a four-inch barrel in her bag and a .25 automatic in an ankle holster. She has street smarts about almost every character and corner in Greenwich Village, and she’s a straight shooter too.’’16 She and her author were commended in Italy’s La Stampa: Lorenzo Soria wrote, ‘‘The Italian American Sandra Scoppettone has landed in Italy with the book Everything You Have is Mine, whose main character, the detective Lauren Laurano, declares from the very first page that she is a lesbian.’’17 Gender views according to which ‘‘a detective ought to have a woman in his arms, a whisky on the table, and a pistol in his hand’’ are evolving new traditions.18 The specifically feminist detective novel, a subgenre that has been spectacularly on the rise since the late 1970s, becomes the subject of entire volumes of commentary. In Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, Priscilla I. Walton and Manina Jones study what fueled this popularity and analyze representative texts.19 Women detectives manifest qualities seen as empowering and liberating for women, traits like self-determination and independence. They may be as assertive, tough-talking, and persistent as males, for they have no need to be liked. At the same time they can reject a macho stance of courting excessive danger and violence. And they reexamine what constitutes information, how it is gathered, and in what ways it can be useful. As Maureen Reddy puts it, the detective ‘‘takes the signs presented (clues) and, eventually, turns them into a coherent narrative, making the text of the crime whole again and the actual text whole and fully legible for the first time.’’ Thus ‘‘enactment of . . . epistemological power is at the heart of the feminist crime novel.’’20 In the broadest sense, Ed McBain suggests (B3), crime fiction would include Hamlet and Macbeth. In mysteries, the detective tries to discover ‘‘who committed a crime or, . . . why the crime was committed’’; but as it becomes ‘‘more and more difficult for detective story writers to find new motives, or new clues, with which to fool readers,’’ more crime fiction comes to be ‘‘largely told from the point of view of the criminal.’’21 Sue Grafton,

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creator of Kinsey Millhone in a series that began A Is for Alibi and goes down through the alphabet, explains in her ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Best American Mystery Stories 1998, ‘‘Almost without exception crime here is the metaphor for human beings in distress, and violence, whether actual or implied, provides the compression chamber for the resolution of interpersonal hostilities’’ (xii). If ‘‘crime is the battering ram that breaches our defenses, forcing us to acknowledge how vulnerable we are’’ (xiii), then ‘‘crime fiction is the periscope that permits us to peer over the wall without having to deal directly with the horror beyond’’ (xiii). ‘‘We can safely condemn offenses we might (with sufficient temptation or provocation) be capable of committing ourselves’’ (xiv). For Simona Griffo, freelancing amateur beset by ‘‘troublems,’’ to probe criminal acts and intents is not only a matter of answering questions and abetting justice (or at least avoiding injustice). It is also a process of understanding herself and the evolving cultures she inhabits. Notes A shorter version of this paper was given at the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association in San Francisco, 13 November 1999. The word ‘‘troublems,’’ fusing ‘‘troubles’’ and ‘‘problems,’’ was coined by Slovak mathematician, dramatist, and fiction writer Andrej Ferko. It is used here to call attention to the emotional components of the protagonist’s intellectual problems. 1. Ed McBain, ‘‘She Was Blond. She Was in Trouble. And She Paid 3 Cents A Word,’’ New York Times, 29 March 1999, B1. 2. Maureen T. Reddy, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Continuum, 1988), 10; quoted by Sabine Vanacker, ‘‘V. I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero,’’ in Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel, ed. Peter Messent (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 62–86:78–79. 3. ‘‘The Birth of Simona Griffo’’ is on the author’s Web site, http:// camillatrinchieri.com. In an e-mail to me of 23 December 1999 the author comments, ‘‘Ed McBain is a wonderful writer and yes he was helpful. When I started writing Small Raise, I realized I knew nothing about the homicide police and so I read several of his books to get the feel of these people. He’s very good on character. Otherwise I am not interested in police procedurals. The how to bores me. I’m interested in the whys, character, the psychology. Why I enjoy writing amateur sleuths is the sense of empowerment it gives me and Simona. Here’s a perfectly ordinary citizen who is able to set things straight on her own, without waiting for the vested authority to do so. I think it’s very Italian too. We’ve always been suspicious of authority and trust our own instinct more, not always a good solution. But in books we can give it the ending we want. How good that feels!’’

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Simona Griffo, Detective Hero: A Series of ‘‘Troublems’’ 259 4. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with a Small Raise (New York: Zebra, 1991), 16. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with a Bad Fit (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1996), 173. 7. Publishers Weekly, 14 December 1990, 64. 8. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with Moonlighting (New York: Zebra, 1991). 9. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with Too Much Sun (New York: Zebra, 1992). 10. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with Thin Ice (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1993). 11. Publishers Weekly, 6 December 1998, 59. 12. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with Going Home (New York: HarperCollins Paperbacks, 1995). 13. Suzy Menkes, ‘‘Ready to Read: Novels about the World of High Fashion from Judith Krantz and Camilla T. Crespi,’’ New York Times Book Review, 21 April 1996, 25. 14. Camilla Crespi, The Trouble with a Hot Summer (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1997). 15. ‘‘V. I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta: Creating a Feminist Detective Hero,’’ in Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel, ed. Peter Messent (London/Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997), 62–86:62. 16. Herbert Mitgang, ‘‘Feminist Detectives, One Familiar One New’’ (review of ‘‘H’’ Is for Homicide by Sue Grafton and Everything You Have Is Mine by Sandra Scoppettone), New York Times, 8 May 1991. 17. ‘‘E Sandra Scopettone [sic], italoamericana, e` addirittura sbarcata in Italia da e/o con Tutto quel che e` tuo e` mio la cui protagonista, la detective, Lauren Laurano, dichiara sin dalla prima pagina di essere lesbica.’’ Lorenzo Soria, ‘‘Gay in giallo, da assassini a detective,’’ La Stampa, 15 September 1998, received via Internet. 18. ‘‘Un detective doveva avere una donna a braccio, un whisky al tavolo e la pistola in mano.’’ Ibid. 19. Priscilla I. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 20. Maureen T. Reddy, Sisters in Crime, 10; quoted by Vanacker, 78, 79. In changing the genre, says Reddy (11), women ‘‘implicitly question and undermine, received wisdom about gender-specific character traits and abilities.’’ See also Kathleen Gregory Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 21. Sue Grafton, ed., ‘‘Foreword,’’ The Best American Mystery Stories 1998, series ed. Otto Penzler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988).

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Writing Life, Writing History Italian-American Women and the Memoir edvige giunta 2000

These flowers said that remembering required effort and attention, because the pinpricks of our existence were so tiny and precious they could easily be erased by a passing wind. mary cappello, Night Bloom Memory has purpose. It is a bridge between the subjective and the intersubjective—the private and unprivileged circumstances of individual lives—and the objective—the collective history of class oppression. janet zandy, Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness

In the 1990s, the memoir became a prominent and controversial genre on the North American literary scene and, in spite of the attacks of its many detractors, established itself as the genre of the turn of the century. Whether due to its concern with the functions and scopes of memory in constructing a story of the self, its postmodern questioning of the validity of traditional historical narratives, or its connection with the emergence of writers from previously silenced groups—including women—for which it has served as a powerful vehicle of expression, the genre that Tristine Rainer calls ‘‘the new autobiography’’ is positioned to occupy a legitimate and lasting place in the literary canon. Appropriating memory is a crucial step for all those groups that have been marginalized and denied access to public forums because of their gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, sexuality, or class. Challenging conceptions of the life of the individual as an isolated entity, the 260

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memoir provides a forum for accounts of untold histories of disenfranchised cultures and communities. As members of a group that has acquired greater cultural visibility and power in the last decade of the twentieth century, Italian-American women have demonstrated a keen interest in the memoir. Autobiographical fiction and poetry, personal essays, documentaries, and book-length memoirs indicate that, like other members of minority groups, these writers are intent on creating personal narratives that explore and question the relationship between individual and community. Yet in becoming spokespersons for their communities, Italian-American women embrace a position fraught with contradictions. These works not only recollect, celebrate, and record Italian-American histories but also expose that which family and community would often rather leave unspoken. Examples include memoirs such as Mary Cappello’s Night Bloom and Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo; memoiristic documentaries, such as Kym Ragusa’s fuori/ outside and Susan Caperna Lloyd’s The Baggage; and autobiographical fiction and poetry like Mary Saracino’s No Matter What and Finding Grace and Rosette Capotorto’s Bronx Italian. Even as they speak on behalf of their communities, these authors do so not in a blindly celebratory manner, but in a complicated mingling of critique and tribute. The family home thus at times appears as the setting for unspeakable violence, as in Nancy Caronia’s ‘‘Go to Hell’’ or, in less brutal though no less insidious ways, in Mary Saracino’s autobiographical novel No Matter What. A self-awareness of the ways in which women have been denied use of their voices underlies the memoirs of Italian-American women. What underscores this vast project of ethnic recovery is a political, feminist consciousness and an insistence on the transformative and redemptive power of writing. Writing of her difficult relationship with her mentally ill mother, Louise DeSalvo comes to this conclusion: ‘‘By writing about her, I have begun to know her, and to love her, as I could not when she was alive. What I have learnt alters my memories of her, transforms them, transforms her. But it changes my past, and it changes me, as well’’ (Vertigo, 262). DeSalvo articulates the position of a group of writers who have found in the memoir a vehicle for cultural recovery and transformation as well as the means by which to reread and rewrite their cultural history and to reposition themselves in relationship to that history.

 From Sister Blandina Segale’s At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, published in 1932 and currently out of print,1 to Rosa, a transcription of the life of the

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first-generation illiterate immigrant Rosa Cavalleri narrated to Marie Hall Ets, published in 1970, the autobiographies of early Italian-American women writers offer an important record of immigrant life from a female perspective and demonstrate an understanding of the function of personal and cultural memory. Rosa, in particular, raises issues of authorial mediation, oral narrative, translation, and compels the reader to reflect on how such issues relate to class identity and to the formation of an autochthonous Italian-American literature. Starting in the late 1970s, Italian-American women have become more actively present on the literary scene, even in the face of tremendous difficulties posed by publishers and readers often indifferent, or even hostile, to those Italian-American authors who write outside the bounds of accepted, stereotypical narratives. In fiction and essays she published starting in 1979, Helen Barolini has been constructing what Fred Gardaphe calls an ‘‘autobiography as a piecework.’’ The fragmentary nature of her autobiographical project, as well as her struggles in the publishing world (until the late 1990s, virtually every one of her books was out of print or unpublished), bespeak the contextual difficulties faced by Italian-American women writers. Barolini’s Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity articulates such contextual difficulties by examining a range of intersecting cultural and biographical circumstances. Sandra Mortola Gilbert’s Wrongful Death (1994), though not directly concerned with issues of Italian-American identity, interweaves, much like Louise DeSalvo’s Breathless: An Asthma Journal (1997), intimate, personal narrative and memories with a discussion of public health issues. Both these memoirs establish the role that Italian-American writers have been embracing as public intellectuals.2 Through memoirs that politicize ethnicity, Italian-American women authors have been shaping a cultural movement that seeks to understand the place of Italian Americans in a multicultural context. These authors are concerned with understanding and responding to the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality intersect in American society. Italian-American women authors question the nostalgia and allegiance to the family and the ethnic enclave that often characterize ItalianAmerican literature, and have begun to write with unflinching honesty of the contradictions of a culture in which love and violence, allegiance and exclusion, go hand in hand, especially when it comes to women.

 Working-class and academic, Italian-American and intellectual: these seemingly contradictory terms underlie Louise DeSalvo’s Vertigo (1996) and Mary

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Cappello’s Night Bloom (1998), two memoirs that boldly defy conventional views of Italian-American womanhood. Writers such as DeSalvo and Cappello, but also Mary Saracino and Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and filmmakers such as Kym Ragusa, Susan Caperna Lloyd, and Mariarosy Calleri, recount the life stories of Italian-American families by placing their works in the context of working-class history, a history they do not mythologize or represent nostalgically. Indeed, some of the most compelling contemporary memoirs by writers of all ethnic background are those shaped by what Janet Zandy refers to as ‘‘working-class consciousness’’ (2). The memoir thus contributes to the development and recognition of working-class literature as a neglected but vital component of U.S. literature. In the late 1970s, Louise DeSalvo wrote, at the request of Sarah Ruddick, an autobiographical essay entitled ‘‘Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar,’’ which was first published in Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women (1984), and later reprinted in Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book. This was her first attempt at memoir-writing. At this point, DeSalvo had not clearly conceptualized a politicized Italian-American identity, though this essay provided cultural validation for many Italian-American women who saw it as voicing key contradictions and struggles faced by Italian-American women. These readers welcomed DeSalvo’s defiant embracing of the shameful term puttana (whore). In Vertigo, the memoir she wrote in the early 1990s at the encouragement of Dutton editor Rosemary Ahearn, DeSalvo views the ItalianAmerican literary tradition as worthy and legitimate, and identifies her work, with greater political awareness, as Italian American: a newly acquired sense of ethnic and class identity shapes the narrative of Vertigo. DeSalvo recalls: In the intervening years [between the puttana piece and Vertigo], I read hundreds of works by women, African American, Latina, Native American, etc., who all situated themselves in the context of a particular culture. This alerted me to the fact that there was something I had not dealt with.3

Indeed, there was much for DeSalvo to deal with. Family history, class and ethnic identity, mental illness, physical and sexual abuse, Catholicism, writing and healing—these are some of the issues DeSalvo tackles in her memoir. She writes of using ‘‘the scalpel of language’’ (102); hers is a project of excavation, recovery, and salvation: ‘‘My work has changed my life. My work has saved my life. My life has changed my work’’ (12). Vertigo makes

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a compelling argument for—and provides a powerful example of—the potential for personal and political transformation that memoir affords its writers and readers.4 Mary Cappello’s Night Bloom also unequivocally affirms its radical intent. This familial memoir examines the family as the site of violence and the source of poetry. Cappello finds it necessary to escape the family in more ways than one; she has to reframe her understanding of the category itself: ‘‘The family, as most gay people know,’’ she writes in an early version of Night Bloom, ‘‘can never be confined to the people you shared the house with for twenty years, gay people having always to create community outside the domesticating bloodline in order to survive.’’ Being a reader of the family places one, as Cappello well understands, in a vulnerable, dangerous position. If one is a reader, she discovers, one must become a writer. The garden, another Italian-American trope, is in turn associated with her father’s violence, her mother’s agoraphobia, her maternal grandfather’s poetical and nurturing powers, and Cappello’s own familial, cultural, and poetical identity. The garden frames and even generates the memoir’s narrative. Cappello’s unconventional sources include, in addition to her maternal grandfather’s journals, gardening books: the names and lives of flowers and plants overlap with familial and personal histories she is both uncovering and reinventing. The workings of memory and gardening thus become entwined in poetical images, such as that of the night-bloom-itself. Cappello’s memoir is simultaneously a theoretical reflection that contextualizes the stories the author tells in terms of social history and a poetical meditation that reconsiders personal and cultural past through the garden. Night Bloom links together individual, family, and community; past and present; class, ethnicity, Catholicism, and sexuality; Sicilian, Neapolitan, Italian, and American; and all of these are interconnected in a sophisticated and delicately nuanced narrative that reveals a self-conscious understanding of the power of memory: ‘‘Maybe none of us has ‘our own’ memory, but each of us inherits the memories of our ancestors, while what distinguishes us is our interpretation of those pasts’’ (118). This emphasis on the collective quality of memory distinguishes the memoirs of Italian-American women writers, making them akin to those of African-American women. Both Cappello and DeSalvo bring into focus a key function of the memoir: to revisit, to retell, to reframe not the true story, but a multifold, provisional account of the truth these particular authors have uncovered, a truth that is both documentary and interpretive, inherited and invented.



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The anger, violence, and sorrow articulated in many of these memoirs— combined with a visceral attachment to their authors’ families and cultures—offer different versions of the Italian-American immigrant plot. Difficult questions lie at the core of memoir—writing: secrecy, allegiance, betrayal, truth, celebration, and biting attack. Memoir, which involves a self-conscious awareness of how one uses memory and of the radical potential of the uses of memory, necessitates a continuous reimagining and reinventing of the past. For Italian-American women authors who are still struggling to come into their own, both inside and outside their culture, this is a daring act. While Italian-American women authors have been producing works of significance and paving the way for the memoir for decades now,5 the most recent developments in the genre suggest that new sites have been uncovered and a new kind of digging needs to be done. Archival work, for example, might uncover early autobiographical and memoiristic work produced by Italian-American women. This kind of archeological work would prove vital in sustaining and fostering the development of a tradition that is taking roots against all odds. Much like the memoir, poised between present and past, the Italian-American female literary tradition lies at a crossroads of past and present: the strength of the contemporary production can act as a propelling force to begin the much-needed exploration of our literary and historical pasts.

Postscript (2010) A decade after the writing of this essay in 1999 and its publication in 2000, there have been dramatic developments both in Italian-American literature and the memoir. Italian-American writers have been receiving greater recognition in the worlds of publishing and academia. The same can be said of the memoir. Many more memoirs have been published by the authors mentioned in this essay (DeSalvo, Cappello, Ragusa, Mazziotti Gillan, Saracino) as well as by established and emerging Italian-American women authors. Indeed, several of the works mentioned in this essay were still in progress at the time of this writing and even had different titles (appropriate corrections have been made). In addition, several scholars both in the U.S. and Italy have written extensively on this genre. A full consideration of the importance of the memoirs published in the last decade by Italian-American women both in terms of the genre of the memoir and Italian-American literature and the critical work they have generated is not the scope of this

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essay, which deals with an early exploration of the memoir by Italian-American women and recognition of the crucial importance of this then-emerging genre. Notes 1. An excerpt from the book, which comprises journal entries written during her stay in Colorado, was reprinted in Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book. 2. Gilbert’s poetry, which more explicitly relies on memory to trace the story of the author’s Italian-American self, also accomplishes an important work of cultural recovery, especially in its concern with the history of women and ItalianAmerican material culture. 3. Telephone conversation with Louise DeSalvo, November 1999. 4. DeSalvo’s recent book Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives further explores the uses of writing uncovered by the author through her writing and teaching memoir. 5. A number of Italian-American women have engaged with the genre of the memoir in other ways, by writing autobiographical essays, fiction, and poetry in which they rely on the act of remembering, of evoking past experiences through the creative workings of memory: Tina De Rosa’s autobiographical novel, Paper Fish, as well as her essays published in the 1980s; and Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, especially her chapbook Taking Back My Name (1991) and her book Where I Come From (1994), exemplify the kind of work Italian-American women do when they tackle the territory of memory: it is a work of meticulous piecing together of the cultural past of working-class people. Rose Romano’s books of poems, Vendetta and The Wop Factor, published in the 1990s, flaunt an autobiographical, memorycentered concern.

Works Cited Barolini, Helen. Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999, orig. 1997. ———. The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000, orig. 1985. Calleri, Mariarosy. Hidden Island/L’isola sommersa. Video. 1998. Caperna Lloyd, Susan. The Baggage. Video. 2001. Capotorto, Rosette. Bronx Italian. Hoboken, N.J.: Pronto Press, 2002. Cappello, Mary. Night Bloom. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Caronia, Nancy. ‘‘Go to Hell.’’ The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2002. De Rosa, Tina. Paper Fish. Afterword by Edvige Giunta. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996, orig. 1980. DeSalvo, Louise. Breathless: An Asthma Journal. Boston; Beacon, 1997.

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Writing Life, Writing History 267 ———. ‘‘A Portrait of the Puttana as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.’’ In Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write about Their Work on Women, edited by Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo, and Sara Ruddick, 35–53. Boston: Beacon, 1984. ———. Vertigo. New York: Dutton, 1996. ———. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1998. Ets, Marie Hall. Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant. Foreword by Rudolph J. Vecoli. Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1970. Reprinted in 1999 with an introductory note by Helen Barolini. Gardaphe´, Fred L. ‘‘Autobiography as Piecework: The Writings of Helen Barolini.’’ In Italian Americans Celebrate Life, the Arts and Popular Culture, edited by Paola A. Sensi Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 19–27. Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association, 1990. Gilbert, Sandra M. Wrongful Death. New York: Norton, 1994. Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. Taking Back My Name. Franklin Lakes, N.J.: Lincoln Springs, 1991. ———. Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems. Toronto: Guernica, 1995. Ragusa, Kym. fuori/outside. Video. Ibla Productions, 1997. Rainer, Tristine. Your Life as a Story: Writing the New Autobiography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997. Saracino, Mary. No Matter What. Minneapolis: Spinster Ink, 1993. ———. Finding Grace. Duluth, Minn.: Spinster’s Ink, 1999. Segale, Blandina. At the End of the Santa Fe Trail. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999, orig. 1932. Zandy, Janet, ed. Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

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Art, Music, and Film

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Concetta Scaravaglione, Italian-American Sculptor carol scarvalone kushner 1993

Concetta Scaravaglione (1900–1975), whose career spanned over five decades, was a critically acclaimed American sculptor. She established herself as a major player in the art world early in her career and counted among her admirers and supporters some of the most influential fellow artists, art critics, museum directors, and curators of her time. Among the awards and grants she received were major commissions from the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix de Rome award from the American Academy, the first such award to be given to a woman. Today, although there is renewed interest in women’s contributions to American art, there is a dearth of knowledge about all but the most acclaimed artists. Yet, as Karal Marling and Helen Harrison explain in the catalog for an exhibition of work done by women artists (including Scaravaglione) in the 1930s, ‘‘The presence of women in positions of leadership at all points in this rich panorama of artistic activity confirms their centrality.’’1 As the child of Italian immigrants who had left Calabria for New York City, Scaravaglione was very much influenced by the values of her parents. As she wrote in an autobiographical essay first published in August 1939 in Magazine of Art, ‘‘My family brought to America what so many Italian families have brought from out-of-the-way villages to crowded sidewalks: courage, knowledge of hard labor, and capacity to work.’’2 Concetta Scaravaglione was the youngest of nine children. Her father died when she was very young, leaving her mother, Rosa, with a small grocery store to manage, which she did with the help of the older children. Scaravaglione’s first exposure to drawing and sculpting came from New York public school art classes. Recognizing her abilities, teachers recommended that she pursue formal art training. Her older brothers and mother 271

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objected. They wanted her to learn stenography, but, as the youngest child, Scaravaglione’s wishes were indulged. In her teens, she studied with Frederick Roth at the National Academy, a tuition-free art school in New York City. There were no co-ed classes and the Academy could not afford to offer a sculpture class to a solitary female student. So when the National Academy canceled her class, Scaravaglione decided to continue at the Art Students League. Unable to afford the tuition, she worked first at a perfume factory and then at a lampshade factory. A letter she wrote to the League at that time said, ‘‘Conditions make it impossible for me to pay. Having no father, my brothers are the only support, and this makes it difficult to send me to the League.’’3 She was soon awarded scholarship help and studied for the next four years at the League. For a young woman who came from a closely knit East Harlem ItalianAmerican neighborhood and an equally close family, the days at the League were a heady adventure. Yet she could not completely integrate her passion for art and her family. She shared an apartment with her mother and her unmarried brothers, with two other brothers and their families living in the same building. The expectations of an unmarried daughter were clear. She was supposed to help out when her brothers’ families needed her and never neglect her family responsibilities in favor of her art. In a letter written to a friend in the summer of 1919, Scaravaglione complained about the drudgery of keeping house for her brothers and said she could not wait for art school to begin.4 At the League, where she met students who shared her passion for art—women and men from all backgrounds—she felt comfortable. She studied drawing with John Sloan and Boardman Robinson, and sculpture with Stirling Calder and William Zorach. Almost immediately her work was singled out as being among the best in the school. In 1924, Scaravaglione received the Nicholas Roerich Scholarship to study at the Masters Institute of Sculpture with Robert Laurent. She spent several summers in Maine working with the master sculptor. Spending long periods away from her family and their traditional values posed a conflict for her family and, to some degree, for Scaravaglione herself. In July 1925, Rosa Scaravaglione wrote her daughter in Ogunquit, Maine, where she was staying with Laurent and Marguerite and William Zorach: You are missed very much at home. Although you were never home at day time, but at least we use [sic] to see you at night, we still have the habit at night before we close the doors that you are coming home from school.

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Her mother added in the same letter that while the day her daughter left was like a funeral, she wished her daughter to take care of herself and ‘‘see that you are always with a lady companion.’’5 Scaravaglione was on her own, young and unmarried, living the life of a 1920s bohemian artist and exploring relationships with others and her own relationship to art. Despite her deep affection for her mother, she realized she could never go back to living with her family. In turn, her family began to accept how much she valued her career. That same summer Rosa put a note inside a package of coffee, Italian biscuits, cake, and melons that she sent to her daughter in Maine. Rosa wrote, ‘‘As you said in your letter that you would come home if I wanted you, being that I am left alone—that I would never wish.’’6 During the early 1920s, Scaravaglione had a love affair with a fellow art student that ended badly. The disruption it caused to her art helped shape her lifelong conviction: she would never marry. Later, in the mid-1920s, she became romantically involved with sculptor Reuben Nakian but refused to marry him, believing the union would place her career secondary to his. Frequently described as a passionate woman, Scaravaglione embraced several long-term romantic affairs during her life. However, her career always came first. In 1926, Scaravaglione was elected to membership in the New York Society of Women Artists, a group of thirty painters and sculptors. Her wood sculpture The Bathers, exhibited that year at the society’s group show, was singled out for praise. A newspaper review described the work as an expression of the ‘‘exaltation of the natural woman, as though the woman artist, freed from the medieval ascetic conception of feminine charms as an agent of Satan, at last exults in her own beauty and seductive power.’’7 By this time in her career, Scaravaglione lived on her own. She moved from East 14th to East 15th Street and later to a series of Greenwich Village studios on West 16th and West 10th streets. Here, she lived and worked in the company of other artists and free from family interruptions and obligations. In 1928 Scaravaglione received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and spent the summer working in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The stay proved to be frustrating. She was unhappy with her work, her fellow artists, her teachers, and the confines of the Tiffany estate. She longed to be back in her Greenwich Village studio and with Nakian. In a letter to Nakian dated June 18, 1928, she wrote, It has been very pleasant here so far, only at times I would like to pack up and leave. I feel I’m being watched or some kind of stiffness around me.8

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After she returned to New York City that fall, Scaravaglione quickly ascended the art world ladder. Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Studio—later to become the Whitney Museum—expressed interest in her sculpture. The Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art invited her to exhibit her work. Scaravaglione exhibited and sold a few of her wood carvings, which enabled her to pay her rent. Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, wrote Scaravaglione to thank her for her loan of three sculptures for the museum’s 1930 exhibition, ‘‘46 Painters and Sculptors under 35 Years of Age.’’ Barr felt her portrait of the painter Canade was ‘‘one of the most distinguished portrait heads in the exhibition, holding its own easily with those of Cash and Noguchi.’’9 During this phase of her career, Scaravaglione taught sculpture at New York University and also tutored private students. Her work evolved from the small wood and stone carvings she had been creating since her early days in art school to more monumental nudes. The first—and now lost—of her large plaster standing nudes was exhibited at the 1933 Fairmount Park Art Association show in Pennsylvania. The show was held outdoors. An unexpected storm totally destroyed the original and only plaster cast sculpture. Yet the attention and recognition the nude received helped pave the way for Scaravaglione’s future commissions. A 1933 review in the New York Times praised her work. The reviewer wrote that Scaravaglione ‘‘helps to prove the fallacy that sculpture is essentially a masculine province. . . . Her very absence of sought-after style or manner results in a distinct quality of personality.’’10 In 1935, Scaravaglione was awarded the Widener Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1934, when Scaravaglione’s Mother and Child was exhibited at the Mayor LaGuardia–sponsored First Municipal Art Exhibition in Rockefeller Center, Holger Cahill was Director of Exhibitions. Cahill, later to become National Director of the Federal Art Project, was very impressed by the young sculptor’s work. In a review article that appeared in Art in America in Modern Times, Cahill wrote, ‘‘Perhaps the most promising of the younger women sculptors is Concetta Scaravaglione, whose work has largeness of scale and a feeling for full round forms.’’11 The recognition led to Scaravaglione’s long association with the Federal Art Project. Girl with Gazelle was exhibited in the 1938 Federal Art Project Outdoor Sculpture show. The covers of both the May 1, 1938 issue of Art Digest and the April 25, 1938 issue of Newsweek featured the same sculpture.12 In addition, Scaravaglione was one of twelve sculptors chosen to receive a commission for the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture. She

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Scaravaglione’s work moved sculpture-of-a-grand-scale out of the masculine province.

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completed four works under this program: a limestone relief on the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington; a large plaster figure for the 1939 New York World’s Fair; an aluminum figure of a railway mail carrier for the Post Office Department Building in Washington; and a wood relief for the Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, Post Office. Edward Rowan, Supervisor of the Section of Painting and Sculpture, Treasury Department, wrote Scaravaglione to say, ‘‘I consider your work one of the outstanding pieces of sculpture receiving an award and I want to congratulate you on your achievement.’’13 The early 1930s marked the beginning of Scaravaglione’s love for Italy. While she spoke Italian at home and had met a few of her Italian relatives when they visited her family, Scaravaglione had never traveled outside the United States. Her first visit to Europe gave her the opportunity to see the art she had only previously known in photographic reproductions. In 1931, she accompanied Nakian, who had received a Guggenheim fellowship, to Paris. She never told her family that she was traveling with a man. Once in Paris, she grew unhappy with the relationship and with her ancillary role to the male sculptor. Scaravaglione decided to shorten the Paris leg of her trip. She sailed to Rome and then traveled to Calabria to visit her uncle, a professor. From Italy she wrote to Nakian in Paris. She apologized for leaving and explained that she was enjoying herself and learning about art history. She visited the Vatican and National Museum in Rome. She added that she truly loved Rome, and that ‘‘I never felt strange there as I did in Paris.’’14 The traditional agricultural practices in her ancestral Calabria fascinated Scaravaglione and stimulated her artistic vision. In a letter to Nakian, from that same summer of 1931, she described how workers separated wheat chaff from grain by using ‘‘the old method of ancients by shoveling it up in the air and having wind do the work.’’15 Later she borrowed from that visual memory to create the Treasury Commission sculpture for the Federal Trade Commission Building. The relief of two workers in a field harvesting wheat, influenced by the old customs of Calabria, was transformed by Scaravaglione into an agricultural symbol for the United States. After her European trip, when she was back in the United States, Scaravaglione completed work for the Treasury Commissions and continued her exhibition schedule. The Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Whitney Museum, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her work. In 1941 the Virginia Museum of Fine

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The relief of two workers in a field harvesting wheat, influenced by the old customs of Calabria, adorns the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C.

Arts presented Scaravaglione’s first one-woman show. She expanded her teaching schedule to include assignments at Black Mountain College and Sarah Lawrence College and became a founding member of the Sculptors Guild. Those who knew her then often commented on her spartan life. A New York Evening Post article by Ruth Seinfel described the barrenness and simplicity of Scaravaglione’s studio, with its mattress built into a wall shelf, and with most of its space devoted to tools and works in progress. Seinfel said the room ‘‘bears no resemblance to the cushioned and divanned studios of Greenwich Village.’’16 A fellow artist, Thomas Lo Medico, assembled a weekly sketching class in his studio, with expenses shared among artists to pay for the model and for wine, cheese, and crackers. Lo Medico said that in 1938, Scaravaglione came dressed to a meeting in the clothes she would wear for a college teaching position interview. She wanted her friends’ opinion. ‘‘She wore a large brimmed hat with a warm yellow tone, a dark blue tailored dress, and shoes bought in the children’s department to fit her small feet,’’ wrote Lo Medico. ‘‘We all had fun expressing our thoughts and she good-naturedly giggled at our response, but she got the position.’’17

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Concetta Scaravaglione in her studio

In 1946, Scaravaglione received a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters ‘‘in recognition of the excellence of composition, the feeling for design and the sensitive quality of the modeling in all of her work.’’18 Scaravaglione’s 1947 Prix de Rome award broke the all-male record of this particular grant from the American Academy. Additionally, it gave her the opportunity to live and work in Italy. Most welcomed by Scaravaglione was the grant’s stipend of $1,250, paid transportation to and from Rome, studio space, residence at the Academy, and an additional travel allowance. The Prix de Rome had been suspended during the war years. Italy was in tough shape, poor and in need of basic supplies. Before sailing out of New York, Scaravaglione gathered clothing and medical supplies to send on to relatives in Calabria. The Academy, housed in a Renaissance-style building on the Janiculum, was and still is a very special place for the artists, composers, and scholars in residence. In Rome, Scaravaglione worked closely with other artists, discussing ideas and techniques over shared meals. She was especially excited to

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explore design possibilities with architects and landscape architects. Crossprofessional collaboration was nearly impossible in America, and it was the direction in which Scaravaglione wished to take her work. In a letter to the Academy, Scaravaglione explained: Here in Italy this collaborative idea is hardly new; the Renaissance artists and architects worked in close harmony from the beginning. This association of creative minds is very evident in the better works of that time and I am finding great enrichment in my work resulting from working where this atmosphere is so strong.19

After her first year at the Academy, Scaravaglione requested and received a renewal of her fellowship. In her application, she wrote, The opportunity to study the art treasures, the countries, and the peoples of Europe I find most beneficial. Moreover, for the first time I am sufficiently free of material cares to be able to devote myself uninterruptedly to the production of sculpture.20

The expanse of work time, along with being in Rome where she felt so at home, was very gratifying. In addition to establishing friendships with peers at the Academy, she met Italian artists and traveled. Her journals chronicle extensive touring in Sicily, as well as trips to Ravenna, Venice, and Milan, and visits to Spain and France. The impressive work she created, Icarus, was first shown in Rome and is now housed in the Tishman Building in New York City. Scaravaglione explained that the work ‘‘evolved out of other problems I was trying to solve pertaining to sculptural relationships of form in space. Somehow also the idea seemed related to the theme of our times.’’21 A definite inspiration for the standing bronze figure was Lauro de Bosis’s epic poem ‘‘Icaro,’’ which retells the myth. She was further influenced by de Bosis’s life, which seemed to mirror Icarus, the Greek god who fell to his death. De Bosis, a Roman poet, champion aviator, and political activist, sacrificed his life opposing the rise of Mussolini. He died in 1931 in an airplane crash while blanketing the Italian countryside with anti-Fascist literature. Icarus was included in a 1951 exhibition of American sculpture at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scaravaglione’s sculpture met with extreme reactions. The public and critics either praised the work for its genius

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Icarus, a meditation on the sculptural relationships of form in space, was first shown in Rome and is now housed in the Tishman Building in New York City.

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or damned it for being too stylized and too much of a break from the sculptor’s previous, more figurative work. Ralph Pearson numbered among the art critics who thought Icarus a ‘‘masterpiece.’’ In The Modern Renaissance in American Art, published in 1954, Pearson wrote: ‘‘The theme—of a body falling through space—is admirably realized. The body is universalized sufficiently to remove it from the category of an actual, individual human form and to stress the generalized theme.’’

He added an explanation of the sculpture given by Scaravaglione herself: I tried to get away from the conventional . . . I played with space relationships. I wanted to get the spiral effect—like that of a leaf falling.22

The 1950s art world in the United States was very different from the art world of the late ’40s. Scaravaglione had returned to New York and to a hotbed of abstract expressionism. Her work, as well as the sculpture of most of her contemporaries, seemed old-fashioned to the new generation. In 1952, she secured a teaching position at Vassar College. Despite suffering from health problems, she continued to sculpt and exhibit, but had to forgo the strenuous physical effort required in carving. She began to sculpt in other media, such as soldering, plaster, and wax. A six-feet-tall welded copper figure, Woman Walking, was exhibited at the 1964 World’s Fair. Her 1967 one-woman show at the Vassar Art Gallery featured a large copper work titled Self Portrait. After retiring from teaching in 1967, she experimented even more with materials. Architect Edward Bullerjahn, who knew her from the American Academy, described some of her late, welded constructions as ‘‘fragments . . . exquisite in their sensitivity.’’23 Scaravaglione took one last trip to Italy in 1963, but health problems interfered. She returned to New York sooner than planned. Throughout the rest of her life she longed to return to Rome to work but never did. Her first one-woman show in New York was held at the Kraushaar Galleries on Fifth Avenue in 1972. Those who knew Scaravaglione during the last months of her life speak of her intense desire to work. While she clearly had little strength, she talked excitedly about her plans to remodel her studio and of the work she wanted to complete. After a long bout with cancer, she died in 1975.

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Scaravaglione once wrote: If, in an ordered work of sculpture, I can convey something of my unconscious conception of beauty, and my absorbed enjoyment in the work, if the stone or the clay or the wood is not too obstinate, if it seems to be on friendly terms with me, then I am profoundly happy.24

For Scaravaglione, this source of joy stemmed from her ancestors, the hill people from Calabria who, in her words, were never ‘‘stumped by lacking exactly the right tools or the right materials . . . [they] have ingenuity, and from infancy they understand simple living.’’25 Perhaps this ancestral knowledge of the joy of work is what gave her the strength to continue with her art despite periods of hardship and ill health, despite the vagaries of the art world and its changing trends, and despite financial setbacks. For as Scaravaglione said, ‘‘To sculpture I am grateful for enjoyment and for an opportunity to be free and independent, to create to the extent of my capacities.’’26 Notes 1. Helen Harrison and Karal Ann Marling, 7 American Women: The Depression Decade (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1976), 6. 2. Concetta Scaravaglione, ‘‘My Enjoyment in Sculpture,’’ Magazine of Art 32 (August 1939): 450. Reprinted in Painters and Sculptors of Modern America, Introduction by Monroe Wheeler (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1942). 3. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, February 1920, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, ‘‘Concetta Scaravaglione: Correspondence and Papers (1924–1974),’’ roll 1622. 4. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, August 1919, Scaravaglione Trust collection. 5. Rosa Scaravaglione, letter, July 1925, Scaravaglione Trust collection. 6. Ibid. 7. Review, April 24, 1926, from newspaper clippings included in Archives of American Art, roll 1624. 8. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, June 18, 1928, Scaravaglione Trust collection. 9. Alfred Barr, letter, April 23, 1930, Archives of American Art, roll 1622. 10. New York Times, January 10, 1933, clipping from Archives of American Art, roll 1624. 11. Holger Cahill and Alfred Barr Jr., eds., Art in America in Modern Times (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), 59. 12. Art Digest, May 1, 1938, cover; Newsweek, April 25, 1938, cover; both from Archives of American Art, roll 1623. 13. Edward Rowan, letter, October 28, 1935, Archives of American Art, roll 1622.

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Conceta Scaravaglione, Italian-American Sculptor 283 14. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, July 1931, Scaravaglione Trust collection. 15. Ibid. 16. Ruth Seinfel, ‘‘Art Old Fashioned, Sculptress Finds,’’ New York Evening Post, n.d., from Archives of American Art, roll 1624. 17. Thomas Lo Medico, letter to author, November 1985. 18. American Academy of Arts and Letters, awards program, May 17, 1946, Archives of American Art, roll 1624. 19. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, December 24, 1947, Archives of American Art, roll 1623. 20. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter, December 1949, Archives of American Art, roll 1623. 21. Concetta Scaravaglione, letter to Peggy Foldes, August 1952, Archives of American Art, roll 1623. 22. Ralph Pearson, The Modern Renaissance in American Art (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 170. 23. Edward Bullerjahn, letter to author, June 1986. 24. Scaravaglione, ‘‘My Enjoyment in Sculpture,’’ 455. 25. Ibid., 451. 26. Ibid., 455.

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Rosa Ponselle, Incomparable Diva james drake 1979

Baltimore and the Green Spring Valley are a study in contrasts. The city, a port cradling the Patapsco estuary near Chesapeake Bay, is a teeming metropolis housing a third of the state’s population. The surrounding area, by contrast, is a sparsely settled stretch of hills abounding in scenes reminiscent of the Hudson Valley School of painting. Atop one of these hills, in a Mediterranean villa, lives one of the state’s most distinguished residents. The early morning hours to which others in these hills awaken will pass this woman by. Her personal clock, the biological one within her, was never regulated to accommodate morning. Night is her prime time, and this night—icy, bitter-cold, and otherwise forbidding—will be one of the happiest she has known in recent years. The date is January 22, 1977, the evening of her eightieth birthday. Outside her home, Villa Pace, the white masonry walls are bathed by floodlights as doormen relieve waiting cabs of their well-dressed passengers. Many have come from New York and have been waiting patiently in the minor traffic jam that has clogged the villa’s mile-long driveway. Inside the villa, in the restaurant-sized kitchens that occupy one arm of the cross-shaped house, chefs put their finishing touches on the food that will be served the hundred or so guests. In the villa’s library, oblivious to the goings-on elsewhere in her home, rests the lady for whom the party is being given. She is dressed in a black velvet gown embroidered in gold; at the urging of her friends she is wearing the ornate cross given her by the government of Italy, signifying that she is a member of the coveted Order of the Commendatori. Seated among a handful of friends near the library’s immense fireplace, she asks to have a stack of letters and telegrams that have arrived during the past few days read to her. A friend reads some of them aloud. Two are from the White House, the first from President and Mrs. Ford. The second is 284

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from the Vice-President, and its tone is more philosophical than the President’s. ‘‘On marvelous occasions like this,’’ Nelson Rockefeller writes, ‘‘we judge others not only by how long they have lived but how well they have lived. By both of these measures, you have had a full and inspiring life.’’ She cannot disagree, especially with a man whose grandfather was among her earliest fans. Messages from the musical world are uniformly adulatory. Leonard Bernstein, in his greeting, credits her with changing the direction of his life. ‘‘Yours was the first operatic voice I ever heard, at age eight, on an old Columbia 78, singing ‘‘Suicidio,’ ’’ he tells her. ‘‘Even through all the scratchiness and surface noise, that voice rang through in such glory that it made me a music-lover forever. I thank you every day of my life.’’ Later in the evening, she will hear tape-recorded greetings from the Metropolitan. ‘‘I am here in my dressing room, I have just finished ‘Di quella pira’ in tonight’s Trovatore, and everything is going fine,’’ Luciano Pavarotti tells the lady he cannot see. The genial tenor makes her a promise. ‘‘I will not tell anybody that you are eighty because you don’t look it, and because I am an Italian gentleman!’’ On tape, Joan Sutherland describes herself as ‘‘Rosa Ponselle’s avid antepodium fan.’’ Renata Scotto offers ‘‘Cent’ anni’’—‘‘May you live a hundred years’’—while two notable basses, Jerome Hines and James Morris, pay her singular tributes. Morris, one of her prize pupils, assures her that ‘‘if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here at the Met. I wouldn’t be on any stage, anywhere.’’ Afterward, the tape yields the low whisper of a lady who identifies herself as Rosa Ponselle’s Number One Fan. ‘‘You have heard from my lips, in person, what an inspiration you have been in the forming of my vocal technique.’’ The woman speaking apologizes for a bad case of laryngitis—leading the woman she admires to quip, in fun, ‘‘Kid, you could have waited till after the laryngitis before telling people that I’m the one who helped form your vocal technique!’’ The speaker soon identifies herself, using the nickname by which friends know her. ‘‘Happy birthday from your Jackie, Marilyn Horne.’’ There are messages of a lighter kind, too. A letter from George Burns gives her a hearty laugh. ‘‘What a team we would make!’’ Burns tells the woman he had first seen as a vaudeville headliner sixty years earlier. ‘‘I don’t think I could manage Madame Butterfly, but we’d have them rolling in the aisles with the ‘Red Rose Rag.’ If you ever need a straight man, let me know. I’ve got a trunk full of hair for any occasion.’’ Lapsing into seriousness for a moment, he can’t resist a typically Burnsian postscript: ‘‘Right

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after we sing ‘Red Rose Rag,’ we go into this little sand dance. It’s very simple and they’d love it.’’

Ponselle’s Early Musical Genius Sand dances and ‘‘Red Rose Rag,’’ George Burns knew, were once a part of Rosa Ponselle’s world. As a piano prodigy around 1910 in her hometown of Meriden, Connecticut, she had amused herself endlessly by racing through the Joplinesque rags that were then sweeping the country. Her keyboard prowess began earning her money as a silent-movie accompanist, at first in small nickelodeons in Meriden and then in larger houses in Ansonia and New Haven. By the time she ventured outside her hometown, however, her voice was attracting more attention than her piano playing. Exactly when young Rosa Ponzillo first gave hints of the vocal genius that was to make her internationally famous is a matter of continuing speculation. On one fact her family and childhood friends agreed: it was not until Anna Ryan chanced to hear her sing that anyone took her vocalizing seriously. Miss Ryan, a chestnut-haired Irish spinster who had grown up in Meriden and who played the organ at the Ponzillos’ parish church on Sundays, had taken Rosa’s older sister, Carmela, as a piano and voice student in 1902. Carmela was fifteen at the time, and Miss Ryan found her an easy learner. By the age of twenty, she had become a finished vocalist, and her unusual combination of Venusian beauty and a limpid, darkly textured mezzo-soprano voice gave her, Miss Ryan thought, a chance at a professional singing career. Anna Ryan used to say that she ‘‘inherited’’ Rosa from Carmela. Deciding that her little sister might have musical talent too, Carmela took Rosa to Miss Ryan for piano lessons and solfeggio instruction. Rosa went happily, wanting to be like Carmela in every way. As a girl of five, after watching Carmela do fingering exercises on a neighbor’s piano, she had often come home wide-eyed and would spend hours running her pudgy fingers up and down a living-room windowsill, imagining it to be an upright’s keyboard. Studying with Miss Ryan, she would have real keys to traverse. It took Anna Ryan no time to discern that her newly acquired pupil had instinctive musical ability. Everything about her piano playing seemed instinctively right. She positioned her hands and wrists perfectly and never had to be reprimanded for using her wrists and forearms, rather than the simple movements of her fingers, to depress the keys. Her sense of tempo, Miss Ryan discovered early, was as regular as a metronome’s—so much so

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that she could stop playing in the midst of a phrase and, a half-minute later, resume playing it without missing the mental beat even slightly. She learned at least three times as fast as her teacher was used to seeing and was playing extraordinarily complicated pieces in a matter of months. Her progress was so astonishing that her father, a hard-bitten Neapolitan immigrant to whom music was a senseless frill in life, abandoned his miserly ways long enough to buy her a second-hand Huntington upright. From then on, Miss Ryan conducted the lessons in the Ponzillos’ home, arriving at eleven each Saturday morning and staying for lunch afterward. It was in the spring of 1908, on a day just warm enough for house windows to be opened, that Anna Ryan discovered Rosa’s singing voice. Intending to buy several loaves of freshly baked bread from the bakery the Ponzillos operated in back of their home, Miss Ryan passed beneath the house’s second-story windows and heard what she thought was Carmela’s voice; the music she heard was di Capua’s familiar ‘‘O sole mio.’’ Not giving the incident much thought, except for the fine quality of the crescendi and diminuendi she had heard in various parts of the refrain, at Rosa’s next lesson she mentioned that she’d forgotten to tell Carmela how nicely the ‘‘O sole mio’’ had sounded. One can imagine her surprise at learning from Rosa that it was she, and not her sister, whom her teacher had heard. We have Anna Ryan’s word that by the time Rosa was fifteen, her voice, except for an occasional lack of ‘‘cover’’ at its highest reaches, had all of the qualities that were to astound New York critics at her Metropolitan debut six years later. We also have Miss Ryan’s word that, much as she might have liked, she could not take any real credit for the girl’s vocal development. Nor could anyone else. William Thorner, the manager who was to bring her to the Metropolitan’s attention, began billing himself as the ‘‘teacher of Rosa Ponselle’’ as soon as the curtain rang down on her debut performance. He had nothing whatever to do with her development as a vocalist and was eventually forced by a court decree to stop advertising that he had. Romano Romani, the young composer and conductor who supervised her mature musical development and coached her through most of her Metropolitan career, also billed himself as her teacher, but he was allowed to mainly because of the intensity of his personal relationship with her. Though Ponselle readily acknowledged that he had given her important insights into keeping a maximum of resonance in her middle and upper tones, he too never taught her to sing.

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As to where the ultimate credit should go for this, the most marvelous dramatic soprano voice of its day—perhaps, as Harold C. Schonberg suggests, of any day—two legendary singers who were a part of the same Golden Age, Geraldine Farrar and Lotte Lehmann, shared a common judgment. Leaving the Met after a typically brilliant Ponselle performance, Lehmann asked Farrar incredulously, ‘‘How does one ever get a voice like hers?’’ ‘‘First you must have an arrangement with God,’’ the great lady replied, ‘‘and then you must work very hard indeed.’’ In quoting this gem of an answer over the years, writers and critics have tended to restate only its first part, completely ignoring the second one, the ‘‘hard work’’ part. It took George Cehanovsky, the Russian-born baritone whose name graced the Met’s rosters for some forty years, to refresh memories. In a 1977 New York Times interview, Cehanovsky acknowledged that ‘‘the Ponselle voice remains unique . . . there was nobody like her [and] nobody will be.’’ But, he quickly added, ‘‘she was such a student of singing. She was constantly studying. She was not content with just having a voice sent by God.’’

Early Vaudeville Days Vaudeville was the link between Miss Ryan’s tutelage and the Metropolitan Opera. Jimmy Ceriani forged the link. A Neapolitan-born opera lover and bon vivant, Ceriani was the owner and proprietor of Mellone’s Cafe, a popular New Haven restaurant and a particular favorite with Yalies. After hearing Rosa at a local movie house, Ceriani approached her with an offer to perform five nights a week for his patrons, at double the salary she was getting as a silent-screen accompanist. She told him she would accept only if he went to Meriden with her to review the offer with her father, as she would need his consent to leave school and move to New Haven. Ceriani agreed and, rather to his surprise, found her father generally unopposed to the plan, so long as he, Ceriani, would take full responsibility for her supervision. Once Rosa’s housing had been arranged—she would stay with a young married woman who was a friend of Carmela’s—Ceriani helped her pack her clothes and then drove her to New Haven. On a hot summer evening in 1915, a year after Rosa had begun performing at Mellone’s, Ceriani found himself in a heated situation that forced him to take his father-by-proxy role to an extreme. As Rosa was waiting for him to drive home, a middle-aged man cornered her outside the restaurant. At

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first she tried to ignore the man’s suggestive remarks, as it was clear that he had been drinking. His persistence soon began to frighten her. Before she was aware what was happening, the man gripped her throat and began tearing away at her clothing. She screamed, and in a matter of seconds Ceriani was at her side. A fistfight ensued and the powerfully built Ceriani, violently angry at the assault upon Rosa, knocked the man unconscious. The next morning the man died in a New Haven hospital. A week later the local coroner held a hearing to determine whether Ceriani should be charged with murder. Rosa, still in a mild state of shock over what had happened, was treated kindly by the presiding judge. He made

At the start: Rosa in vaudeville, 1917. (Courtesy of the author.)

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clear that he was exonerating Ceriani only on the basis of her testimony. Rosa’s parents were in the courtroom with her, and her father was asked to testify that he had named Ceriani her guardian while she was living in New Haven. In the midst of the questioning the prosecutor asked him whether, as her father, he would have reacted the same way Ceriani had. A chill came over the courtroom when he answered the question. ‘‘The man would have died much sooner,’’ he replied in a monotone. Several months after the incident, Carmela decided to pay a surprise visit to Rosa at Mellone’s. Already an established performer in New York—she had been singing at Reisenweber’s and other Manhattan restaurants since 1910 and had scored a success in a musical called The Girl from Brighton Beach—Carmela was totally unprepared for what she heard in New Haven. As she sat in a remote corner of the restaurant and listened to her sister toss off the ‘‘Un bel di vedremo’’ from Madame Butterfly and the big aria from Cavalleria Rusticana as if both were simple vocalises, she had to face the fact that Rosa was a better singer than she. Instead of resenting her ability, Carmela wanted to help promote Rosa and immediately remembered a conversation she had had with Gene Hughes, her New York manager. ‘‘Sister’’ acts, Hughes had told her, were becoming popular on vaudeville bills. He went on to suggest that she persuade some young singer to pose as her sister in a vaudeville routine. After hearing Rosa at Mellone’s, Carmela saw the makings of a publicity man’s dream story and was sure that Hughes would agree. At first his reactions were unfavorable. Edith Prilik, who met Rosa that same day and who eventually became her secretary, explained why. ‘‘Other than that incredible voice, she had very little going for her in those days. She was easily thirty to forty pounds overweight, she had no idea how to use make-up, and knew even less about how to dress flatteringly. Compared to Carmela, she looked like a rotund peasant girl fresh off the boat from Naples.’’ Such was Hughes’s reaction, too, until he asked her to sing for him. Then his attitude changed noticeably. ‘‘I don’t give a goddam how fat she is,’’ he exclaimed to Carmela. ‘‘When can she open with you?’’ The audition with Gene Hughes took place on a Sunday. A week from the following Thursday, at the ultracheap Star Theater in the Bronx, the Ponzillo Sisters, also known as ‘‘The Italian Girls,’’ made their vaudeville debut. A mere sixteen months after the curtain went up at the Star, the sisters were headlining at the Palace Theater, vaudeville’s Mecca.

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Ponselle in 1920, ‘‘Madonna’’ publicity photo. (Courtesy of the author.)

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Irving Caesar, whose lyric-writing with George Gershwin and Vincent Youmans produced such popular tunes as ‘‘Swanee,’’ ‘‘I Want to be Happy,’’ and ‘‘Tea for Two,’’ saw the Ponzillo Sisters at the Palace and offers this account of audiences’ reactions to their act. When the curtain went up, they created a visual effect even before they made a move onstage. Everything around them was lighted in a cool shade of blue—the backdrop was blue and I think even their skirts were blue. The color created a soothing visual effect and it put the audience in the right kind of mood. Simplicity was the theme of their act—everything was kept simple onstage, even their costuming, so that nothing would distract from their singing. The high-point came when, in the middle of the act, Rosa would sing ‘‘Kiss Me Again,’’ from Victor Herbert’s operetta Mademoiselle Modiste. The song had always been associated with Fritzi Scheff, so much so that she almost had a patent on the way it should be sung. When Rosa would launch into its opening couplets, you could almost hear people saying, ‘‘Well, this kid has guts. Let’s hope she can get through this without falling on her face.’’ Then she’d sing those sacred Fritzi Scheff coloratura passages, with their near-octave drops into the lower voice. That’s when the hammer hit, right there. People would suddenly straighten up in their seats and there’d be looks of astonishment exchanged. When she came to the first line of the refrain (‘‘Sweet summer breeze, whispering trees’’) which lay very low for the soprano voice, it sounded as if someone had welded together Tetrazzini’s upper voice and Schumann-Heink’s lower one. This was the most gorgeous sound any of us had ever heard on a vaudeville stage. It made Fritzi Scheff ’s voice sound like a schoolgirl’s.’’

Beginnings of an Opera Career William Thorner became Carmela’s and Rosa’s manager in December 1917, at a time when they were earning seven hundred dollars a week as Keith Circuit performers. Thorner, who had parlayed meager European credentials into a top-flight managerial career, had met and contracted Carmela first and was suitably impressed when she brought Rosa to him. ‘‘When I sang for him,’’ Rosa said in a 1922 interview, ‘‘I saw him wink at my sister and say yes, he’d take me.’’ Curiously, after hearing Rosa, Thorner remained convinced that Carmela held the greater promise of the two. No doubt influenced by her personal beauty and charm, he failed to take sufficient note of Rosa’s superior

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voice and musicianship. It remained for Victor Maurel, the dashing French baritone for whom Verdi had written both Falstaff and Iago in Otello, to correct Thorner’s impression. Maurel, long after the days when he and Francesco Tamagno, the dramatic tenor who had created the role of Othello, had electrified audiences at La Scala following the premier of Verdi’s penultimate opera, was now teaching in New York. For relaxation he played cards with Thorner, who often sought his advice on vocal and interpretative matters. On hearing Rosa and Carmela sing, Maurel advised Thorner that it was Rosa upon whom the gods had smiled. After assuring the sisters that they would be signing a contract either with the Metropolitan or with the Chicago Opera Company in no more than five or six months, Rosa replied offhandedly, ‘‘Yeah, in five or six years maybe, and maybe not even then.’’ Thorner’s prediction was uncannily accurate. On June 4, 1918, Rosa signed a contract to sing opposite Caruso in a revival of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. Ironically, the Met allowed only one Ponzillo into its coveted ranks. Carmela was left out of the negotiations entirely, and, except for a few seasons prompted by her sister’s power and pressure tactics, was forced out of the limelight entirely. Giovanni Martinelli, the elegant tenor who led the cast in an Aida in which Carmela debuted in 1926, correctly spoke her epitaph many years later: ‘‘She was a sapphire who had the misfortune to be mounted next to a diamond.’’ Giulio Gatti-Casazza’s shrewdness kept the Metropolitan from making Rosa an overnight celebrity. From the time the news of her contract began to circulate among the inner circle of administrators, W. J. ‘‘Billy’’ Guard, the public-relations wizard the Met had enlisted after its forces had bought out Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company, had urged that every part of her daily life be captured in the Graflex viewfinders of the syndicated press corps. General Manager Gatti-Casazza and his chief assistant, Edward Ziegler, opted for a different strategy, one as shrewd as it was safe. Instead of letting the press ‘‘discover’’ their newest singer, the critics and public would be allowed to do the discovering when Rosa made her debut. As the beginning of the season approached, she went through rehearsal after rehearsal without the slightest hint of nervousness. Her sense of the stage was instinctive, so much so that stage director Richard Ordynski felt she needed very little guidance, except for entrance and exit cues. Her knowledge of the Verdi score was a revelation to everyone. In a day when most opera singers could not read music, she knew virtually every note of the entire orchestral score. Of the rest of the principals in the cast of Forza del Destino, only Enrico Caruso was similarly prepared. A natural clown,

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Caruso often broke up rehearsals by taking Rosa into his arms, waltzing her to the studio piano, and asking her to play everything from Neapolitan folk songs to Joplin rags. Knowing that such gestures were calculated to keep the young girl’s tension under control, conductor Gennaro Papi never objected to the tenor’s antics. The opening night of the 1918–1919 season fell, ironically, on what proved to be the happiest day of the year: Monday, November 11, 1918, the day World War I formally ended. At the Met the day began with the usual nervous anticipation preceding an opening night. Stage director Ordynski and Armando Agnini, the stage manager, spent the morning reviewing the sets to ensure that everything would be in its proper place before the curtain rose on Saint-Saens’ Samson and Delilah. Caruso and Louise Homer were to sing the title roles, and Robert Couzinou was to make his debut as the High Priest. Pierre Monteux would conduct. The first act went without a flaw, from Caruso’s heroic singing at the gates to the temple of Dagon to the ‘‘Spring Song’’ with which Homer, as Delilah, ended the act. Between acts the company’s technical director received a note from Gatti ordering the lights lowered for the rest of the performance. The audience was now aware that something unusual was about to take place. The final curtain had hardly come to a rest on the stage floor when it was raised again, showing the cast still in their costumes but carrying the flags of the Allied nations. As the applause mounted, Monteux struck up ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’’ ‘‘La Marseillaise,’’ the ‘‘Inno di Garibaldi,’’ and finally ‘‘God Save the King.’’ With the vocal strength of a real-life Samson, Caruso led the cast in praise of the countries whose youth had made possible the armistice closing the ‘‘war to end all wars.’’ The Metropolitan’s way of celebrating the armistice was orderly and formal compared to the general goings-on in New York City. In Times Square, cloth and newspaper effigies of the Kaiser were burned, stoned, hanged, paraded around in orange-crate coffins, and sent skittering down the street with firehoses. The celebrating was still going full-force on Tuesday, and Rosa spent the day attending to costume fittings and other details that remained to be handled before her Friday-evening debut. On Wednesday, the day the general rehearsal for Forza was scheduled, she slept late; she wanted to be at her peak that day, and walked rather than rode to the Metropolitan. When she arrived she and Edith Prilik, now her secretary, composed a good-luck note for Giulio Crimi, a newly contracted Italian tenor who was to make his debut that evening in Aida. Crimi, an experienced singer who had been given much exposure in the press, had written Rosa a similar note

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earlier in the week. Feelings ran especially high after the rehearsal, and Gatti-Casazza celebrated by ordering a late-afternoon party for Rosa. After the last courses were served, he hired a cab to take Edith and her back to their West 97th Street apartment. As the driver was pulling away from the curb Gatti said to Caruso, ‘‘It’s all going like clockwork. She isn’t a bit apprehensive.’’

The Met Debut The next day, Thursday, the bubble burst. The day began quite normally; she awakened about eleven and ate a heavy breakfast while still in bed. After showering she decided to go bicycling, riding to Grant’s Tomb and back. When she returned to the apartment she did a vocal exercise or two, and afterward Edith handed her the afternoon newspapers. Leafing through them she came upon reviews of Giulio Crimi’s debut. After a while Edith assumed that she’d fallen asleep because she didn’t hear her stirring around. Eventually she walked by Rosa’s bedroom and saw her sitting in a chair, clutching a newspaper. Her eyes were locked in a stare and her face was sheet-white. ‘‘Are you sick?’’ Edith asked her. ‘‘What’s the matter?’’ ‘‘What’s the matter!’’ Rosa shrieked. ‘‘Have you read these reviews? Did you see what they did to poor Crimi? They panned him. They actually panned him!’’ ‘‘Maybe it just wasn’t his night,’’ Edith said nonchalantly. ‘‘Dammit, what about me?’’ she shot back. ‘‘Crimi is a pro, a veteran. I’m a nobody, fresh out of vaudeville. When those bastards get their typewriters trained on me Friday night, they’ll grind me into sausage! What the hell have I gotten myself into?’’ Edith was sure the anxiety would pass. By late afternoon it only got worse; she was so nervous she couldn’t concentrate on rehearsing. Later she tried to take a long walk, but was so upset that she lost interest after only a few blocks. Finally, Edith called a doctor, who prescribed a strong sedative. She slept most of the day, but awakened in the middle of the night and had to be given another dose to get to sleep. Friday morning she was wide awake, uncontrollably nervous, and unable to eat anything. Another sedative had to be prescribed. She slept uneasily for several hours, until it was time to go to the theater and get into costume. A Death Row inmate would have gone to his fate more easily. She arrived at the Met early and couldn’t bring herself to go in. She insisted on walking around the building several

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times and paced up and down the Thirty-Ninth Street side of the house. It wasn’t until a strand of purple-colored bunting caught her eye that she mustered the courage to go in. Purple was one of her lucky colors, and she began telling herself that the bunting portended good things. Once inside her dressing room, her make-up attendants found her in such bad shape that they had to do everything for her. She was trembling when Edith helped her get into costume. Her manager, Thorner, showed up twenty minutes before curtain time and made a half-hearted attempt at cheering her up. Whatever his attempts accomplished, he quickly undid them by insisting that she vocalize for him. She told him that she didn’t want to take any chances with her voice before going onstage. When he became more insistent she finally sang a vocalise, never thinking that her dressing room’s heavy carpeting and draperies would thoroughly deaden the resonance of her voice. When her ears didn’t convey what she was used to hearing, she panicked. Fighting back tears, she said over and over again that now the very worst had happened: she had lost her voice. As she stood in the wings waiting to go onstage, Edith handed her a brown leather wallet containing prayer cards and miniatures of Christ and the Virgin. Her make-up and lipstick left their colors on the wallet’s glassine covers as she kissed the miniatures, repeating a series of short prayers to herself. Convinced that she would make history by dropping dead on the stage of the Metropolitan, she made her entrance unwillingly and somehow managed to sing. She survived the first act mainly because of Caruso, who bolstered her with a stream of coraggios whispered in their love scene. Forza’s second act—‘‘fifty-five minutes of Hell,’’ as she liked to describe it—made her the center of the audience’s attention in two difficult scenes. By the act’s end, when her voice joined the organ-like bass of Jose Mardones in the simplistic beauty of the ‘‘Vergine degli angeli,’’ the house erupted and she was recalled a dozen times before the curtain. After that her nervousness began to subside. Any hint of being ill at ease was gone when, in the opera’s final scene, she sang the dramatic ‘‘Pace, pace, mio Dio.’’ Afterward, she received as many curtain calls as Caruso—a sure indication of her success. The next day the critics proved Gatti-Casazza’s no-publicity strategy to have been right: they discovered a new star. ‘‘Opera has in Rosa Ponselle a dramatic soprano of splendid potentialities,’’ said the Times, calling attention to her ‘‘dark, rich, and ductile’’ voice. In the Sun, the ever finicky W. J. Henderson (mentor in later years of the young Irving Kolodin) judged hers ‘‘one of the most voluptuous dramatic soprano voices’’ he had ever heard.

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This was high praise from a man whose musical scholarship gave his criticism an ironclad soundness, a man who had heard or else reviewed nearly everyone from the days of Adelina Patti onward.

Later Career From Forza del Destino through Carmen, her final role before leaving the Metropolitan in 1937, Rosa Ponselle’s career reads like an opera compendium. Less than a month after her debut she took on the awesome role of Rezia in Weber’s Oberon, singing it in English because of anti-German wartime sentiments. Rachel in Halevy’s La Juive came next, pairing her again with Caruso and giving her the first of many opening nights at the Met. A series of leading roles in historic revivals followed—Elvira in Verdi’s Ernani in 1921, Mathilde in Rossini’s William Tell and Selika in Meyerbeer’s L’Africana in 1923, Giulia in Spontini’s classical La Vestale in 1925, and Fiora in L’ Amore dei Tre Re in 1926—culminating in a 1927 revival of Norma that assured her a permanent niche in opera history. Her depiction of the tragic Druid priestess, both in the opera house and on recordings, set a standard by which all subsequent Normas have been measured. Few have even come close to her. After Norma, Ponselle became her own hardest act to follow. Having conquered Cavalleria Rusticana, Il Trovatore, Aida, La Gioconda, Luisa Miller, Andrea Chenier, Don Carlo, and Le Roi d’Ys, often in first-time Met offerings, she expanded her repertoire to include, between 1929 and 1935, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and the title roles in La Traviata and Carmen. In many quarters her Donna Anna was thought to be the equal of her Norma, and her Violetta in Traviata, if unconventionally sung because of her amberlike dramatic voice, was heralded in New York as well as London. Only her Carmen earned her mixed reviews, with the major critics evenly (often hotly) dividing over her characterization. Among those who disliked it, consensus was that the tragic quality of her basic personality could not be made to fit the feral-child demands of Bizet’s gypsy.

After the Met Curiously, for all the success her nineteen Metropolitan seasons brought her, Ponselle never really wanted a career. Although her singular voice brought her international fame at the age of twenty-one and enabled her to become

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a multimillionaire by her thirtieth birthday, the pressures of performing ultimately ended her singing career. A victim of her own unreasonably high standards and inherited mental instability, she engineered the demise of her career by making unreasonable demands of the Met management and by refusing or else canceling radio and concert engagements. She retreated to Hollywood for a time, testing for a film version of Carmen at Paramount and MGM, but then undermined negotiation by demanding an unreasonable advance. Neither Paramount’s Adolph Zukor nor MGM’s wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, were able to temper her demands. Hollywood continued to serve her in exile from the Met until, in 1939, her husband’s business interests took her eastward again. She had married Carle A. Jackson, son of the mayor of Baltimore, during her last Metropolitan season. Already twice-married and dogged by a playboy reputation, Jackson had no interest in music and had seen her onstage only once. Their oil-and-water relationship ended in divorce in 1950. Two years prior to the divorce Ponselle had attempted suicide and was confined to a mental institution, until electro-shock therapy finally relieved her depression. For the rest of her life she has been victimized by bouts of severe blackness and at seventy-five underwent shock treatments again. Between these two rockbottom events she managed to rebuild her self-confidence and came to enjoy a second career as artistic director of the Baltimore Opera Company, a post she still holds. Beverly Sills, Teresa Stratas, Sherrill Milnes, Placido Domingo, Justino Diaz, and James Morris are but a few of the singers who have profited from her coaching. Luciano Pavarotti, to whom Ponselle has always been an Olympian figure, arranged to meet his idol in 1976, and he left Villa Pace marveling over the quality of her singing at the age of seventy-nine. ‘‘We made great music that day, singing everything from Neapolitan folk songs to bits and pieces of the big duets,’’ the tenor recalls, ‘‘even though she said to me, ‘Luciano, I don’t have my pianissimo today, so I know I’m not in voice.’ With or without the pianissimo, she was beautiful.’’ Talk developed of a joint recording of Italian songs, but Ponselle dismissed it with a shrug. ‘‘If I’m good, they’ll say the record has been doctored, and if I’m bad, they’ll say I never should have made it. Anyway, getting into shape for a recording session is hard work.’’ She knows her subject well. In 1954, when she was nearing sixty, she came out of retirement to make two superlative LPs for RCA, making her the first soprano of Caruso’s era to be recorded by hi-fi means. Pavarotti has the answer to Rosa Ponselle’s continuing hold upon opera savants. ‘‘Play one of her records for someone who doesn’t know her voice,

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and they will say, ‘Where is she singing? Where can I hear her?’ She is still the most modern of singers. Vocally there has been no one like her, and interpretatively she helped set the style for modern dramatic singing. I don’t think there is one soprano who hasn’t used her as a model. She remains the Queen of Queens in singing.’’ Her own assessment of her role in opera history is more succinct. Last summer a European interviewer brought with him a 1926 recording she made of the ‘‘Ritorna vincitor’’ from Aida. She hadn’t heard the disc in years and listened intensely as her youthful voice brought to life Verdi’s prismatic measures. As the shimmering purity of her upper tones gave way to the awesome richness of her lower voice near the end of the record, she leaned back in her chair and stared into space. Afterward, she raised her eyebrows and said, detachedly, ‘‘I was a freak.’’ She was—but what a glorious one!

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Nancy Savoca An Appreciation jacqueline reich 1995

Within the context of American cinema, both mainstream Hollywood and independent productions, familiar faces such as Martin Scorsese and new talents like John Turturro and Quentin Tarantino have brought issues of Italian-American ethnicity to the screen. Their films, however, concentrate primarily on male characters and how they come to terms with their ethnic roots. Women in films by these Italian-American male directors, as well as by others, have for the most part conformed to Daniel Golden’s widely quoted and accepted stereotypes: the sensuous bombshell a` la Sophia Loren or the overbearing Italian mamma.1 This Madonna/whore dichotomy, so pervasive in cinematic representations of Italian-American female subjectivity, has recently been examined and undermined in the works of one of America’s more underappreciated directors: Nancy Savoca. With a subtle yet powerful touch, Savoca’s films offer up portrayals of Italian-American women who rise above these stereotypes, providing unique insights into issues of gender and ethnicity. The female characters who dominate her films give voice and vision to this less heard and less seen aspect of the Italian-American experience. The Morris Park section of the Bronx, where Savoca was born and raised, not surprisingly remains a source of inspiration for her work. The Italian-American men and women who populate her films are multifaceted, not merely iconic signs of their ethnicity. However, if there is one theme which runs throughout her work it would be the constant, complex battle of the sexes. Conflicts rage between a young Italian-American couple embarking on their future in True Love (1989), between a Marine headed to Vietnam and a homely, aspiring folk singer in Dogfight (1991), and a butcher who wins his wife in a pinochle game in Household Saints (1993). While a 300

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love story provides the framework for the confrontations, Savoca’s three films address such topics as the lack of communication between men and women, rituals of male and female bonding, and the often suffocating constraints imposed by socially prescribed rules of proper masculine and feminine conduct. Savoca needed six years to bring her first film True Love to the screen, having been rejected by every major studio not once but several times (it was eventually financed privately by friends including the filmmakers John Sayles, Jonathan Demme, and Susan Seidelman). Winner of the Grand Jury prize at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival, the film grew out of her and her husband’s own experiences in attending numerous neighborhood weddings. True Love tells the story of Donna and Michael, whose impending marriage becomes the plot’s structuring narrative event. Their union, however, is far from the idyllic fairy tale of ‘‘true love’’: never do they even exchange the words ‘‘I love you.’’ In fact, as the day draws closer, the couple comes to realize that their relationship is based on social conventions and expectations. Their uncertain future is symbolized in the film’s final image, after Michael has declared his desire to spend their wedding night with the ‘‘guys’’ and Donna is left crying on the banquet hall’s toilet. As they pose for their wedding photo in front of the on- and off-screen camera, Michael stares numbly into space and Donna shields her tear-streaked face with her hands. Unlike a contemporary film Moonstruck, in which gender conflict and Italian-American ethnicity are romanticized and simplified all for the greater good of la famiglia, Savoca’s film provocatively explores the social forces and pressures from both family and friends that can lock the sexes in constant battle. In True Love, men and women exist on different wavelengths: the more women crave stability and responsibility, the more the men shy away from it. Yet Savoca does not limit her treatment of gender difference to the film’s diegesis. The lovers are often shown separated by physical barriers: phones, doorways, and finally the bathroom stall in which Donna has taken refuge. In one efficacious scene, Michael and another woman reenact the mating ritual through dance, first gyrating seductively close and then chasing one another around the bar’s pool table. Moreover, Donna, Michael, and their family and friends are not synthetic ethnic caricatures. Michael, for instance, is light-skinned and blond. Their mothers are not hysterically overbearing but rather quiet and sympathetic. Being Italian American is not an excuse for irrational behavior and lunacy, as is literally signified in Moonstruck’s title and personified in that film’s characters. True Love instead paints

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a portrait of demystified ethnicity, with all its tender humor, familial warmth, richly colorful characters, and sexual conflict. Moving from present-day New York City Italian Americans to San Francisco of the 1960s, Dogfight, Savoca’s next film, is an extremely powerful work about the pre-Vietnam era. Written by Bob Comfort, a former Marine, as a tribute to his comrades killed in combat, the film focuses on Eddie Birdlace and his buddies (they refer to themselves as the ‘‘Four Bs’’), who, on their last night before being shipped out overseas, stage a contest at a local bar to see which one of their troop can bring the ugliest date (hence the ‘‘dogfight’’). After searching much of the city, Eddie meets Rose, a shy and rather portly waitress working in the family coffeehouse. What follows is a moving portrayal of two radically different people, who, once they break away from the various social situations that oppress them, are able to communicate. However, there is no ‘‘conversion’’ in the end through true love. Eddie returns to the troop, bragging about a one-night stand with an officer’s wife, not his tender evening with the unattractive Rose. Rose on the other hand does not blossom into a beautiful swan and embark on a successful musical career: she is seen in the film’s epilogue working in the same cafe´, compassionately hugging a distraught Eddie who has returned from the war, the only survivor of the Four Bs. Although Dogfight begins with Marine rituals of female denigration, Savoca takes the theme of dehumanization and turns it upside down. The film becomes not so much an exploitation of female objectification but rather an exploration of masculinity as configured by society and by war. On their last night in the city, Eddie’s fellow Marines do what they are expected or conditioned to do: pick fights with Navy sailors, curse, get tattoos, solicit prostitutes, and watch pornographic films. These rites of male-bonding are brilliantly juxtaposed with the sequences involving Rose and Eddie, just trying, despite rigid gender expectations, to be two regular people on a regular date. The film’s music further enhances this dichotomy. More than just anchoring the film chronologically, the soundtrack sets the mood and tone for each scene. Soulful folk ballads accompany the episodes involving Rose and Eddie; rambunctious pop songs enliven the Marines’ exploits. The film’s inconclusive ending not only sets it apart from the Hollywood tradition (the studio in fact wanted Savoca to make it more upbeat), it also perfectly captures the ambiguity surrounding the Vietnam conflict without taking sides. Rarely has a film so efficaciously represented the mentality and climate of war with only one minute of actual combat footage. The final image of

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Eddie and Rose’s embrace is a powerful symbol of both the destructive effects of war on the human soul and the need for comfort and compassion in a time of crisis. Savoca’s latest offering, Household Saints, is her most artistically innovative. Adapted from Francine Prose’s eponymous novel by Savoca and Richard Guay, the location is once again New York City, and the story is chronologically situated from the late 1940s through the 1960s. In a departure from the novel, a present-day setting of a family dinner provides the oral framework for the narrative, which is told in flashback. Joseph Santangelo, a local butcher, wins Catherine Falconetti’s hand in marriage in a nightly pinochle game during the excruciatingly hot summer of 1949. While never initially intending to collect on the bet, Joseph and Catherine eventually wed, much to the dismay of Joseph’s overbearing mother, whose fervid belief in Catholic folklore and superstitions doesn’t bode well for the newlyweds. When Carmela Santangelo predicts that the pregnant Catherine will give birth to a chicken after witnessing the slaughter of a turkey, the baby is in fact stillborn. Catherine’s subsequent eight-month depression ends, perhaps not coincidentally, with Carmela’s death, after which the Santangelo home literally blossoms with life. Catherine soon gives birth to Teresa, who embodies much of her grandmother’s religious spirit. When her parents subsequently forbid her to join a convent, she instead decides to emulate the life of St. Therese, serving God instead through everyday, menial tasks. She eventually suffers a nervous breakdown and is confined to a religious mental institution, where she dies a fevered but peaceful death after imagining playing pinochle with the St. Therese, Jesus, and God (who cheats). When at her death the institute’s wilted flowers bloom and all the mentally ill patients in the hospital are cured, Teresa is baptized a saint by the residents of the Italian-American community. Visually infused with magical realism and steeped in Catholic mysticism, popular folklore, and Italian oral tradition, Household Saints describes the Italian-American female experience. Possessing a greater ethnic sensibility than the novel, the film chronicles three generations of Italian-American women, focusing on their world: the domestic sphere. Daily household tasks, like making the sausage for which the Santangelo butcher shop is renowned or watering the plants which are Catherine’s obsession, are given the importance of religious ritual and passed down as tradition. Teresa compulsively cleans her family’s and later her boyfriend’s apartments as a means of showing her devotion to God. The ghosts, miracles, and visions that

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abound in this film occur in the home: Carmela recognizes her dead husband’s ghost by the smell of his cigars; Catherine’s withering plants bloom suddenly as she awakes from her depression; Jesus visits Teresa as she irons her boyfriend’s shirts. Their search for spirituality and meaning in the world leads them away from the church as institution, back to the family, to the menial, to the everyday, where God’s presence is felt on a personal yet equally important level. At the same time, however, the film offers up a critique of the Italian-American family and its strict gender divisions, where women are expected to serve and obey. As one of the story’s present-day listeners comments on Teresa’s beatification in the film’s epilogue, ‘‘I can name a list of women as long as my arm who went crazy cooking and cleaning and trying to please everyone.’’ But the film itself refuses to take one position. The inconclusiveness as to whether Teresa’s hallucinatory psychosis is due to her deeply religious nature or is merely an escape from reality is essential to the ambiguous tension between the rational and the spiritual that runs throughout the film. In a 1989 interview with the Village Voice, Savoca had this to say on being Italian American: ‘‘There are some things you do have to reject, otherwise you can’t survive growing up in a certain culture. But I think in the end you have to keep some of that stuff. I see people who reject everything— and you end up pretty empty once you do.’’2 Savoca’s films tenderly and gently examine this fusion of Italian and American, conjuring up deeply evocative tales and images of Italian Americana. The characters who populate her films are authentic and real people, seen from within rather than from without. Her women in particular stand out not only against the stereotypical portrayal of Italian-American women but also against general female stereotypes typical of American cinema. They are forced to confront the many gender, social, and ethnic conflicts that comprise the ItalianAmerican experience. Yet her films propose no easy solutions to these issues. Instead, they offer up a delicious and thought-provoking ambiguity in which the films’ conclusions eschew the Hollywood principles of certainty and closure for the inconclusive uncertainty of everyday life. Notes 1. Daniel Golden, ‘‘Pasta or Paradigm: The Place of Italian-American Women in Popular Film,’’ Explorations in Ethnic Studies 2 (January 1979): 3–10. 2. Maria Laurino, ‘‘That’s (Not) Amore,’’ Village Voice, October 31, 1989, 49–50.

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Studies about Italian-American Women

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Italian-American Women A Review Essay donna gabaccia 1993

As is true of immigration studies generally,1 surveys of Italian-American life—from scholarly reviews2 to more popular accounts3 —have often failed to incorporate women’s experiences extensively. This reflects something other than the paucity of research on Italian immigrant women and their descendants. The 1970s produced a first flowering of research on ItalianAmerican women; research continued, and even expanded, in the 1980s.4 At the 1992 meetings of the American Italian Historical Association (AIHA), about a third of the papers on the program focused directly on Italian-American women or considered gender as a dimension of ItalianAmerican life. Rather than provide an explanation for why a considerable literature on women left such modest traces in scholarly footnotes or in general interpretations of Italian-American life,5 this essay instead offers a survey of work completed since 1970, and an assessment of the current state of that research. The goal of this survey is to encourage better integration of materials on women in future publications on Italian-American life as well as to foster a new generation of research that will advance scholarship beyond its present state. The year 1970 is an obvious choice for the starting date of this literature review. Stirrings of the new ethnicity and the feminist movement simultaneously sparked interest in ethnic women at the start of that decade.6 Today’s scholarship no longer emerges as directly from these (or other) social movements, but it is still rooted in concerns of the 1970s. For those lacking expertise on women, I have tried to summarize the historiography on Italian-American women within the context of women’s 307

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studies generally, while emphasizing potential connections between this research and topics of interest to many Italian-Americanists. I hope this will encourage nonspecialists to consider how research on women could better inform their future writings on various topics. For those already familiar with some or all of the works discussed here, this essay also points to questions as yet unanswered. Both immigration and women’s studies significantly altered their research agendas in the late 1980s. These changes in direction, coupled with new interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities, have created a scholarly environment quite unlike that of the early 1970s. Those who intend to study Italian-American women’s lives in the years ahead also need to understand the scholarly world in which they live, think, and publish. Looking forward to the 1990s, they should seek to identify questions and methods to bring future research closer to the central concerns of women’s studies and immigration studies.*

The 1970s and 1980s: What We Learned The years 1977 and 1978 brought exciting developments in Italian-American women’s studies. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin published Family and Community in 1977.7 Her debates with Miriam Cohen focused attention on the influence of homeland traditions on wage earning among immigrant women.8 That same year, the AIHA dedicated its annual conference in Toronto to new research on immigrant women. In 1978, the proceedings of the Toronto conference appeared as The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, edited by Betty Caroli, Robert Harney, and Lydio Tomasi.9 During these years, too, Corinne Krause and her colleagues in Pittsburgh published their first reports on an oral history project focused on three generations of Italian, Slavic, and Jewish women.10 These earliest publications identified many of the themes that scholars continued to explore through the 1980s—the relationship between female * In the 1990s, attention shifted away from social-historical studies of women toward studies of gender as a cultural and linguistic factor shaping all relationships of power. Accompanying this shift was greater attention to sexuality. Finally, in the two decades after 1990, studies of Italian immigrant women in the United States gave way to transnational, comparative, global and diasporic perspectives on migrations from Italy. These perspectives focused on the gendering of both sending and receiving societies and on the ways in which women’s lives changed both ‘‘at home’’ and ‘‘abroad.’’ Scholars increasingly wrote about migration rather than exclusively about immigration to the United States. [Author’s note, 2010]

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wage-earning and women’s family responsibilities; the centrality of neighborhood, community, and kin networks in female lives; and change across the generations. They also identified themes that generated little scholarly attention until more recently. Already in 1977–1978, one could distinguish between scholars who preferred exploring women’s separate and unique experiences (sometimes called ‘‘women-centered studies’’) and others who used gender as an analytical category to discuss men’s and women’s lives together, notably (in the 1970s at least) within families.11 Early publications also illustrated a range of interdisciplinary approaches. While Cohen and Yans-McLaughlin had read widely in sociology and anthropology, an important group of essays in The Italian Immigrant Woman explored images and self-presentations of Italian-American women in film, fiction, and popular culture.12 Krause’s oral history project promised to bridge interdisciplinary methods: using women’s own words as its major source, Krause’s project nevertheless initially presented its results in the language and format of quantitative social science.13 The strong influence of the social sciences left research on Italian-American women somewhat apart from pioneering general studies of immigrant women published at this time by Cecyle Neidle and Maxine Seller. Social historians sought to understand shared, everyday experiences of ordinary, often inarticulate Italian-American women as a group. By contrast, Neidle—along with many women’s historians in the 1970s—gave greater attention to notable women and individual women’s lives.14 Seller pushed scholars to move beyond what she believed to be stereotypes—of passive, voiceless immigrant women—by focusing on activists, rebels, and individual accounts. Seller’s evidence came from immigrant women’s autobiographies and fiction as well as from the oral histories and census listings more favored by social historians.15 The so-called new ethnicity of the 1970s focused the attention of much early research on discovering what was unique about Italian women’s experiences and what the study of women could tell us about the survival of ethnicity. Exploring these topics took two directions. Beginning with YansMcLaughlin’s research, some scholars looked to Italy and Italian traditions for clues to Italian distinctiveness. Others instead saw the comparative method as the most appropriate one for identifying italianita`, or the quality of ‘‘Italian-ness’’ among immigrants. Cohen, Krause, and other authors in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America compared Italian immigrant women to Jewish immigrant women or—somewhat less frequently—to Slavic and Polish women.16

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In their widely noted early controversy, Yans-McLaughlin and Cohen both sought explanations for Italian women’s patterns of wage earning in the culture and traditions of rural Europe.17 Yans-McLaughlin emphasized that Italian peasants preferred women to work within family circles, thus limiting immigrant women’s wage earning in industrial Buffalo. Cohen, by contrast, argued that Italian peasants expected all members to contribute to family economic well-being, thus explaining her findings of high levels of female Italian employment in New York’s garment industry. Yans-McLaughlin’s and Cohen’s varied interpretations originated in their differing sources of information on Italian traditions. While both seemed familiar with the Italian language, neither had done primary historical research on Italian peasant life. Yans-McLaughlin’s understanding of Italian peasants came from anthropological studies and theories about the confrontation of traditional and modern in the contemporary world; Cohen drew instead on Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s historical research on women in preindustrial France and England.18 Women’s historians have cited Yans-McLaughlin’s early work as evidence of men’s domination of traditional families.19 Indeed, Linda Gordon found extreme examples of patriarchal control of women in Italian immigrant families in turn-of-the-century Boston.20 Yans-McLaughlin has argued recently that these historians misread her work through inappropriate feminist assumptions that wage earning alone empowers women to escape patriarchy.21 It seems fair to recognize, however, that Cohen and others who documented high rates of wage earning or high commitment to wage earning viewed these patterns as the outcome of women’s involvement in family economies, not as challenges to them.22 Italian scholars were among the first to question Yans-McLaughlin’s interpretations of wage earning’s significance for women. Luise Cetti argued that most Italian women worked for money, inside or outside the home, and that they cared about becoming good workers and building their skills.23 Diane Vecchio, in recent research on Italian women in upstate New York and Milwaukee, seems to encourage us to view Italian immigrant women as the predecessors of today’s jugglers—early pioneers in combining wage earning with marriage and motherhood.24 Despite research findings like these, however, Maddalena Tirabassi concluded that Italian-American women’s ‘‘stereotyped image has not yet been fully demolished.’’25 Comparative research also usually demonstrated that other immigrant women were often like Italians. Research by Caroli and Thomas Kessner confirmed Cohen’s contention that the lives of both Jewish and Italian

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mothers centered around family responsibilities, housework,26 and ‘‘breadgiving,’’ while wage earning loomed larger in the lives of their daughters.27 Broader studies revealed this common pattern among European immigrant women of most backgrounds. Scholars contrasted low rates of wage earning among immigrant wives with much higher rates among African American wives.28 Elizabeth Pleck concluded, however, that in the Italian case, cultural prescriptions against female wage-earning formed a minor obstacle at most, especially when good wages for women became available.29 Other studies showed that unmarried immigrant women differed in the kinds of jobs they took rather than in their rates of wage earning. Irish, Scandinavian, and Polish women more often found work as domestic servants, while Jewish and Italian women worked in factories. But it is still unclear whether this difference results from cultural preferences, the timing of migrations, or variations in job market opportunities.30 While controversy centered mainly on her interpretations of female wage-earning, Yans-McLaughlin’s early work also pointed to the family and the community as places where Italian-American ethnicity was created and where it survived the forces of Americanization and assimilation. YansMcLaughlin sometimes asserted the presence of women’s power in family and community, but later scholarship documented it more effectively. Comparative studies by Pleck, Smith, Krause and others cited below also established that female power in the family and community characterized many ethnic groups; it was not unique to Italians. Jewish and Italian women’s lives, according to Judith Smith, revolved around socializing with one’s ‘‘own kind.’’31 Like other immigrant women, Italian women created and maintained many of the family, kin, and social networks that provided social security and a sense of ethnic community for immigrants and their children.32 Laura Anker has described how the family served as immigrant women’s most important coping mechanism and also fostered creative female adaptations to the challenges of American life.33 My early work, too, argued (first) that la famiglia was more a product of migration and life in the United States than of Italian traditions, and (second) that women’s difficulties in recreating old neighborhood networks in a new environment explained the growing importance of kinship.34 Studying later generations of Italian Americans in California, anthropologist Micaela Di Leonardo labeled women’s maintenance of kin groups ‘‘kinship work.’’35 She also saw women finding rewards for their labor in a satisfying ethnic and working-class women’s world of ‘‘cards and holidays’’—a world unlike yet also roughly parallel

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to the Anglo-American women’s world of love and ritual described by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for the nineteenth century.36 If feminist scholarship of the 1970s sought to understand the origins and dimensions of sisterhood, scholarly studies of Italian and other immigrant women tended instead to document the strength and significance of mother–daughter ties. These bound women to ethnic worlds, instead of linking them to a multiethnic sisterhood of women.37 Some daughters, of course, rebelled against immigrant mothers’ (and fathers’) expectations— especially the weekly donation of paychecks to the family purse. But despite the fact that the experiences of daughters diverged significantly from their immigrant mothers, most daughters continued to see mothers as important role models and to admire their mothers’ influence within family, kin, and neighborhood networks. Whatever their lack of ‘‘American’’ experience, Italian and Jewish mothers remained important influences on their Americanizing daughters; most daughters continued to believe that they owed their mothers special care in old age as a result.38 Studies of immigrant women’s experiences in families also gradually uncovered an unhappier, conflictual side of family life, rarely represented in oral histories with men or in published Italian-language sources. Oral histories with women by women have consistently revealed evidence of discord, conflict, and occasional violence alongside evidence of family solidarity and sacrifice—in Italian as in other immigrant, American, and working-class families.39 Micaela Di Leonardo reported that women more willingly discussed family problems than men, who more typically presented sanitized or romanticized memories, especially of their own mothers. Italian scholar Maddalena Tirabassi described how Italian immigrants and their daughters sometimes turned to social welfare agencies for aid in confronting abusive fathers and husbands—a pattern common to all immigrant women according to Elizabeth Pleck.40 Other evidence suggested that women who appealed to social agencies lacked access to traditional resources, like female kin and neighborhood networks. Gordon noted the considerable social isolation of violent families. Despite her findings of extreme patriarchal control in Italian families, she also reported no significant ethnic differences in rates of family violence.41 Already in the 1970s, some comparative research also found sharp differences among female immigrants in the family arena and outside of it. Cohen noted that Italian daughters—who typically grew up in families poorer than Jewish daughters—less often attended high school, and that they made the transition from ‘‘workshop to office’’ somewhat later than their Jewish

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counterparts (during the Great Depression).42 Sociologist Richard Alba confirmed that Italian-American women lagged educationally, in comparison to both their brothers and ethnic and American counterparts, until the 1960s.43 And, while both Jewish and Italian daughters worked outside the home, Italians participated much less frequently in a broad range of other activities beyond the family world. In studies of the labor movement, a large and growing literature focuses on Jewish women as labor activists;44 Italian women instead attract attention mainly through their absence. J. Vincenza Scarpaci’s study of International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) vice president Angela Bambace described the difficulties one Italian woman faced in reconciling family expectations and commitments to public activism.45 Still, while innumerable studies of the 1908 strike of twenty thousand female garment workers contrasted Jewish activism to Italian apathy and hostility,46 Colomba Furio’s research demonstrated that by 1913 Italian women had become ILGWU members, if not leaders, in large numbers. In 1919 they overwhelmingly supported a huge garment industry strike.47 Italian-American women unionized, Furio argued, only after Italian men became union members themselves. But Italian daughters may have had other models, too: In a comparative study of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Ardis Cameron described Italian and other immigrant mothers continuing Old World traditions of mob, often violent, female action with strong community support during times of labor conflict.48 Whether or not Italian women also maintained greater distance from Americanization initiatives than other women is still unclear. Feminist scholars in the 1970s tended to stress settlement Americanizers’ special sympathies for their female clients, noting middle-class women’s acceptance of immigrants’ cultural gifts.49 Ethnic historians of the same period nevertheless described Italian immigrants rejecting contacts with settlements. They also discussed the well-educated (largely unmarried) American ladies who organized them—‘‘sisters without religion,’’ one immigrant woman called them.50 Italian scholar Maddalena Tirabassi noted that settlement houses and social reformers specially targeted Italian women and children for their programs because they saw them as the keys to Americanizing the entire group.51 American scholars have only more recently become familiar with the idea that reformers ‘‘went after the women’’ from studies of Mexican women’s interaction with settlements.52 A new round of research on the interaction of settlements and new immigrants is now presenting a more

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carefully nuanced picture of conflict and cooperation between immigrant women and college-educated social welfare activists.53 In a much clearer case, we now know that commercial entertainments, youth culture, and the joys of American consumerism beckoned Jewish, German, and Irish immigrant daughters in large numbers. But most studies of urban working-class women portrayed Italian daughters still firmly ensconced in family-oriented worlds. They dated and chose their own spouses less often than Jewish women; they less often met young men outside the family circle; they less often strolled the avenue window-shopping with their female peers; and they less often sought pleasure at Coney Island or city dance halls.54 Italian daughters, apparently, did not participate in what Kathy Peiss has termed ‘‘hetero-social urban youth culture.’’55 Only the movies seemed attractive to Italian daughters, and acceptable to their watchful parents, concerned about premarital chastity and family honor.56 Finally, historical demographers have documented that Italian and Jewish fertility and reproductive decisions diverged into the second, Americanborn, generation. Immigrant Italian women bore larger numbers of children than either their counterparts in Italy or their urban neighbors, Jewish women. By 1910, foreign-born Jewish women had instead begun controlling their fertility. Mothers of neither immigrant group prepared daughters for menstruation, adult sexuality, or maternity, but Jewish daughters nevertheless used birth control and chose hospital birth more often than Italian daughters.57 (Italian daughters’ fertility did decline, relative to their mothers, however.58) Jewish women may have changed their reproductive behavior more rapidly because they had built social networks reaching beyond the immediate family or because their family and neighborhood networks more often included doctors. Italian daughters, by contrast, depended heavily on their mothers for information about birth, and on their husbands for information about birth control.59 As each of these examples suggest, scholars have debated the relative significance of family identity for Jewish immigrant women, while more scholars of Italian women have continued to emphasize the centrality of family. Historian Franco Sturino has even argued that woman-centered study of Italian women is an unnecessarily presentist and reductionist approach—by studying the family group we automatically study women, since their lives and identities remained centered there.60 Women’s historians have staunchly maintained that, on the contrary, a focus on the family encourages scholars to ignore conflict or differences within the group, and thus to romanticize female oppression within families.61 Ironically, those

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who insisted on studying Italian-American women in families thus found themselves subject to criticism from both fellow ethnic historians and women’s historians. Still, as this review of the research suggests, attention to gender and power within families described male/female and parent/child interactions that helped explain why and how Italian Americans came to view themselves as uniquely family-oriented people. In his important synthesis of much immigration history research of the 1970s and early 1980s, John Bodnar urged us to see immigrants’ confrontation with capitalism—first in the homeland, subsequently in the United States—as the key to their experiences and gradual adaptation to American life.62 Focusing on family groups, Bodnar viewed wage earning, labor activism, and ethnic voluntary and religious associations as main arenas for this confrontation. Research on Italian—and other—immigrant women established that women, like men, confronted capitalism as wage earners, but that for many adult married women, choices about reproduction, consumption, and childrearing, along with neighborhood and kin networks, predominated over wage earning, working-class resistance, or ethnic institutionbuilding as points of contact between the old and new worlds. Taken as a whole, research on Italian and other immigrant women’s social lives did offer a plausible explanation for ethnicity’s survival into the 1970s. Women helped make ethnicity an important part of each family’s private little tradition and, thus, ultimately, a component of individual identity into the second and third generations. Italian women’s kinship work, and their influence over their daughters, became increasingly important in the creation and maintenance of ethnicity as the (predominantly male) ethnic institutions of the immigrant generation waned in the twentieth century. Perhaps that is why, today, women of the third and subsequent generations are more likely than men to believe that ethnicity is a major influence on people’s lives.63 The research of the 1970s and 1980s also offered a lesson in understanding when and how new research revises broad scholarly interpretations rather than falling on deaf ears. Research on Italian immigrant women gained broad attention from scholars in ethnic, women’s, and labor studies when specialists disagreed strongly among themselves—notably in the YansMcLaughlin/Cohen debate. In the 1970s, however—with its excitement about the new ethnicity and the new feminism—sharp disagreements among women or among Italian Americans raised disturbing images. They seemed to speak of the failure of female sisterhood or of insufficient ethnic solidarity among Italian Americans. Rather than fear debate, however,

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scholars should welcome and encourage disagreements among themselves. Debate and controversy move our scholarly understanding of Italian-American lives forward; disagreement is one characteristic of group life—not necessarily a threat to it.

The 1970s and 1980s: What We Ignored Disagreement and controversy most often emerge from new or neglected topics and methods, not from well-worn ones. Certainly the literature on Italian-American women reveals gaps in our knowledge, and these are worth mentioning. Overall, however, I believe it most important for scholars to consider whole methodologies and publishing strategies ignored for almost two decades. Compared to research on immigrant women of other backgrounds, on Anglo-American women, and on Italian-American men, Italian-American women’s community activism outside their informal kin and neighborhood networks has received little attention. This suggests what is, in fact, unlikely—that it did not exist. Similarly the religious faith of Italians, generally, and Italian-American women specifically, deserves more attention than it has received. Lack of interest in both these topics may be linked. While some Italian-American women apparently learned the principles of voluntary association from second-generation nationality workers in American settlements64 or from men’s fraternal organizations,65 most Italian-American women probably first joined clubs and organizations within the Catholic world of sodalities and altar societies.66 Whether Catholic encouragement of female organization within the church represented part of an Irish-American effort to wean Mediterranean Catholics from the folk religious traditions described so well by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum67 and Robert Orsi,68 or whether women’s activism instead represented an American flowering of these folk traditions, remains a question well worth answering. Until quite recently, too, few scholars of Italian Americana paid much attention to sexuality and gender identity, except in reference to fertility (a frequent marker of assimilation) and birth control. Thus, a session at the 1992 AIHA meetings offered what Wallace Sillanpoa believed was ‘‘the first time ever that issues specific to American Italian Lesbians and Gay men had been recognized and discussed.’’69 But even intermarriage, along with other far more common and less controversial dimensions of human sexuality in ethnic populations, have not yet found their scholars.70 We have mere tantalizing hints about gender ideology in Italian-American life: Robert Harney’s

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early study of the all-male worlds of Italian ‘‘birds of passage’’ can be seen as an early contribution to the history of Italian-American masculinity.71 Richard Gambino described Italian-American ideals of womanhood as ‘‘serieta`.’’72 I have portrayed male dominance in Italy as more compensatory myth than social practice.73 Recently, Corinne Krause suggested that womanly ideals represented a particularly conflict-ridden issue for Italian Americans.74 Given the centrality of honor and shame in Mediterranean cultures, the place of these concepts, and their transformation, in Italian-American life cry out for analytical attention.75 Having noted these gaps, scholars need also to recognize problems that are still more fundamental. Although researchers in the 1970s and 1980s wrote more about the history of Italian and Jewish immigrant women than about any other groups of female immigrants, no one has yet written a woman-centered historical monograph exclusively about Italian-American women. Thus, Italian-American women’s studies has nothing comparable to Baum et al.’s early synthesis, The Jewish Woman in America, or to newer monographs like Sydney Weinberg’s The World of Our Mothers, Susan Glenn’s Daughters of the Shtetl,76 or Hasia Diner’s Erin’s Daughters in America.77 Elizabeth Ewen’s Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars78 is the only recent book-length study of Italian women from a historical perspective, and hers is a comparative study of Italian and Jewish women in New York. And even then, far more women’s historians than Italian-Americanists know Ewen’s work. Does the absence of monographs and major historical syntheses on Italian-American women really matter when so much research is readily available in shorter publications? Apparently it does. Nonspecialists particularly depend on monographic literature for guidance in identifying major themes. Instead of drawing on Ewen or other more recent publications, historians of Italian immigrant life continue to repeat the findings of YansMcLaughlin, published almost twenty years ago.79 Surely, then, monographs and a synthesis on Italian-American women are important desiderata. Such a work should surely take into account regional variations in women’s American experiences.80 Methodologically, too, early work on Italian-American women appears surprisingly uniform from the perspective of the 1990s. In immigration studies, generally, no methodological innovation of the 1970s and 1980s more revised historians’ interpretations of immigrant life than research strategies examining immigrants in both their places of origin and in the United States. At first women’s studies showed signs of developing along the same

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lines. The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America dedicated an entire section on Italian women’s lives in the homeland;81 Yans-McLaughlin’s and Cohen’s disagreements also rested ultimately on assumptions about the old world. Since that time, however, few scholars have pursued original research on connections between old and new worlds in Italian-American women’s lives. Two notable exceptions were the work of Lucia Birnbaum and myself. Impressed with the Italian feminist movements of the 1970s, Birnbaum determined to understand when, where, and why Italian-American women’s political consciousness had instead faded across the generations.82 Her research in Italy focused attention on the female ‘‘earth mothers, godmothers, and radicals’’ who were the mothers and grandmothers of Italian-American women. Birnbaum concluded that American education had stripped women of the resourceful traditions of their feisty and powerful ancestresses.83 Birnbaum’s more recent research on women in Italian folk religious traditions raises parallel questions about the Americanization of religious faith, a transformation that may have rendered Italian-American women apolitical if not exactly antifeminist.84 My own research in the 1970s focused on the ecology of gender and everyday life in Sicilian agrotowns; it showed how changing patterns of male and female work and sociability in a New York Little Italy contributed to the creation of the immigrant institution la famiglia.85 In the 1980s, I argued that declining Italian industries (especially cottage textile production, which employed large numbers of rural women) and the feminization of Italian agriculture powerfully influenced whether Italian men emigrated alone or in the company of women.86 In more recent work, I discussed patterns of male and female return migration to Sicily and their consequence for local social organization and politics—reminding readers that female emigration produced changes at home, too.87 Most recently, Linda Reeder has begun research on the lives of the women without men, waiting in Sicily. In an early report, Reeder described Sicilian women expanding their contacts to and manipulating the Italian state as a response to male emigration.88 Collectively, this should push scholars of Italian-American women to see Italy as something more than background. Those studying immigrant women, like immigration scholars generally, could productively view Italian women as people who lived in two worlds, both of which deserve scholarly attention. Finally, the research of the 1970s revealed a sharp disciplinary concentration. Historians, and to a lesser extent, social scientists dominated the study

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of Italian-American women in the 1970s and 1980s. But the methods and sources of history and the social sciences proved inadequate in a number of ways. They revealed frustratingly little about female experience and subjectivity, and for that reason they seemed of limited use in answering questions about complex phenomena like identity, consciousness, cultural change, values, and emotions. They also, too often, assumed unquestioningly the existence, measurable nature, and immutability of ethnic identity rather than viewing ethnicity as a changing social or ideological construct. Since the mid-1980s, research on Italian-American women and gender in Italian-American life has as often been the work of literature scholars as social scientists. Autobiographies89 and fiction have both become more popular sources, supplementing and extending the oral histories collected earlier. Helen Barolini’s collection The Dream Book reopened discussions about representation, self-representation, and women’s voices in Italian Americana.90 Her volume contained evidence of an Italian-American female tradition in a wide variety of literary genres. Perhaps inspired by this disciplinary turnabout, Corinne Krause in 1991 issued a new version of Grandmothers, Mothers, Daughters; this version gives readers access to some of the oral histories used as data in earlier publications.91 While Krause’s oral histories emphasized the centrality of family and ethnicity in women’s lives, The Dream Book, along with newer collections of Italian-American women’s interviews edited by Connie Maglione92 and writings edited by Mary Jo Bona,93 suggest a more complex portrait of female subjectivity. Connected to the past and to their mothers and grandmothers, many Italian-American women nevertheless dreamed of moving beyond ethnicity. Many, too, seemed aware that writing doubly violated Italian-American or familial demands for silence (omerta`) when the writer was a female.94 Increasingly, folklorists began contributing to scholars’ understanding of female subjectivity.95 Despite the continued popularity of contribution histories in ItalianAmerican studies, biography of notable Italian-American women showed few signs of becoming as popular. The only Italian-American woman with a long list of biographers at present is Frances Cabrini.96 It seems likely, however, that Madonna Ciccone’s biographers may soon outnumber those of the immigrant saint, reminding cultural historians of the tenacity of old dualisms—women as either virgins or whores. Shorter publications of the 1970s and a few older studies alert readers currently fascinated with Madonna to the fact that performance also offered a common road to Italian female achievement in the past.97 Works by literary scholars have also familiarized us with a sizeable population of Italian-American women writers

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whose lives as exceptional women deserve attention, both for what they can tell us about the transformation of female consciousness and the keys to individual Italian-American female achievement.

Where Do We Go from Here? It would seem that scholars wishing to pursue research on Italian-American women have a rich foundation on which to build, but they also face confusing choices in formulating their future research. Will they address immigration historians and women’s historians with the methods of the past or will they instead publish for experts in gender studies and literature using new and still-evolving interdisciplinary methods? Regardless of their choices, researchers planning future work need to think carefully about the issues currently of interest to specialists in each of these fields. While studies of particular immigrant groups and American communities dominated immigration history in the 1970s, recent work in the field has instead emphasized comparison and synthesis.98 Work on the construction or creation of ethnicity by historians now attempts to study what earlier scholars sometimes took for granted.99 Closely linked to scholarly interest in ethnicity’s creation is interest in its possible demise: scholars of ItalianAmerican women may want to consider seriously sociologist Richard Alba’s contention that Italian-American identity, along with other ethnicities rooted in migrations from Europe, has entered its twilight, declining years.100 A clear alternative to these U.S.-centered questions comes from scholars who instead wish to study Italian migration within international and diaspora paradigms.101 In each of these cases, I believe that gender analysis—rather than woman-centered approaches—may prove most fruitful. In fact, immigration historians now share with gender historians a growing interest in the construction of ethnic and female identities: studies of ItalianAmerican men and women can demonstrate the connection of the two processes.102 For scholars who prefer woman-centered studies and an audience in women’s history, it seems wise to understand the recent significant impact of multicultural approaches in this field. In women’s history, immigrants from Europe and their descendants are often viewed as Euro-Americans or as whites. In some cases this label strongly suggests that whites may be culturally indistinguishable among themselves, and that they are also the universal beneficiaries of white skin privileges built on their oppression of racial minorities. In 1992 Rose Romano reported to the AIHA conference about

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her difficulties participating in lesbian multicultural discussions as an ItalianAmerican woman: ‘‘When [they] say ‘Europe’ they’re thinking ‘England’ and when they say ‘Christian’ they’re thinking ‘Protestant’ and when they say ‘white’ they’re thinking ‘WASP.’ ’’103 In the scholarly world too, identity politics could influence reception of future studies of Italian-American women. Explorations of the cultural concept of Latin in the lives of women from Mediterranean and American backgrounds seems a promising approach, since it requires comparisons between Italian-American women now perceived as ‘‘white’’ and Latina women. It could also open comparative discussions among women’s historians about the place of Catholic religious values in immigrant women’s lives, past and present. In American cities today, furthermore, Italian Americans sometimes remain close, if somewhat ambivalent, neighbors to African Americans and to recently arrived immigrants from the Third World. Potentially controversial research focusing on Italian and Italian-American women’s interactions with or comparisons to racialized minorities could attract the kind of attention to Italian-American studies that the Cohen/YansMcLaughlin debate enjoyed in the 1970s. Spike Lee has from his own perspective effectively explored Italian/black relations on film. Surely a look at these issues from the point of view of urban, often working-class white ethnic women or through a gendered lens could be just as fruitful. Some of the most exciting scholarly challenges, however, will undoubtedly continue to emanate from interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. Italian Americanists, like many students of ethnic life generally, are just beginning to grapple with the issues raised by various postmodernist approaches within cultural studies.104 Even as literary studies of ItalianAmerican women have focused on autobiography, oral history, and fiction for insight into women’s authentic experiences and subjectivity, scholars in cultural studies raise troubling questions about the existence of any such self, with its own authentic subjectivity. Many now prefer to focus on reading the construction of oral accounts and autobiographies as texts. Scholars in cultural studies see autobiographies, like other kinds of texts, as constructed and thus deeply political or ideological systems of signs and oppositions, rather than as transparent roads into a woman’s mind or psyche.105 Semiology, deconstruction, and other varieties of postmodernist thinking already dominate the study of the Madonna phenomenon,106 and postmodernist approaches are also being applied to other topics once safely monopolized by the social sciences.107

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There would seem to be yet another option for those seeking an audience for future research on Italian-American women. Since the 1960s, AIHA, its annual conference, and publications like Italian Americana have focused specifically on Italian-American life and identity. Collectively they represent yet another potential audience for research on Italian-American women. While I do not want to make too much of this point, in the past one could still distinguish between scholars who published mainly for broad audiences in women’s, labor, immigration and urban history, and so forth and scholars who instead wrote primarily for other Italian Americanists. It is this audience of Italian Americanists, however, that remains most difficult to characterize. What does Italian-American studies want from future research on women? What are the burning issues in Italian-American studies today? I confess I cannot identity them as separate from the ones discussed above. Welcoming to all, the field has not sought or seemed to need a clear focus since the days of the new ethnicity of the early 1970s. For this reason, I would expect Italian-American studies to remain an arena where scholars addressing issues central to broader fields can enjoy talking among themselves on occasion. But to see Italian-American studies as the only audience we address would confine our future research on ItalianAmerican women to an unnecessarily small realm. Clear guidelines for formulating the next generation of research will continue to come from women’s and gender studies, immigration studies, ethnic literature, and cultural studies as well as from the interdisciplinary methodologies that link these fields. As these fields change, so too will Italian-American women’s studies. Notes 1. Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘The Transplanted: Women and Family in Immigrant America,’’ Social Science History 12, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 243–52; Betty Bergland, ‘‘Immigration History and the Gendered Subject: A Review Essay,’’ Ethnic Forum 8, no. 2 (1988): 24–39; Suzanne Sinke, ‘‘A Historiography of Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,’’ Ethnic Forum 9, nos. 1–2 (1989): 122–45; Sydney Stahl Weinberg, ‘‘The Treatment of Women in Immigration History,’’ in Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 3–22. For the social sciences, see Rita J. Simon and Caroline Brettell, eds., International Migration, The Female Experience (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1986); Silvia Pedraza, ‘‘Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender,’’ Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991): 303–25. 2. George Pozzetta, ‘‘Immigrants and Ethnics: The State of Italian-American Historiography,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 9, no. 1 (1989): 67–95. Pozzetta

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Italian-American Women: A Review Essay 323 directs readers interested in the history of Italian-American women to publications by Yans-McLaughlin (n. 7), Smith (n. 31), and Caroli et al. (n. 6). 3. Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia, Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). Their bibliography directs readers to works by Caroli et al. (n. 6), Yans-McLaughlin (nn. 7 and 8), Aleandri (n. 12), Barolini (n. 92), Furio (n. 47), Orsi (n. 69), Mathias (n. 97), and myself (n. 74). 4. Francesco Cordasco, The Immigrant Woman in North America: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected References (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985); Donna Gabaccia, Immigrant Women in the United States, A Selectively Annotated Multidisciplinary Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989). 5. A topic I’ve taken up elsewhere: Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘Immigrant Women: Nowhere at Home?’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 10, no. 4 (1991): 61–87; Gabaccia, ‘‘What’s Next in Research on Immigrant Women?’’ Newsletter, American Italian Historical Association 26, no. 1 (January 1993); Gabaccia, ‘‘Italian Immigrant Women in Comparative Perspective,’’ AltreItalie 9 (January–June, 1993): 163–75. 6. Gabaccia, ‘‘Nowhere at Home,’’ 61; Caroli, ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, ed. Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978), xi. 7. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). Yans-McLaughlin had already published early versions of her arguments in ‘‘Patterns of Work and Family Organization: Buffalo’s Italians,’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971): 299–314; and ‘‘A Flexible Tradition: South Italian Immigrants Confront a New Work Experience,’’ Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 429–45. 8. See Yans-McLaughlin, ‘‘Italian Women and Work: Experience and Perception,’’ and Cohen, ‘‘Italian-American Women in New York City, 1900–1950: Work and School,’’ both in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 101–19 and 138–57 respectively. 9. See n. 6 above. Caroli had generated considerable interest in women’s studies within the AIHA with her earlier article ‘‘Italian Women in America: Sources for Study,’’ Italian Americana 2 (1976): 242–54. 10. See Corinne Krause, ‘‘Italian, Jewish and Slavic Grandmothers in Pittsburgh: Their Economic Roles,’’ Frontiers 2 (Summer 1977): 18–28; Krause, ‘‘Urbanization without Breakdown: Italian, Jewish and Slavic Women in Pittsburgh, 1900 to 1945,’’ Journal of Urban History 4 (May 1978): 291–305; Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers and Daughters: an Oral History Study of Ethnicity, Mental Health, and Continuity of Three Generations of Jewish, Italian, and Slavic-American Women (New York: American Jewish Committee Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity, 1978). Krause and her collaborators also presented papers at the AIHA Toronto conference; they were published in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America: Krause, ‘‘Oral History in Pittsburgh—Women, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: Rationale, Procedure, and Methodology,’’ pp. 260–68; Francesca Colecchia, ‘‘Women, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: The Italian Woman, Impressions and Observations,’’ 252–59.

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324 Donna Gabaccia 11. This tension eventually surfaced as a major debate in women’s studies in the late 1980s. Feminist scholars first argued for studies tracing women’s escape from patriarchal families, and then for attention to gender in all dimensions of life, not merely in the family or the private sphere: compare Heidi Hartmann, ‘‘The Family as a Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,’’ SIGNS 6, no. 3 (1979): 366–94, to Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 12. All page numbers are from The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America: Rose Basile Green, ‘‘The Italian Immigrant Woman in American Literature,’’ 341–50; Daniel Golden, ‘‘Pasta or Paradigm: The Place of Italian-American Women in Popular Film,‘‘ 350–57; Emilese Aleandri, ‘‘Women in the Italian-American Theater of the Nineteenth Century,’’ 358–69. The 1977 AIHA also included readings by and about Italian-American women, a feature continued in annual conferences down to the present. 13. See, especially, Grandmothers, Mothers, Daughters, 1978. 14. Cecyle Neidle, America’s Immigrant Women: Their Contribution to the Development of a Nation from 1609 to the Present (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1975). 15. Maxine Seller, ‘‘Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman, 1880–1924,’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies (Spring 1975): 59–70; Seller, Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). 16. Besides the works of Krause and colleagues in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America (n. 10), see Jessica L. Cohen, ‘‘A Comparison of Norms and Behaviors of Childrearing in Jewish and Italian Mothers,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1977. 17. See n. 8 above. 18. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). Tilly had already begun her study of industrialization in the Milan area and had published an early criticism of Yans-McLaughlin’s work based on her own understanding of Italian rural families: ‘‘Comment on Two Papers on British and American Working Class Families,’’ Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 452–59. 19. See, e.g., Florence T. Bloom, ‘‘Struggling and Surviving—the Life Style of European Immigrant Breadwinning Mothers in American Industrial Cities, 1900– 1930,’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 8, no. 6 (1985): 609–20. 20. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking Press, 1988). 21. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ‘‘Comment on Donna Gabaccia Paper,’’ Altreitalie 9 (January–June, 1993): 180–83. From a somewhat different perspective, Jean Scarpaci also argued that historians influenced by present-day concerns failed to grasp truths central to immigrant women themselves: see her ‘‘La Contadina: The Plaything of the Middle Class Woman Historian,’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 9 (Summer 1981): 21–38. 22. See also Rosara L. Passero, ‘‘Ethnicity in the Men’s Ready-Made Clothing Industry, 1880–1950: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia,’’ unpublished Ph.D.

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Italian-American Women: A Review Essay 325 dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1978; Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta, ‘‘Immigrant Women in Tampa: The Italian Experience, 1890–1930,’’ Florida Historical Quarterly 61 (July 1982): 296–312; Cynthia R. Daniels, ‘‘No Place Like Home: A Pictorial Essay on Italian-American Homeworkers in New York, 1910– 1913,’’ in Support and Struggle: Italians and Italian Americans in a Comparative Perspective: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, ed. Joseph L. Tropea et al. (Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association, 1986), 93–111. 23. Luisa Cetti, ‘‘Donne Italiane a New York e Lavoro a Domicilio (1910– 1925),’’ Movimento Operaio e Socialista 7, no. 3 (1984–85): 291–303; Cetti, ‘‘Work Experience among Italian Women in New York, 1900–1930,’’ Rivista di Studi Anglo Americani 3, 4–5 (1984–85): 493–505. 24. Diane C. Vecchio, ‘‘Italian Women in Industry: The Shoeworkers of Endicott, New York, 1914–1935,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 8 (Spring 1989): 60–86; see also her ‘‘Women and the Economy: Upstate New York and Milwaukee,’’ paper given at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference, AIHA, November 1992. 25. ‘‘Bringing Life to History: Italian Ethnic Women in the United States, ‘‘ The Italian Diaspora, Migration across the Globe, ed. G. E. Pozzetta and B. Ramirez (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992), 135–54. 26. Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘Housing and Household Work, Sicily and New York, 1890–1910,’’ Michigan Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies (1981): 1–15. 27. Thomas Kessner and Betty Boyd Caroli, ‘‘New Immigrant Women at Work: Italians and Jews in New York City,’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (Winter 1978): 19–32. 28. Barbara Klaczynska, ‘‘Why Women Work: A Comparison of Various Groups in Philadelphia: 1910–1930,’’ Labor History 17 (Winter 1976): 73–87; Christine E. Bose, ‘‘Household Resources and U.S. Women’s Work: Factors Affecting Gainful Employment at the Turn of the Century,’’ American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 474–90. 29. Elizabeth H. Pleck, ‘‘A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911,’’ The American Family in Social Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 367–92. 30. Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), chapter entitled ‘‘Why Irish Became Domestics and Italians and Jews Did Not.’’ Contrast Steinberg’s economistic view to those emphasizing culture: Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Joyce K Lintelman, ‘‘ ‘America Is the Woman’s Promised Land’: Swedish Immigrant Women and American Domestic Service,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 8, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 9–23. 31. Judith Smith, ‘‘Our Own Kind: Family and Community Networks in Providence,’’ Radical History Review 17 (Spring 1978): 99–120; see also her Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island 1900–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

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326 Donna Gabaccia 32. A responsibility that continued into the subsequent generations: Arlene Mancuso, ‘‘Women of Old Town,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 312–23; Judith N. Desena, ‘‘Involved and ‘There’: The Activities of Italian American Women in Urban Neighborhoods,’’ in The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000, ed. Jerome Krase and William Egelman (Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association, 1987). 33. Laura Anker, ‘‘Women, Work and Family: Polish, Italian and Eastern European Immigrants in Industrial Connecticut, 1890–1940,’’ Polish American Studies 45 (Autumn 1988): 23–49. 34. Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘Sicilians in Space: Environmental Change and Family Geography,’’ Journal of Social History 16, no. 2 (1982): 53–66; ‘‘Kinship, Culture and Migration: A Sicilian Example,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 3, no. 2 (1984): 39–53. 35. Micaela Di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). 36. Micaela Di Leonardo, ‘‘The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,’’ SIGNS 12 (Spring 1987): 440–53; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America,’’ SIGNS 1 (1974): 1–29. 37. Elisabetta Vezzosi, ‘‘The Dilemma of the Ethnic Community: The Italian Immigrant Woman between ‘Preservation’ and ‘Americanization,’ ’’ in Support and Struggle: Italians and Italian Americans in a Comparative Perspective, ed. J. Tropea et al. (Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association, 1986). 38. Some of the best work on mother–daughter ties and roles within secondgeneration families has been done by sociologists and anthropologists: Colleen L. Johnson, Growing Up and Growing Old in Italian-American Families (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985); ‘‘Sibling Solidarity: Its Origin and Functioning in Italian-American Families,’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 44, no. 1 (February 1982): 155–67; ‘‘The Maternal Role in the Contemporary Italian-American Family,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 234–45. Other articles on mothers and daughters in this volume include Sharon Hartman Strom, ‘‘Italian American Women and Their Daughters in Rhode Island: The Adolescence of Two Generations, 1900–1950,’’ 191–205, and Judith E. Smith, ‘‘Italian Mothers, American Daughters: Changes in Work and Family Roles,’’ 206–21. See also Elizabeth S. Johnson, ‘‘Role Expectations and Role Realities of Older Italian Mothers and Their Daughters,’’ International Journal of Aging and Human Development 14 (1981–1982): 271–76; Bertram J. Cohler and Marvin Lieberman, ‘‘Personality Change across the Second Half of Life: Findings from a Study of Irish, Italian and Polish Women,’’ in Ethnicity and Aging, ed. Donald Gelfand and A. Kutzik (New York: Springer, 1979). 39. Dorothy M. Balancio, ‘‘The Making and Unmaking of a Myth: Italian American Women and Their Community,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1985; Mary Jane Capozzoli, Three Generations of Italian American Women in Nassau County, 1925–1981 (New York: Garland, 1990).

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Italian-American Women: A Review Essay 327 40. Maddalena Tirabassi, Il faro di Beacon Street: Social Workers e immigrate negli Stati Uniti (1910–1939) (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990); Elizabeth H. Pleck, ‘‘Challenges to Traditional Authority in Immigrant Families,’’ in The American Family in Social Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 504–17. 41. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives. 42. Miriam Cohen, ‘‘Changing Educational Strategies among Immigrant Generations: New York Italians in Comparative Perspective,’’ Journal of Social History 5, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 443–66; Cohen, From Workshop to Office (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 43. Richard D. Alba, Italian Americans, into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 12428; see also Jerome Krase, ‘‘Italian-American Female College Students: A New Generation Connected to the Old,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 246–51; Joseph V. Scelsa, ‘‘Italian-American Women: Their Families and American Education, Systems in Conflict,’’ in The Family and Community Life of Italian Americans, ed. Richard N. Juliani (Staten Island, N.Y.: Italian American Historical Association, 1981), 169–71; Maria Parrino, ‘‘Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women Immigrants,’’ Italian Americana 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1992): 126–46. 44. For a good review of the literature, see Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), chap. 5. 45. Jean Scarpaci, ‘‘Angela Bambace and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union: The Search for an Elusive Activist,’’ in Pane e Lavoro: The Italian American Working Class, ed. George Pozzetta (Staten Island, N.Y.: American Italian Historical Association, 1980), 99–118. See also Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women, the Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 45–47. 46. Maxine Seller, ‘‘The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class and Ethnicity in the Shirtwaist Makers Strike of 1909,’’ in Struggle a Hard Battle—Working Class Immigrants, ed. Dirk Hoerder (DeKalb: University of Northern Illinois Press, 1986), 280–303. 47. Columba M. Furio, ‘‘The Cultural Background of the Italian Immigrant Woman and Its Impact on Her Unionization in the New York City Garment Industry, 1880–1918,’’ in Pane e Lavoro, 81–98. 48. Ardis Cameron, ‘‘Bread and Roses Revisited: Women’s Culture and Working-Class Activism in the Lawrence Strike of 1912,’’ in Women’s Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 42–61. 49. Here, they drew on the work of Alan Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 50. Mary Ellen Mancina Batinich, ‘‘The Interaction between Italian Immigrant Women and the Chicago Commons Settlement House, 1909–1944,’’ in The Italian

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328 Donna Gabaccia Immigrant Woman in North America, 154–67. Other articles in this volume include: Richard Juliani, ‘‘The Settlement House and the Italian Family,’’ 102–23, and George E. Pozzetta, ‘‘Immigrants and Craft Arts: Scuola d’Industrie Italiane,’’ 124– 37. The Protestant orientation of many settlement workers may explain women’s standoffishness: see Maxine Seller, ‘‘Protestant Evangelism and the Italian Immigrant Woman,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 124–37. 51. Maddalena Tirabassi, ‘‘Prima le Donne e Bambini: gli International Institutes e l’Americanizzazione degli Immigrati,’’ Quaderni Storici 51 (1982): 853–80; Tirabassi, ‘‘The Meaning of ‘Americanization’ for Italian Immigrant Women,’’ in Looking Inward—Looking Outward, from the 1930s through the 1940s, ed. S. Ickringill (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 195–200. 52. George J. Sanche´z, ‘‘ ‘Go after the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929,’’ in Unequal Sisters, a Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge. 1990), 250–63. 53. Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ruth H. Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Origins of the Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1886–1930 (Champaign/Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 54. Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), chap. 12. 55. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 56. Elizabeth Ewen, ‘‘City Lights; Immigrant Women and the Rise of the Movies,’’ SIGNS 5 (1980): 545–65. 57. John W. Briggs, ‘‘Fertility and Cultural Change among Families in Italy and America,’’ American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1129–45; S. P. Morgan, Susan C. Watkins, and D. C. Ewbank, ‘‘Generating Americans: Ethnic Differences in Fertility,’’ in After Ellis Island, ed. Susan Watkins et al. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1994); Ann Rosen Spector, Susan Cott Watkins, and Alice Goldstein, ‘‘Demographic Patterns and Family Behavior among Jewish and Italian Women in the United States, 1900–1940,’’ paper presented at the Social Science History Association Meetings, New Orleans, 1991. 58. Ira Rosenwaike, ‘‘Two Generations of Italians in America: Their Fertility Experience,’’ International Migration Review 7 (Fall 1973): 271–80. 59. Susan Cott Watkins and Angela D. Danzi, ‘‘Women’s Gossip Networks: Information Exchange and Social Support among Italian and Jewish Women in the United States, 1910–1940,’’ paper presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Washington, D.C., 1991. 60. For this approach, see Franc Sturino, ‘‘Family and Kin Cohesion among South Italian Immigrants in Toronto,’’ and Leo Cellini, ‘‘Emigration, the Italian

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Italian-American Women: A Review Essay 329 Family, and Changing Roles,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 288–311 and 273–87. 61. Gabaccia, ‘‘Nowhere at Home,’’ 68–71. 62. John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1. 63. Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 69–70; 130–35. 64. Lorett Treese, ‘‘Why It’s Mother: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs in New York,’’ Italian Americana 9, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1990): 25–41. 65. Luigi Pautasso, ‘‘La Donna Italiana Durante Il Periodo Fascista in Toronto, 1930–1940,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 168–86. 66. Mary E. Brown, ‘‘The Making of Italian-American Catholics: Jesuit Work on the Lower East Side, New York, 1890–1950s,’’ Catholic Historical Review 73 (April 1987): 285–303. 67. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993). 68. Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 69. Wallace Sillanpoa, ‘‘ ‘Enrolling American Italian Gay Men.’ ’’ Sillanpoa analyzed a number of writings by and about Italian American gay men. For reasons discussed below, literary scholars rather than historians have most effectively drawn attention to ethnic gay and lesbian life. See also Rose Romano, ‘‘Dodici Azpadu: Using Omerta to Break Omerta,’’ paper given at the 25th Annual Conference, AIHA, November 1992; ‘‘Il Viaggio Delle Donne: Italian-American Women Reach Shore,’’ Sinister Wisdom 41 (Summer/Fall 1990). 70. Most third- and subsequent-generation Italian Americans of both sexes now marry ‘‘out.’’ Alba, Ethnic Identity, 203. 71. ‘‘Men without Women: Italian Migrants in Canada, 1885–1930,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 79–102. 72. Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-American (New York: Doubleday, 1974). 73. Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change among Italian Immigrants (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). 74. Corrine Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers and Daughters, Oral Histories of Three Generations of Ethnic American Women (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 5; see also VaneetaMarie D’Andrea, ‘‘The Social Role Identity of Italian-American Women: An Analysis and Comparison of Familial and Religious Expectations,’’ in The Family and Community Life of Italian Americans, 61–68; Elisabetta Vezzosi, E. ‘‘L’immigrata italiana: alla ricerca di una identita` femminile nell’America del primo novecento,’’ Movimento Operaio e Socialista 7, no. 3 (1984): 305–19. 75. For an early statement, see Harriet Perry, ‘‘The Metonymic Definition of the Female and the Concept of Honour among Italian Immigrant Families in Toronto,’’ The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 223–33.

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330 Donna Gabaccia 76. Charlotte Baum et al., The Jewish Woman in America (New York: New American Library, 1975); Sydney S. Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers: Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); for Glenn, see n. 44. 77. See no. 30. 78. See n. 54. 79. Neither Pozzetta (n. 2) nor Mangione and Morreale (n. 3), for example, cite Ewen’s work in their lengthy bibliographies. 80. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum’s ongoing project ‘‘Godmothers’’ may become such a general work. On regionalism, see Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, ‘‘Italian Immigrant Women in the Southwest,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 324–34; M. Susanna Garroni, ‘‘Coal Mines, Farm and Quarry Frontiers: The Different Americas of Italian Immigrant Women,’’ Studia Nordamericana 5, no. 2 (1988): 115–36; Louise R. Edwards, ‘‘Italian Immigrant Women in America: Situating their Experience in a Demographic and Regional Context, 1910–1940,’’ paper given at the 1989 Social Science History Association Meetings, Washington, D.C. 81. Emiliana Noether, ‘‘The Silent Half: Le Contadine del Sud before the First World War’’; Judith Jeffrey Howard, ‘‘The Civil Code of 1865 and the Origins of the Feminist Movement in Italy’’; Mary Gibson, ‘‘Prostitution and Feminism in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy’’; Claire LaVigna, ‘‘Women in the Canadian and Italian Trade Union Movements at the Turn of the Century: A Comparison’’; and Nancy G. Eshelman, ‘‘Forging a Socialist Women’s Movement: Angelica Balabanoff in Switzerland,’’ in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, 3–75. 82. Liberazione delle Donne: Feminism in Italy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). 83. Lucia Birnbaum, ‘‘Earthmothers, Godmothers, and Radicals: The Inheritance of Sicilian American Women,’’ Marxist Perspectives 3 (Spring 1980): 128–41. 84. Birnbaum, Black Madonnas. 85. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street. 86. Donna Gabaccia, ‘‘In the Shadows of the Periphery: Italian Women in the Nineteenth Century,’’ in Connecting Spheres, Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jeanne H. Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166–76. 87. Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), chap. 7. 88. ‘‘Sicilian Women Go to City Hall: The Roots of the Political Participation of Immigrant Women,’’ paper given at the 25th Annual Conference, AIHA, November 1992. 89. Parrino, ‘‘Education in the Autobiographies of Four Italian Women’’; Parrino, ‘‘Breaking the Silence: Autobiographies of Italian Immigrant Women,’’ Studi Nordamericana 5, no. 2 (1988): 137–58. Few autobiographies of immigrant Italian women are as well known as Maria Hall Ets, Rosa, the Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970). For others see Gabaccia, Immigrant Women in the United States, chap. 11.

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Italian-American Women: A Review Essay 331 90. Helen Barolini, ed., The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1985). See also Anthony J. Tamburri and Fred Gardaphe, eds., From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991). 91. Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, Daughters, 1991. Other scholars, however, continue to use oral history as a source of data: see Elizabeth G. Messina, ‘‘Narratives of Nine Italian American Women: Childhood, Work and Marriage,’’ Italian Americana 10, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1992): 186–202. 92. Connie Maglione and Carmen Anthony Fiore, eds., Voices of the Daughters (Princeton, N.J.: Townhouse Publishing, 1989). 93. Mary Jo Bona, The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian/American Women Writers (Toronto: Guernica Press, 1994). 94. Mary Jo Bona, ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Voices We Carry. See also Romano, ‘‘Dodici Azpadu’’; Chris Ruggiero and Gloria Ricci Lothrop, ‘‘Reclaiming the Subject: Italian-American Women Self-Defined,’’ Explorations in Ethnic Studies 9, no. 1 (1986): 27–36. 95. For early examples, see Antoinette T. Ragucci, ‘‘Generational Continuity and Change in Concepts of Health, Curing Practices, and Ritual Expressions of the Women of an Italian-American Enclave,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1971; Karyl McIntosh, ‘‘Folk Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Pediatrics in Utica, New York,’’ New York Folklore 4 (Summer/Winter 1978): 49–59. More recently see Elizabeth Mathias and Richard Raspa, Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985); Helen Barolini, Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). 96. Cyril C. Martindale, Life of Mother Francesca Saverio Cabrini, Foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1931); A Benedictine of Stanbrook Abbey, Frances Xavier Cabrini, The Saint of the Emigrants (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1944); Lucille P. Borden, Francesca Cabrini, without Staff or Script (New York: Macmillan, 1945); Theodore Maynard, Too Small a World: The Life of Francesca Cabrini (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1945); Pietro Di Donato, Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini (New York: McGrawHill, 1960); Sergio C. Lorit, Frances Cabrini (New York: New York City Press, 1970); Mary L. Sullivan, ‘‘Mother Cabrini: Missionary to Italian Immigrants,’’ U.S. Catholic Historian 6 (Fall 1987): 264–79; Stephen Michael Digiovanni, ‘‘Mother Cabrini: Early Years in New York,’’ Catholic Historical Review 77, no. 1 (January 1991): 56–77; Mary Louise Sullivan, Mother Cabrini, ‘‘The Italian Immigrant of the Century’’ (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1992). 97. Emilese Aleandri, ‘‘Women in the Italian-American Theater.’’ See also Barbara M. Barker, ‘‘The American Careers of Rita Sangalli, Giuseppina Morlacchi and Maria Bonfanti: Nineteenth Century Ballerinas,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1981. For older biographies of violinist Camilla Urso, opera singers Luisa Tetrazzini and Adelina Patti, and dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi, see chap. 10 in Gabaccia, Immigrant Women in the United States.

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332 Donna Gabaccia 98. Besides Bodnar, The Transplanted, see Maxine Schwartz Seller, America, a History of Ethnic Life in the United States, rev. ed. (Englewood, N.J.: Jerome S. Ozer, 1988); Roger Daniels, Coming to America, A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women and Gender in American Immigrant Life, 1820–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 99. Kathleen N. Conzen et al., ‘‘The Invention of Ethnicity,’’ Altreitalie 2, no. 3 (1990): 4–36; Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The notion of ethnicity’s construction came from literature. See Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 100. Besides Alba, Italian Americans, see Alba, Ethnic Identity. For an Italian-Americanist response to Alba’s arguments, see George E. Pozzetta, ‘‘Chi e`, allora, l’euroamericano, quest’uomo nuovo?’’ Altreitalie 6, 3 (November 1991): 93–98. 101. Pozzetta and Ramirez, The Italian Diaspora. 102. Model studies include Mary H. Blewett, ‘‘Manhood and the Market: The Politics of Gender and Class among the Textile Workers of Fall River, Massachusetts, 1870–1880,’’ and Nancy A. Hewitt, ‘‘ ‘The Voice of Virile Labor’: Labor Militancy, Community Solidarity, and Gender Identity among Tampa’s Latin Workers, 1880–1921,’’ both in Work Engendered, Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 92–113 and 142–67. 103. Romano, ‘‘Where Is Nella Sorellanza When You Need Her?’’ 104. See, for example, 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), 254–91. 105. See, for example, Betty Bergland, ‘‘Ideology, Ethnicity, and the Gendered Subject: Reading Immigrant Women’s Autobiographies,’’ in Seeking Common Ground, 101–22. 106. Anthony J. Tamburri, ‘‘The Madonna Complex: The Justification of a Prayer,‘‘ paper given at the 25th Annual Conference, AIHA, November 1992. See also Cathy Schwichtenberg, ed., The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). 107. Lucia Birnbaum, ‘‘Black Madonnas: Postmodernist Interdisciplinary History.’’

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Materials from Arno Press The Italian-American Woman maxine seller 1976

Arno Press has published an impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States with its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. The series is as diverse as the community it depicts. It includes the autobiography of Pascal D’Angelo, Son of Italy (1924); the poems of the romantic labor-radical Arturo Giovannitti (with an introduction by Norman Thomas); nine novels varying in literary quality from mediocre to superb (but all valuable as statements of information on Italian-American life); and documents ranging from the reports of Protestant mission societies at the turn of the century to the proceedings of the Third Symposium of American Studies, organized by the University of Florence in 1969. It includes historical and sociological examinations of communities all over the country, topical studies ranging from education and health to labor activities and political attitudes, classic volumes by pioneer investigators such as Giovanni Schiavo, and recent works by contemporary scholars, some published here for the first time. In view of the current interest in women’s history and women’s roles, it is unfortunate that the Arno series contains so few works dealing with women. Not one of the thirty-nine volumes is devoted exclusively to women. In the anthologies only two documents are primarily concerned with women: Antonio Stella’s report ‘‘The Effects of Urban Congestion on Italian Women and Children’’ and a YMCA pamphlet, published in Italian, on the problems of the Italian immigrant woman. Materials on Italian working women and documents on Italian women’s organizations would have been a welcome addition to the series. Relative neglect of women cannot be attributed solely to the editors, however. The authors of many of the studies appear to have done their research on the assumption that the only 333

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people of importance in Italian-American life were male. Richard Otis Ulin’s study of Italian-American students, as well as Michael Parenti’s work on Italian-American political attitudes and activities, for example, ignore the female population altogether. Despite this neglect, the careful reader can uncover a wealth of information on Italian women scattered throughout the Arno series. Some of this material embodies old, negative stereotypes of Italian women as ignorant, backward, superstitious household drudges, oppressed by their husbands and of no interest to the outside world except in their roles as mothers. This is essentially the view that emerges in the Arno anthology Protestant Evangelism among Italians in America. Protestant missionaries talked about providing a ‘‘social ministry’’ to Italian women, not so much because they were concerned about the women, but because they recognized that Protestantization of the children was impossible without conversion of their mothers. A close reading of the Arno documents shows that this interest was more talked about than acted upon. Despite repeated statements of the necessity for a female ministry to Italian women, missionary societies did not hire many women. Missions described in the documents provided more varied activities for boys than they did for girls. (A mission in New Haven, Connecticut, for example, scheduled a wide range of athletics for junior and senior boys but only offered folk games and a story hour for junior girls— and nothing at all for senior girls.) Often missions provided English classes for men, but only ‘‘mothers clubs’’ for women, despite complaints that immigrant women were not fit companions for their children because they remained ‘‘static in mental outlook.’’1 Undoubtedly, many women did live lives of powerlessness and household drudgery as portrayed in these missionary documents. Other materials in the Arno collection, however, suggest a much more varied picture. The community studies show that, in contrast to the stereotypes, first- and second-generation Italian women often worked outside the home. In Omaha they were stenographers, seamstresses, saleswomen, telephone operators, and domestics. Parents were ambitious for daughters as well as for sons. According to Charles W. Churchill’s study of Newark, over half of the firstgeneration parents in that city wanted their daughters to be either professionals or white collar workers; only 25 percent of the first generation and 10 percent of the second wanted their daughters to become ‘‘only housewives.’’ The Omaha study mentions a number of Italian women in that city who did achieve professional status, including women with graduate degrees in languages and one doctor, a Dr. Nancy Catania, physician, surgeon, and faculty member at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine.

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Most Italian women who worked outside the home were blue collar or industrial workers. Edwin Fenton’s superb study, Immigrants and Unions, one of the most valuable works in the Arno series, contains fascinating material on these women. Fenton describes the difficulties in unionizing Italian women in the garment industries in the opening years of the twentieth century and the changes that gradually took place. According to Fenton, by 1919 the number of Italian women in the garment unions was growing and ‘‘some of them proved to be exceedingly energetic and bellicose, as the police rolls showed.’’2 Fenton tells us that union leaders recognized the relationship between subservience in the family and subservience on the job, and therefore they made deliberate attempts not only to radicalize Italian women at work but also to equalize their positions within the home. Clement Valletta’s study of Carneta (a pseudonym for a town in a rural and industrial area of eastern Pennsylvania) analyzes the position of the traditional nonworking immigrant woman within the home, a position that, unlike the stereotype, was far from powerless. ‘‘Your reputation is everything. If you’re good, you’ll always have the upper hand.’’3 Other community histories describe women’s charitable, educational, and social activities outside the home, activities that varied in scope from one community to another. Scattered and sparse as these materials are, they suggest that women played a variety of roles and that there is more to be learned in this area. Some of the most useful insights about Italian women are those of novelists. While women do not figure prominently in many academic studies in the Arno series, they are very prominent in virtually every novel, indicating their central importance in the ‘‘real,’’ if not the scholarly, world. The most appealing picture of the traditional Italian mother is the character of Marietta in Jo Pagano’s Golden Wedding (1943). Marietta is devoted to her husband and children, around whom her life revolves. She works hard (without being a drudge) and, though lacking formal education, is a woman of intelligence. Her husband heads the family, but she initiates many of the most important decisions: to leave the coal mines and move to a town, for example, and later to give up saloon keeping in the town and go into business in Denver. Traditional in lifestyle, she is a person of significance and influence within her sphere. Garibaldi Lapolla’s Fire in the Flesh (1931) shows us a different kind of Italian woman, the independent, frankly sexual Agnese, who does not limit herself to a traditional lifestyle. As a young girl in Italy, Agnese acknowledges publicly that she has an illegitimate child and that the child’s father is the village priest. In the United States she continues to defy convention by entering into a successful business partnership with a

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man other than her husband. Throughout the novel Agnese is shrewd, practical, and—though loyal to her family—entirely independent, moving freely in the business world as in the home. Undoubtedly there were women like Marietta and Agnese in actual life as well as in fiction, and the Arno collection should stimulate scholars to learn more about them. Notes 1. Philip M. Rose, The Italians in America (New York: Kessinger Publishing Co., 1922; New York: Arno, 1975), 75 and 143–46. 2. Edwin Fenton, Immigrants and Unions: A Case Study; Italian and American Labor, 1870–1920 (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1957; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 526. 3. Clement Lawrence Valletta, A Study of Americanization in Carneta: Italian American Interest through Three Generations (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1968; New York: Arno Press, 1975), 192.

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Italian Women in America Sources for Study betty boyd caroli 1976

In the period of greatest immigration, from 1830 to 1920, women accounted for approximately one-third of all the Europeans arriving in the United States.1 Because fewer women repatriated, their contribution to permanent immigration is even greater. Yet they are, for the most part, absent from histories of immigrant experiences and from scholarship measuring changes that ethnic groups fostered in their adopted country. As the fields of women’s studies and immigration history grow, this neglect will no doubt find correction, and the records of the largest groups at least will be examined.2 Materials on the immigration experiences of Italian women emerge more readily than those of some other groups. After unification, their country’s central government collected statistics on movements in and out of the various regions, thus providing better information at the departure point than for many others who, because of fluctuating geographical boundaries and multinational backgrounds, had to await classification at debarkation in the United States. Sommario di Statistiche Storiche Italiane3 and Annuario Statistico dell’Emigrazione Italiana4 summarize many of the Italian government reports, although they present some problems. Italians used a calendar rather than fiscal year and adopted first one and then another method of gathering data on departing nationals. Difficulties in using Italy’s statistics are summarized by Anna Maria Ratti5 and Elizabeth Cometti.6 Immigration scholars generally regard the receiving country as a more accurate source of information although American officials, before 1899, classified newcomers according to country of origin, obscuring differences of ethnicity and religion. Nevertheless, the sexual composition of immigrants, by country but not by age, between 1820 and 1899 is available.7 After 337

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1899 American officials categorized arriving aliens by ‘‘race or people,’’ distinguishing northern Italians—inhabitants of Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia, and Veneto—from southern Italians.8 In American terminology even Florentines and Genoese are ‘‘southerners.’’ The Annual Report of the Immigration Commissioner breaks down northern and southern Italian women, after 1910, by age and marital status, literacy, financial condition, and travel arrangements.9 American sources remain valuable in spite of limitations and errors as noted by Edward P. Hutchinson,10 Campbell Gibson,11 and others. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic have relied on United States statistics for analyses of Italy’s contribution through emigration.12 Any examination of the roles of immigrant women must define their status in the society which they left. Here Italian materials are superior, especially on occupations cited for immigrant women. United States immigration officials drew a general picture of conditions in Italy,13 but failed to report occupations of national groups by sex. Nor did they break down Italian population shifts further than the inappropriate ‘‘northern Italian’’ and ‘‘southern Italian.’’ For the years after 1915 the Annuario shows types of employment for women immigrants, both by region left and new country entered.14 Several writers have explored intellectual achievements of upper-class women in Italy. Few of the well-educated emigrated, but their stories illustrate the range of possibilities available to some women. Much of the research in this field occurred on both sides of the Atlantic in the early decades of the twentieth century. Emmanuel Pierre Rodocanachil5 and Mary Agnes Cannon16 cite examples of learned women. Nicola Zanichelli’s history of the University of Bologna17 lists women professors. An excellent source on the feminist movement in Italy in the nineteenth century is by a Siena professor, Franca Pieroni Bortolotti.18 The author covers the exchange of ideas between American and Italian feminists, neither of whom paid much attention to immigrant women. Bortolotti followed her earlier book with another on the relationship between feminism and socialism in Italy.19 More relevant to the pre-immigration lives of Italian women are analyses of their work records. Amintore Fanfani discusses the role of women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when they worked in Florentine textile factories, Lombard mines, and Roman schools.20 On their more recent history, Mary Argyle Taylor writes of crafts associated with various regions of Italy,21 Helen Campbell reports conditions of women working in their

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homes,22 and Mrs. Thomas Okey lists labor laws at the beginning of the twentieth century.23 Louise Tilly’s critique of work in the field provides a useful supplement to descriptive material but often lacks any attempt at interpretation.24 Professor Tilly concludes that women’s roles in Italy derived from complex class and geographical differences and cites sources for further exploration. More specifically on the subject of emigration from Italy, several writers have observed a long history of women leaving their families for employment elsewhere. Amy Bernardy’s article in the Bollettino dell’ Emigrazione lists examples of towns which women left to find work while their husbands stayed home to tend the land.25 Various reports of the Ministero dell’Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio (MAIC) offer similar evidence. One pamphlet includes photographs of eating and sleeping facilities for women at the work site.26 Other MAIC reports give information on migratory women workers in Italy, such as travel arrangements, earnings, and days worked. In both northern and southern regions, women accounted for a sizable percentage of the agricultural worker force.27 Migratory female workers in Italy generally labored in the fields, but large numbers of other women did manufacturing-type tasks, often in their own homes. MAIC gathered materials on their working conditions.28 The best source for statistics on women workers in Italy is Ornello Vitali’s book, which summarizes by region jobs held by women in various sectors of the economy.29 It is based on various censuses taken between 1881 and 1961. Much of the research on the Italian woman has centered on her role in the family. The intricate system of godparentage, involving both etiquette and tradition, is explored in articles by Leonard Moss and others.30 In his writing on the southern Italian family, Professor Moss concludes, after interviewing residents of several small towns in the 1950s, that women more willingly accepted new ideas than did their husbands and brothers.31 Women organized into groups more frequently and discussed their problems with greater freedom than did men in the same towns. The authors described Italian families as ‘‘mother-centered’’ rather than patriarchal. In an investigation of women’s roles in superstitions and witchcraft in an Abruzzian village, Leonard Moss and Stephen C. Capponari found that the town doctor received less credence from residents than did the local magaro (witch doctor and healer).32 Carlo Levi’s book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, explores the prejudices and superstitions observed by a Florentine doctor during his exile at a southern village in the 1930s.33 Torregreca, by an American

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woman, Ann Cornelisen, describes another southern town and its superstitious practices in the 1950s.34 Alice Hamilton documents the transfer of old beliefs to Chicago.35 Whatever interest and importance the pre-immigrant phase may hold for students of the Italian experience, the years after arrival in the United States also deserve careful attention. An analysis of census returns and city directories will help document women’s economic roles. This task becomes difficult for the years before the onset of mass immigration because published censuses do not distinguish the small ‘‘Italian-born’’ group from ‘‘other foreign-born.’’ Analysis of federal manuscript census schedules, when these are available, and state enumerations provide some evidence on the extent of employment of Italian women outside their homes.36 By 1890 the Italian component in several of America’s largest cities had become large enough for separate consideration. Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor, gathered together some of the census material in his book on the slums of Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.37 A report by John S. Billings, an army physician, includes significant material on Italians in New York City and Brooklyn between 1884 and 1890.38 Billings breaks down the two cities by ward and sanitary district, giving information on mortality and causes of death for persons who are distinguished by their mothers’ birthplace. Separate categories exist for English, Irish, Scots, French, Germans, Russians and Poles, Canadians, Scandinavians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Italians and the catch-all ‘‘other.’’ Billings’s material makes comparisons possible, for example, on infant mortality rates among the various groups. A vehement debate developed in the early twentieth century over women’s working conditions and the restriction of immigration. More complete records of the industrial scene resulted. A Russell Sage study, report by Louise C. Odencrantz, concludes that Italian women in metropolitan New York entered manufacturing jobs in much higher percentages than other immigrant women, but they avoided domestic work.39 The Odencrantz book includes a supplementary study by Henriette Walter on single Italian women, arriving in New York City between 1912 and 1913.40 A majority of the unmarried women respondents gave economic reasons for journeying to North America. Many of them intended to support families back in Italy with their remittances. New York City is also the setting of Mabel Hurd Willett’s examination of the clothing trade. After investigating apartments where home finishers

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worked, she concluded that whenever finishers are found in large numbers, ‘‘we may be sure that they are Italians.’’41 Several summaries of women’s work based on census material contain valuable data but do not distinguish further than ‘‘native-born’’ and ‘‘foreignborn.’’ This approach characterizes Statistics of Women at Work, based on the 1900 census,42 and Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920 by Joseph A. Hill.43 Although these accounts do not document Italian women’s participation, they provide a general picture of employment opportunities. A more interpretive approach characterizes an article by Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge in Journal of Political Economy.44 The authors note varying rates of growth in traditional women’s jobs during the time of heavy Italian immigration. Domestic work grew slowly, for example, while trade and clerical jobs mushroomed. Mary Van Kleeck, in her study of artificial flower makers, found Italian girls more willingly worked for less money than other immigrant females.45 One young Italian girl reported to an interviewer that she accepted a low wage in order to help send her brother through medical school. Elias Tobenkin noted a similar docility among young Italian women in Chicago.46 Additional case histories, some of them emotionally charged, are included in a book by Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt on working girls in New York City.47 Amy Bernardy, Italian writer and sympathetic student of her country’s emigrants, described conditions of women’s lives in the United States through articles published in Italy.48 Bernardy noted a large number of her countrywomen arriving in the United States unaccompanied by a member of their families. She concludes that most of them worked at one time or other in the boardinghouse system. Caroline Manning reports results of interviews with 2,146 immigrant women, including 214 Italians, in Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley in the 1920s.49 Breakdowns by marital status, literacy, family size, and wages help describe working Italian women in those sections of Pennsylvania. The progressive period of labor union growth generated many state commissions to investigate working conditions of immigrant women. For a description of living arrangements and case studies of single women, see Massachusetts Commission on Immigration50 and New York’s Factory Investigating Commission Reports.51 Most studies of Italian unionization deal with men rather than their working wives and sisters. Observers of women’s unions generally concluded that Italian women organized less willingly than other immigrants.52

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The Women’s Trade Union League of New York described its efforts to convince Italian women of the benefits they could derive from joining the League.53 Eventually the Women’s Mutual Benefit Society, formed with the help of Arturo Caroti, an Italian socialist, got the support of some of his countrywomen because the Society provided them with inexpensive medical insurance. Mobility studies generally confine their subjects to men54 but one comparison of Italians and Eastern European Jews in New York City, 1880– 1915, has a chapter on women and children.55 Thomas Kessner notes that, in the sample studied, single Italian women made more substantial gains than their brothers on the ladder of occupational status. Mobility over two or three generations can be examined in federal census summaries by Niles Carpenter56 and Edward P. Hutchinson.57 Various volumes of the United States Immigration Commission report on earnings of several ethnic groups, their housing conditions, and their education. Volumes twenty-six and twenty-seven focus on seven cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Buffalo. In each city a sample of the principal immigrant groups was examined. Women in Buffalo, a majority of whom came from Sicily and had less than ten years of American residence, reported much lower numbers employed than a similar sample group in New York City.58 Extremely small percentages of Italian women engaged in domestic work but large numbers went into needle trades, where those jobs existed.59 Whether in national samples from particular industries or in individual cities, southern Italian girls often left school and took jobs at younger ages than other immigrant girls or their Italian brothers. In discussing fecundity of immigrant women, several writers such as Gilbert Kelly Robinson60 and Arnold M. Rose61 examined Italians. Massimo Livi Bacci, a demographer, includes a chapter on the fecundity of Italian women after 1917 in his book on assimilation of his compatriots in America.62 In the debate concerning changes which the Italian family experienced in the American setting, Paul Campisi,63 contrary to the interpretation of Virginia Yans McLaughlin,64 describes important alterations after immigration. Professor Yans McLaughlin concludes that the Italian family in Buffalo remained male-centered even when the father lost his job. Leonard Moss reported similar findings in a southern Italian town.65 Lydio Tomasi’s bibliographical essay summarizes the most important sources on family structure in both countries.66

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Lucy H. Gillett discusses Italian-American families’ nutritional needs and dietary habits.67 The social worker endorses Italian housewives’ preference for fresh fruits and vegetables, but she discourages them from heavy consumption of coffee and sugar. Among those assigning a strong role to the immigrant Italian woman are Richard Gambino and Leonard Covello. In a chapter of his book Blood of My Blood, Gambino considers the meaning of la serieta, a requisite characteristic of Italian women.68 The term, best translated as seriousness, includes reliability and strength in independent action. Covello’s classic study, Social Backgrounds of the Italian American School Child, also emphasizes the central, important role of the Italian woman in her family’s life.69 Fictional accounts of Italian families in America describe different sections of the country and time periods. Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro treats a Rochester immigrant mother who spoke less English than her husband, worked entirely among her own country-people and insisted on the use of her native language in her home.70 Mario Puzo’s Fortunate Pilgrim is a woman’s story told by her son.71 The mother’s life on New York City’s West Side in the 1920s and 1930s develops outside the boundaries of her control. In Puzo’s words, ‘‘She had never meant to be a pilgrim. To sail a fearful ocean.’’72 Other fictional accounts of Italian-American families, with strong emphasis on the mother’s role, include Michael De Capite’s Maria.73 Her life evolves through expanding boundaries, described in sections of the book entitled ‘‘Little Italy,’’ ‘‘The South Side,’’ and ‘‘The City.’’ At the end Maria takes a job to assume total support of her two children. Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato describes a widow’s attempts to keep her family together after her husband’s death in a construction accident.74 The family’s story, prior to the father’s death, is the subject of Three Circles of Light, which di Donato published in 1960.75 For fictional accounts of the Italian-American family written by women, see Marion Benasutti’s No Steady Job for Papa76 and Mari Tomasi’s descriptions of life in Vermont.77 Few biographies exist of Italian immigrant women. Notable American Women,78 a three-volume reference work, includes only one Italian among the 1,350 women covered.79 Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart and the first American citizen to become a saint, is the subject of several biographies.80 A more typical immigrant experience is described in Rosa, the story of a northern Italian woman who immigrated to Missouri in the 1880s and then moved to Chicago and worked at the Commons, a settlement house.81

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Oral histories, now being collected, may help document the lives of other typical Italian women. In addition to the Immigration Museum’s collection at the Statue of Liberty, others are underway in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, and Boston’s North End.82 The last compares records of Italian women over three generations. Additional local studies, relying on extant official records as well as personal documents and oral accounts, will help describe the Italian woman’s move to America. Much more research is needed on specific roles in different sections of Italy, because evidence already examined shows that the Sicilian woman shared little with her Trentino sister, even though they may have disembarked alongside each other in New York. Once Italian backgrounds are carefully documented, the effect of American settlement on the religious, political, economic, and social lives of Italian women of different ages can be explored. Why, for example, did so few women take jobs in Buffalo while many more, from similar backgrounds, went into New York City’s factories? What role did the many benevolent societies, such as San Raphael, play in the adjustment of Italian women? These societies’ records, available at the Center for Migration Studies, merit careful examination.83 Many settlement house files from eastern urban centers and the Midwest are housed in the Social Welfare Archives at the University of Minnesota. Additional sources include local church data, especially those of women’s organizations, and newspaper accounts of women’s activities as well as individual responses. The uncovering of additional materials plus renewed scrutiny of the old will produce a clearer picture of Italian women’s lives before and after immigration. Only after many of those sources have been tapped and thoroughly analyzed can valid comparisons with women from other ethnic groups be made. Notes 1. The author acknowledges financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York. 2. The American Italian Historical Association and the Canadian-Italian Historical Association will consider the Italian Immigrant Woman in North America at a meeting at the University of Toronto in 1977. Doctoral dissertations and articles on ethnic women indicate a growing interest. The Second Berkshire Conference, Radcliffe College, October 1974, included a panel on immigrant women in urban America, and the American Studies Association considered the topic at its November 1975 meeting.

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Italian Women in America: Sources for Study 345 3. Istituto centrale di statistica, Sommario di statistiche storiche italiane (Rome, 1958). 4. Commissariato Generale dell’ Emigrazione, Annuario statistico della emigrazione italiana (Rome, 1926). 5. Anna Maria Ratti, ‘‘Italian Migration Movements, 1876–1926,’’ in International Migrations, ed. Walter F. Willcox, 2 vols. (New York, 1929–31), 2:440–71. 6. Elizabeth Cometti, ‘‘Trends in Italian Emigration,’’ Western Political Quarterly 2 (December 1958): 820–34. 7. Among the most accessible are: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census with the cooperation of the Social Science Research Council, 1965); U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907–1910, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 41 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), especially vol. 3; and Walter F. Willcox, ed., International Migrations, vol. 1. 8. U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907–1910, Reports, 5: 81. 9. U.S. Commissioner General of Immigration, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office). 10. Edward P. Hutchinson, ‘‘Notes on Immigration Statistics,’’ Journal of the American Statistical Association 53 (1958): 963–1025. 11. Campbell Gibson, ‘‘The Contribution of Immigration to U.S. Population Growth,’’ International Migration Review 9 (Summer 1975): 157–77. 12. For example, the classic study by Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, 1919) as well as the more recent demography monograph, L’immigrazione e l’assimilazione degli italiani negli s.u. (Milan, 1961) both use American statistics. 13. U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907–1910, Reports, IV. 14. Commissaria to Generale dell’ Emigrazione, Annuario statistico della emigrazione italiana (Rome, 1926). Pages 345 to 415 show the number of males and females over 15 years of age leaving each region between 1915 and 1920. Emigrants are distinguished by destination and by occupation. 15. Emmanuel Pierre Rodocanachi, La femme italienne avant, pendant et apres la renaissance (Paris, 1922). 16. Mary Agnes Cannon, The Education of Women During the Renaissance (Washington, D.C., 1916). 17. Nicola Zanichelli, L’universita di Bologna: Nel passato e nel presente (Bologna, 1919). 18. Franca Pieroni Bortolotli, Aile origini delmovimento femminile in Italia, 1848– 1892 (Turin, 1973). 19. Bortolotti, Socialismo e Questione Femminile in Italia, 1892–1922 (Milan, 1974). 20. Amintore Fanfani, Storia del Lavoro in Italia (Milan, 1943). 21. Mary Argyle Taylor, ‘‘Italian Industries for Women,’’ Atlantic 100 (October 1907): 547–52. 22. Helen Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty Abroad (Boston, 1890). 23. Mrs. Thomas Okey, Labour Laws for Women in Italy (London, 1908).

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346 Betty Boyd Caroli 24. Louise Tilly, ‘‘Comments on the Yans-Mclaughlin and Davidoff Papers,’’ Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 452–59. 25. Amy Bernardy, ‘‘L’emigrazione delle donne e dei fanciulli dal Piemonte,’’ Bollettino dell’ Emigrazione, no. 10 (1912): 3–64. 26. Ministero dell’ Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio (MAIC), Dati statistici sui lavoratori delle risaie del Vercellese (Rome, 1912). 27. MAIC, Le migrazioni periodiche interne dei lavoratori agricoli, no. 19 (Rome, 1913). Another pamphlet, by the same title, was published the following year as no. 25. 28. MAIC, La donna nell’ industria italiana, studi di demografia e di economia industriale, no. 5 (Rome, 1905). 29. Ornello Vitali, Aspelli delia sviluppo economico italiano alia luce delia ricostituzione delia popolazione attiva (Rome, 1970). Statistics are from censuses taken in 1881, 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931, 1936, 1951, and 1961. 30. Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Capponnari, ‘‘Patterns of Kinship, Comparaggio and Community in a South Italian Village,’’ Anthropological Quarterly 33 (January 1960): 24–32. 31. Leonard W. Moss and Walter Thomson, ‘‘The South Italian Family,’’ Human Organization, Vol. 18 (1959), 35–41. 32. Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Capponnari, ‘‘Folklore and Medicine in an Italian Village,’’ Journal of American Folklore 73 (April 1960): 95–102. 33. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York, 1947; reprint ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963). 34. Ann Cornelisen, Torregreca (Boston, 1969). 35. Alice Hamilton, ‘‘Witchcraft in West Polk Street,’’ American Mercury 10 (January 1927): 71–75. 36. Thomas Kessner, in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, used samples from the federal manuscript census of 1880 and the New York State censuses of 1892 and 1905 for his comparison of Italians and Jews in New York City. The dissertation, ‘‘The Golden Door: Immigrant Mobility in New York City,’’ was published by Oxford University Press in 1977. 37. Carroll D. Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia (Washington, D.C., 1894). This volume, subtitled Seventh Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor and reprinted by Arno Press in 1970, shows the size of the Italian population, by age and sex, in each of the four cities. See also Carroll D. Wright, Italians in Chicago (Washington, D.C., 1897). 38. John S. Billings, Vital Statistics of New York City and Brooklyn (Washington, D.C., 1894). 39. Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry (New York, 1919). 40. Henriette R. Walter, ‘‘Supplementary Study of Italian Women,’’ in Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry, 299–318. 41. Mabel Hurd Willett, The Employment of Women in the Clothing Trade (New York, 1902), 99. 42. S. N. D. North, Statistics of Women at Work (Washington, D.C., 1907).

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Italian Women in America: Sources for Study 347 43. Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870–1920 (Washington D.C., 1929). 44. Edith Abbott and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, ‘‘Employment of Women in Industries,’’ Journal of Political Economy 14 (January 1906): 14–40. 45. Mary Van Kleeck, Artificial Flower Makers (New York, 1913). 46. Elias Tobenkin, ‘‘The Immigrant Girl in Chicago,’’ Survey 23 (1909):189–204. 47. Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (New York, 1911). 48. Amy Bernardy, ‘‘L’emigrazione delle donne e dei fanciulli italiani nella North Atlantic Division,’’ Bollettino dell’ Emigrazione, No. 1 (1909): 3–159. Another article on Midwestern and western sections of the United States is entitled, ‘‘Sulle condizioni delle donne e dei fanciulli italiani negli Stati Uniti del Centro e dell’ovest della confederazione del Nord America,’’ Bollettino, No. 1 (1911): 3–170. 49. Caroline Manning, The Immigrant Woman and Her Job (Washington, D.C., 1929). 50. Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, Report on Immigration in Massachusetts (Boston, 1914). 51. New York Factory Investigating Commission, Preliminary Report, 3 vols. (Albany, 1912), especially vol. 1; and Fourth Report, 5 vols. (Albany, 1915), especially vol. 2. 52. Among others, Adriana Spadoni came to this judgment in a report of garment strikes in New York. An article, with photographs, ‘‘The Italian Working Woman in New York,’’ appears in Collier’s 49 (March 23, 1912): 14–16. 53. Women’s Trade Union League of New York, Annual Report, 1910–1911 (New York, 1911). 54. Among those who document mobility of Italian men but ignore, for the most part, the role of women: Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians (Cambridge, 1973); Humbert Nelli, The Italians of Chicago: A Study in Ethnic Mobility (New York, 1970); Josef J. Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Boston, 1975). 55. Thomas Kessner, ‘‘The Golden Door.’’ 56. Niles Carpenter, Immigrants and Their Children, 1920 (Washington, D.C., 1927). 57. Edward P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 1850–1950 (Washington, D.C., 1956). 58. U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907–1910, Reports, vols. 26 and 27. 59. U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907–1910, Reports, 28: 242 ff. 60. Gilbert Kelly Robinson, ‘‘Catholic Birth Rate: Further Facts and Implications,’’ American Journal of Sociology 41 (May 1936): 757–66. 61. Arnold M. Rose, ‘‘A Research Note on the Influence of Immigration on the Birth Rate,’’ American Journal of Sociology 47 (January 1942): 614–21. 62. Massimo Livi Bacci, L’immigrazione e l’assimilazione degli italiani negli S.U. (Milan, 1961).

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348 Betty Boyd Caroli 63. Paul Campisi, ‘‘Ethnic Family Patterns, The Italian Family in the United States,’’ American Journal of Sociology 53 (May 1948): 443–49. 64. Virginia Yans McLaughlin, ‘‘Like the Fingers of the Hand,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1971. 65. Leonard Moss and Walter Thomson, ‘‘The South Italian Family,’’ Human Organization 18 (1959): 35–41. 66. Lydio Tomasi, The Italian-American Family (Staten Island, 1972). 67. Lucy H. Gillett, ‘‘Factors Influencing Work Among Italians,’’ Journal of Home Economics 14 (January 1922): 14–19. 68. Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood (Garden City, N.Y., 1974). 69. Leonard Covello, Social Backgrounds of the Italian American School Child was first available as an unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University, 1944. It was later published in Leiden, 1967, and again in Totowa, New Jersey, 1972. 70. Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro (New York, 1942). 71. Mario Puzo, Fortunate Pilgrim (New York, 1964). 72. Ibid., 296. 73. Michael De Capite, Maria (New York, 1943). 74. Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (New York, 1939). 75. Pietro di Donato, Three Circles of Light (New York, 1960). 76. Marion Benasutti, No Steady Job for Papa (New York, 1966). 77. For a description of Mari Tomasi’s life and writing, see Alfred F. Rosa, ‘‘The Novels of Mari Tomasi,’’ in this volume. 78. Edward T. James et al., Notable American Women, 1607–1950, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1971). 79. Actresses and singers were excluded from this count because they seemed to represent a special group of immigrants. One Italian woman who became famous as an actress and impresario, Antonietta Pisanelli Alessandro, is considered by Maxine S. Seller, ‘‘Beyond the Stereotype: A New Look at the Immigrant Woman, 1880– 1924,’’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 3 (Spring 1975): 59–70. 80. Sr. Blandina Segale, much lesser known, told the story of her immigration to Cincinnati in 1854, taking religious vows in 1872 and serving first in Ohio and then in the Far West: At the End of the Santa Fe Trail (Milwaukee, 1948). 81. Marie Hall Ets, Rosa (Minneapolis, 1970). 82. The Immigration Museum’s oral-history program, under the direction of Margo Nash, concentrates on famous immigrants. 83. Center for Migration Studies, 209 Flagg Place, Staten Island, N.Y.

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Contributors

Carol Bonomo Albright has been editor-in-chief of Italian Americana for over twenty years. She recently initiated, with Christine Palamidessi Moore, a web supplement to the journal. It can be found at www.italianamericana .com. She served two terms as vice president of the American Italian Historical Association and has taught Italian American studies at Harvard University Extension School and has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard College. With Joanna Clapps Herman, she co-edited Wild Dreams: The Best of ‘‘Italian Americana’’ (Fordham University Press, 2008). In 2004 she co-edited an annotated edition of two of Joseph Rocchietti’s works, written in 1835 and 1845 (making one of them the first known Italian-American novel). She coedited an anthology, Italian Immigrants Go West, and was series editor of Italian American Autobiographies. Her memoir, My Greenwich Village and the Italian American Community was published last year. A section of her memoir was published in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion and was translated into Italian and published in Italy in the book Padri: Tre memoir italo americani; another section appeared in Harvard University Journal of Italian American Studies. Her essays have appeared in the landmark publication The Dream Book: Writings by Italian American Women, in Social Pluralism and Literary History, and in Voices of the Daughters; articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of American Ethnic History, PMLA, LIT, and MELUS. She has also written reviews and articles for the Providence Journal-Bulletin and has received numerous grants and awards, including being named an Associate Fellow of the Danforth Foundation and receiving a university-to-community outreach grant from that foundation. Christina Bevilacqua is the director of programs at the Providence Athenaeum Library in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Bard College and received her M.A. from the University of Chicago. Betty Boyd Caroli first became interested in the subject of immigration, especially repatriation, as a teacher of English in Palermo, Sicily. After 349

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completing research in Italy as a Fulbright scholar, she published Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914. She co-edited a volume from the 1977 American Italian Historical Association conference, The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, as well as Immigrants Who Returned Home, and Today’s Immigrants: Their Stories (with Thomas Kessner). Nathalie Cooke is Associate Dean of Arts at McGill University and a member of the Department of English. Her publications focus on Canadian literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on women’s life writing; they include a biography of Margaret Atwood (1998) and a critical companion to Atwood’s fiction (2004). She is founding editor of the electronic journal CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures and editor of the forthcoming volume What’s to Eat? Entre´es in Canadian Food History. Michael D’Angelo is research coordinator at the Rockland County Department of Planning. He has co-authored a number of research articles on the Italian-American experience. He is currently working on research about the decline of ethnic neighborhoods in New York. Rose De Angelis is Professor of English at Marist College, where she teaches courses in Ethnic and American Literature. She was the editor of the book series ‘‘Anthropology and Literature’’ from 1996 to 2001. Her work on Italian American Studies has appeared in Forum Italicum and Italian Americana. She has published articles on Eduardo De Filippo, Ford Madox Ford, Toni Morrison, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, and others and has edited a volume of essays entitled Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse. James Drake, president of Brevard Community College in Florida, is the author of seven books. Two of his biographies, Ponselle: A Singer’s Life (Doubleday), and Richard Tucker: A Biography (Dutton), with forewords by tenor Luciano Pavarotti, were selected as a Books of the Month by the National Book Clubs of America. He has served on the editorial board of Opera Quarterly. William Egelman is Professor of Sociology at Iona College. His articles have appeared in Italian Americana, Italian American Review, and a variety of other publications. His current research interests focus on Italian Americans in suburbia and changes in Italian-American urban communities.

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Contributors 351

Donna Gabaccia is Professor of History and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of many books and articles on immigration to the United States and Italian migration around the world, including (as co-editor, with Loretta Baldassar) Intimacy and Italian Migration: Gender and Domestic Lives in a Mobile World (Fordham University Press, 2011). Her next book, Foreign Relations: An International History of U.S. Immigration, will be published by Princeton University Press. Richard Gambino has a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University, and is emeritus professor at Queens College, where he founded the first Italian American Studies Program in the United States in 1973. He was a founder of Italian Americana. His book Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian Americans (1974) is considered a classic in the field. Sandra (Mortola) Gilbert is the co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press) and of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, whose three volumes are The War of Words; Sex Changes; and Letters from the Front. She also co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. She has also written Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, as well as three volumes of poetry. Edvige Giunta is professor of English at New Jersey City University and co-editor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. She is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (2002) and co-editor of The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (2002), Italian American Writers on New Jersey (2003), and Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (MLA, forthcoming). William Gratzer is Professor of Mathematics at Iona College. His current pedagogical pursuits include an investigation of the appropriate balance of theory and technology in statistics classes intended for non-statistics majors. His recent research has involved statistical investigations in the social sciences and health care. Carol Helstosky is Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she teaches European history and the history of food and

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drink. Her books include Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Italy (2004); Pizza: A Global History (2008); and Food Culture in the Mediterranean (2009). Blossom S. Kirschenbaum wrote two articles for The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia. She has taught at numerous American universities as well as in Rome and continues to collaborate with Italian Studies at Brown University. Published translations include novels, stories, and Fables from Trastevere, from the romanesco of Trilussa. Antonello Borra’s Alfabestiario, which she has translated in a dual-language illustrated edition, was the subject of her December 2009 MLA paper. Carole Brown Knuth is a native of South Carolina and received her Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published widely on James Joyce, southern women writers, and multicultural women’s literature. Dr. Knuth is Professor Emerita of English at Buffalo State College, where she taught courses in Irish literature, British Romanticism, ethnic American women writers, and southern literature for thirty-four years. She retired in 2007. Carol Scarvalone Kushner, who is the great-niece of Concetta Scaravaglione, studied sculpture with Scaravglione as a student at Vassar College. Kushner is now Professor of English at Dutchess Community College and is also a published fiction writer. Paul Levitt has written plays, novels, children’s books, medical books, and scholarly works. He is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has won awards for teaching and scholarship. His novel, Come with Me to Babylon, recently received ForeWord Magazine’s bronze prize for historical fiction, and his current novel, Stalin’s Barber, is nearing completion. Mary Ann Mannino is Associate Professor of English at Temple University. Her book, Revisionary Identities: Stategies of Empowerment in the Writing of Italian/American Women, was published by Peter Lang. She co-edited an anthology, Breaking Open, in which Italian-American women writers discuss ethnic influences on their creative works. An award-winning poet and fiction writer, her poem ‘‘Jimmy Fahey’’ took first place in the 2001 Allen Ginsberg poetry awards.

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Contributors 353

Elizabeth G. Messina, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice and a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She is editor of an anthology and author of numerous articles and book chapters that focus on Italian-American culture and behavior. She conducts cross-cultural research focused on Italians and Italian Americans and is currently president and co-founder of the Italian American Psychology Assembly. At the time of her interview with Tina De Rosa, Lisa Meyer worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times in its New York City bureau. Catherine Tripalin Murray preserved memories of the old Italian/Sicilian Greenbush neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin, with a history-laced compilation of family recipes and old photographs. Two sequels to A Taste of Memories from the Old ‘‘Bush,’’ 1900–1960 followed. Two of the three books received Book Awards of Merit from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. In 1996, Grandmothers of Greenbush was published, and today she is working on Spaghetti Corners and all that . . . Sauce! featuring the immigrant grandfathers and fathers. Christine Palamidessi Moore is senior editor and web editor at Italian Americana, a novelist, and an independent scholar of ethnic literatures. She began her writing career in radio and advertising and covered New York City’s independent film and video industry in the 1980s. Her books include The Virgin Knows (St. Martin’s Press) and The Fiddle Case (IAP); her stories and articles appear in publications as diverse as Andy Warhol’s Interview, Stone’s Throw, and Don’t Tell Mama. Her award-winning memoir ‘‘Grandmothers’’ is engraved on a granite monolith at Boston’s Jackson Square subway station. In 2007 Palamidessi Moore established Global Education Initiatives, a nonprofit organization that donates writing supplies to children in India and the Americas. Maria Parrino obtained her Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Genova, Italy. She has written articles about Italian-American women’s autobiographies and has published textbooks on short stories and Gothic literature. She teaches English language and literature in an Italian lyceum and teaches a course at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Padova.

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Jacqueline Reich is Associate Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity and Italian Cinema, and co-editor of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943. She has written numerous articles on Italian and Italian-American cinema. Alfred F. Rosa is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Vermont and an editor of Men against Granite by Mari Tomasi and Roaldus Richmond. Maxine Seller is Professor Emerita of Educational Administration and Policy and of History at the University at Buffalo. A past president of the national History of Education Society, she continues to do research and to publish in the fields of immigration and education history. Her most recent book, We Built Up Our Lives, deals with the British internment of Jewish refugees from Germany during World War II. Lorett Treese is the author of nine books and many articles on various aspects of mid-Atlantic regional history. She is a college archivist at her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, where she majored in Italian literature. She earned an M.A. from Villanova University in American History. Diane C. Vecchio is Professor of United States History at Furman University, where she teaches courses in American immigration history and the Jewish experience in America. She is the author of Midwives, Merchants, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America. She is currently working on Jewish peddlers and merchants in the South Carolina upcountry following the Civil War. Cassandra Vivian is an American writer and photographer of Italian ancestry. Her three writing foci are Egypt, the Mid-Monongahela Valley, and Italian Americana. In addition to Immigrant’s Kitchen, she has published a number of essays on Italian American foodways and The Oversee’s Family: A Memoir of the Tuscan Countryside, a book about the journey she and her eighty-six-year-old mother took to Tuscany in search of their heritage.

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Index

activities of women: charitable, educational, social, 311, 334, 335; kinship work, 311; Omaha study of work, 11, 334; work outside home, 311, 334. See also labor activism; labor unions Adams, Kay, 202–3, 204; compared to Lucy Mancini, 202 agoraphobia, 264 agriculture, 318; agrotowns, 318; feminization of, 318 Aiello, Rosa, 124, 125, 127, 131, 132n4 Aiello, Rose, 139n2 Albright, Carol Bonomo, 221 Alfredo, Panzini, 127 Alta House, activities of, 62–63 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 271, 278, 283n18 American Academy in Rome, 7, 226. See also Caponegro, Mary; Ciardi, John; Scaravaglione, Concetta American University in Cairo Press, 152 Americanization: of Italian name, 336n3; of religious faith, 318, 334; role of settlement houses in, 63; role of YMCA in, 40; of women, 313. See also family conflict; social workers amoral familism, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118 ancestors, search for, 12, 151, 223, 241, 264, 276, 282 anger, 2, 6, 27, 170, 183, 192, 198, 216, 218, 234, 265 Antin, Mary, 57, 66, 67

Arezzo, 150 Arno Press, 11; information on women found in, 331–36 artists: Scaravaglione, Concetta, 271–83 Artusi, Pellegrino, 123, 134 assimilation, 2, 5, 10, 22, 58, 84, 97, 99, 107, 205, 217, 219–22, 230, 311, 316 autobiographies, 77n64; and gender, 59; and group identity, 59–60; by women, 57–77, 72n4, 76n48, 260– 67, 271, 309, 319, 321 baccala, 151 Baltimore, 284, 298, 340, 344 Banfield, Edward C., 110, 115, 116 Bard College, 225, 249 Barolini, Helen, 206, 207–12; Chiaroscuro, 262; The Dream Book, 8, 263, 319; Festa, 138; ‘‘Greener Grass,’’ 10; Umbertina, 10, 207–12, 217, 220–22 beauty, in Italian-American culture, 148, 174, 183–85, 195, 282 Benevolent Society, 344 bengodi, 126. See also cuccagna binational: fiction, 230; identity, 225 biography, 7, 319 ‘‘Black Hand,’’ 48, 52 boarding house, 52, 341 Boni, Ada, 136, 153 ‘‘Bread and Roses’’ strike, women’s role in, 117, 327 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 121, 206 Brin, Irene, 128 Bronx Italian, 261, 300

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356 Index Brooklyn, 242, 243, 274, 340, 344; Williamsburg, 40, 242, 248 Brown University Writing Program, 226, 231 Bugialli, Giuliano, 153 businesswomen, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 207; as cigar makers, 48, 49; and domestic duties, 47–56; and family businesses, 47–56 Bynum, Caroline (Walker), 206 Calabria, 115, 155, 271, 276, 278, 282 Calleri, Maria, 263 campanilismo, 35–36 Camporesi, Piero, 123 Capatorto, Rosette, 261 capitalism, 114, 184; confrontation with, 315 Caponegro, Mary, 3, 8, 225–31 Cappello, Mary, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265 Caronia, Nancy, 261 Caruso, Enrico, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298 La casareccia napoletana pei golosi e buongustai, 123, 125, 126, 129, 131 Catholic, 4, 29, 58, 114, 117, 118, 129, 185, 188, 189, 190, 202, 218, 235, 263, 264, 303, 316, 321 Cavalleri, Rosa, 3, 63, 262 census, 9, 48, 53, 79, 309, 339, 349, 341, 342 Chiaroscuro, 262 Chicago, 6, 38, 41, 49, 148, 162, 164, 177, 178, 189, 276, 293, 340ff; Opera, 49, 293. See also Commons House children, 83, 85, 99, 102, 105, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118–19, 138, 161ff, 170, 173, 188, 205, 207, 209–10, 215, 216, 221–22, 233, 242, 244, 248, 254, 271, 311, 313, 314, 333ff, 342, 343 Christmas, 106, 150, 228 Ciardi, John, 230 cigar manufacturers, 48, 49 Ciresi, Rita, 217, 218, 219

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class differences, 59, 63, 117, 130, 131, 221, 222, 337ff Cleveland, 62, 342 clubs: drama, 66, 76; mothers’, 30–46; women’s, 49, 138, 251, 316, 334 college: and economic mobility, 9, 80, 83, 89, 97, 103, 217; expectation of, 4, 39, 166, 186, 202, 221, 244, 277; nurturing children for, 59, 60, 61, 71, 216, 222, 243 Comfort, Bob, 302 Commission Row, 49, 53 Commons House, Chicago, 41, 45, 75, 76, 164, 343 Communion, Holy, 63, 151, 212 comparaggio, 33, 216. See also godparent cookbooks, 121–55; in America, 138; Anglo-American ‘‘Italian,’’ 136; of community, 10, 22, 137, 138, 139, 140–41, 153; during fascism, 127–30, 131; as historical artifacts, 123, 124; and identity, 8, 121, 122, 153–54; invisibility of Italian-American, 10, 138; logistics of writing, 150; motivation to write, 10, 122, 142, 148; refashioned Italian cuisine in, 138; regionalism in, 10, 122, 123, 127 Coover, Robert, 225 Corleone family (The Godfather), 202–4. See also Adams, Kay Cornelisen, Ann, 24, 116, 117, 340. See also Mezzogiorno culture Coro d’Italia, 39 Council of Italian-American Mothers’ Clubs, 42 Council of Jewish Federations, survey of intermarriage, 110 counterrevulsion, in literature, 174 Covello, Leonard, 34, 58, 343 cuccagna, 126. See also bengodi La cucina casareccia napoletana, 123–32 cucina povera, purposes of, 124 D’Angelo, Pascal, 333 Deep Grow the Roots, 167–69

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Index 357 ‘‘Definition of Womanhood: Class, Acculturation, and Feminism,’’ 8 DeMedici, Lorenzo, 153 Demme, Jonathan, 301 demographics, of Italian Americans in 2000 federal census, 90–97 depression, 2, 27, 216–17, 298, 303, 304 Depression, the. See the Great Depression DeRosa, Tina, 177–201, 266 DeSalvo, Louise, 10, 211, 261, 262, 263 Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, 257 Dickinson, Emily, 196 discrimination, 58, 62, 68, 188, 223 Dogfight, 300, 302 Donovan, Molly Walsh, 218 The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women, 8, 263, 319 education: attainment, 11, 79, 80, 85, 90, 91, 97, 102, 103, 107, 246; changes in levels of, 79, 83, 84, 85, 97; in New York City, 4, 73, 79, 102 ‘‘The Effects of Urban Congestion on Italian Women and Children,’’ 333 employment, 78–86. See also activities of women; businesswomen; cigar manufacturers; labor unions; union activism; urban culture emigration, 318, 338, 339, 345 endogamy, 98, 99, 100, 102, 107 entertainment, 36, 41, 130, 160, 162, 183, 221, 255, 295, 314 entrepreneurs, 7, 47–56 Ermelino, Louisa, 10, 208 ethnic groups: African-American, 117, 121, 212, 263, 264, 311, 321; German, 101, 241, 340, 341; Irish, 101, 104, 170, 286, 311, 314, 316, 340; Jewish, 9, 96–109, 134, 137, 202, 204, 218, 227, 235, 241, 309ff; Latina, 263, 321; Lithuanian, 177, 187;

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Polish, 309, 311, 340; WASP, 121, 175, 210, 248, 321 Ets, Marie Hall, 34, 76, 164, 202 family: mother-daughter ties, 11, 312, 326n38; responsibilities of, 11, 16, 17, 18, 29, 47, 54, 112, 116, 272, 309, 311 family conflict, 8, 24, 26, 27, 99, 169, 272, 300, 301, 302, 304, 312, 317; intergenerational, 3, 59, 60; rebellion and, 211, 233; role of social welfare agencies in, 314. See also social workers Farebegoli, Elba, 33, 35, 39–43 fascism in Italy: food during, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131; propaganda against, 167, 279 father, role of, 3, 17, 20, 21, 33, 34, 60, 61, 69, 70, 71, 77, 137, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 166, 177, 179, 183, 186, 189, 192, 195, 197, 201, 203, 204, 211, 225, 229, 233, 234, 243, 245, 256, 264, 271, 272, 287, 288, 290, 342, 345 feminism, 6, 34, 111, 114, 181, 183, 190, 191, 228, 229, 246, 261, 307, 312, 313, 318, 338; in crime fiction, 5, 250, 257; in Italy, 111, 318, 330, 338 The Feminist Mystique, 245 Feminist Press, 178, 181, 191 Fenton, Edwin, 4, 335 fertility rates, 118, 119, 316; Italian women’s compared to Jewish women’s, 84, 314 films, 9, 300–4. See also Dogfight; Household Saints; Moonstruck; True Love Fire in the Flesh, 11, 335 folk art: in song and dance, 3, 39, 42; in storytelling, 159–65 folklore, 154, 159, 177, 303 food, 5, 8, 10, 18, 24, 27, 37, 42, 51, 64, 75n37, 121–55, 203, 250, 284 foodways, 206–14

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358 Index The Fortunate Pilgrim, 112, 186 fraternal organizations, 36, 37, 316 futurism: ‘‘Battle against Pasta’’ and ‘‘Manifesto of Futurist Cooking,’’ 128 Gabaccia, Donna, 10, 11, 55, 114, 206 Gans, Herbert J., 137, 206 gardens and gardening, 148, 149, 150, 153, 163, 212, 233, 247, 248, 264 gender, 23, 32, 48, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 85, 113, 114, 195, 198, 220, 221, 222, 227, 233, 246, 272, 273; differences, 59, 90, 92, 93, 95; infantilization of sons, 118, 119; roles, 6, 7, 71, 78, 83, 84, 166, 244, 313, 341 Gentile, Marie, 134 Gilbert, Sandra (Mortola), 240–49 Gillan, Maria Mazziotti, 263, 265, 266 Giovannitti, Arturo, 333 Giunta, Edvige, 5–6, 181, 201 The Godfather, 5, 186, 202–4 godparentage, 33, 116, 339 Golden, Daniel, 300 Golden Wedding, 11, 335 ‘‘Go to Hell,’’ 261 grandfather, 147, 195, 244, 254, 264, 285 grandmother, 2, 4, 7, 10, 18, 52, 84, 127, 134, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 177, 179, 191, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 209, 221, 303, 318, 319 granite, 166–76; as symbol, 172, 173 Grati, Ettore, 135 Great Depression, the, 135, 136, 313 Great Migration, 3, 39, 337 ‘‘Greener Grass,’’ 10, 209, 211 Green, Rose Basile, 5, 112, 166 Grillo, Clara Corica, 359, 360, 362 Guay, Richard, 303 guilt, about Italian involvement in World War II, 167 Hawkes, John, 225 history of immigration, oral, 10, 49, 59, 123, 125, 137, 159, 160, 164, 262, 303, 308, 309, 312, 319, 343–44

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Hobart and Williams Smith College, 228 Hollywood, 230, 247, 298, 300, 302, 304 home, departure from, 3, 186, 197, 337, 339, 345n14 Household Saints, 9, 300, 303 Hurst, Fannie, 69 husband, 4, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 63, 76n46, 78, 85, 86, 113, 114, 117, 118, 161, 169, 170, 177, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 212, 218, 220, 221, 251, 252, 298, 301, 312, 314, 334, 335, 336, 339, 343 identity: ambivalence about, 206–13; food and, 206–13, 234; shame and embarrassment regarding self-, 209, 210, 244, 317 Immigrant’s Kitchen: Italian, 132, 150–55 Immigrant’s Return, 7, 77 immigration, 1, 2, 11, 40, 57, 59, 60, 79, 90, 98, 99, 102, 110, 114, 215–24, 307, 308, 315, 317, 318, 320, 322, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342, 348, 351; trauma of, 2, 3, 64, 215–24. See also history of immigration, oral income, 1, 9, 37, 47, 51, 52, 53, 79, 87, 92–113, 117, 119, 125, 167, 186; concern about, 162, 185, 229, 242, 272; wage earning and, 11, 114, 308, 309, 310, 311, 315 industrial workers, women, 72, 117, 310, 335, 340 industrialization, 36, 75, 163, 324 intellectual life, 3, 5, 41, 57, 69, 101, 136, 183, 203, 220, 228, 244, 245, 262, 338 intergenerational issues, 3, 37, 39, 40 intermarriage, 9, 98–109, 316; Marianna DeMarco Torgovnick on, 101; in novels of Pietro diDonato, Jerre Mangione, and Mario Puzo, 101

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Index 359 Italian American: definition of, 8, 10, 138; artists, 8, 159, 164, 186, 271–83 The Italian American Novel: A Documentary of the Interaction of Two Cultures, 166 The Italian Cookbook, 134 Italian cooking, giants of, 153 Italian Folktales in America: The Verbal Art of an Immigrant Woman, 5, 165 Italianicity, 5 Italy: economic hardships in, 340; family structure in, 3, 20, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 78, 99, 106, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119, 160, 310, 339, 342; NorthSouth issues in, 3, 11, 36, 119, 128, 129, 338, 339, 340; Northern, 3, 34, 119, 160, 162, 166; pre-immigrant phase for women in, 340; Southern, 3, 33, 58, 78, 99, 110, 115, 116, 215; unification of, 207, 337; village life in, 35, 58, 99, 116, 117, 134, 150, 160, 162, 163, 164, 215, 221, 335 Jewish women, compared with ItalianAmerican women, 69, 83, 101, 103, 134, 137, 241, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 317 Jews, 57, 69, 83, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 134, 145, 181, 188, 202, 203, 204, 205, 218, 227, 235, 241, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 317 ‘‘juggling’’ work and family, 6, 47–56 Kelly, Robert, 225 Kesterberg, Judith, 216 kinship, 36, 102, 311, 315 labor unions, 4, 11, 37, 335, 341 language: English, 69, 72, 77n62, 138, 229, 343 Lapolla, Garibaldi, 11, 136, 335 Las Vegas, 203, 204 Laurino, Maria, 210

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leadership opportunities, 3, 29, 38, 40, 43, 59, 60, 62, 84, 85, 167, 212 Like Lesser Gods, 5, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Lloyd, Susan Caperna, 261, 263 Lombardy, 36, 164, 338 Loren, Sophia, 300 McBain, Ed, 250, 257, 258 McLauglin, Virginia Yans, 37, 61, 208, 308–11, 315, 317, 318, 321, 342 Madonna (Ciccone), 228, 319, 321 Madonna-whore dichotomy, 22, 319, 300 magazines, 128, 129, 136, 152, 166, 219, 271 Maldini, Piero, 127, 129 male, 4, 9, 33, 37, 48, 59, 78, 91, 94, 96, 111, 112, 151, 221, 226, 242, 250, 276, 300, 301, 304, 315, 317, 318, 334; child, 4, 70 Mancini, Lucy, 5, 202–5 Manhattan, 162, 251, 256, 257, 290 Manhattan Opera Company, 293 ‘‘Manifesto of Futurist Cooking,’’ 128 marble, 172, 173; Carrara, 172; Quarata, 151 Marinetti, Filippo, 128 marriage, 9, 10, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 54, 85, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112, 113, 114, 116, 170, 175, 193, 198, 203, 219, 221, 222, 251, 253, 255, 301, 303, 310; arranged, 20, 34, 35, 116; courtship and, 2, 15, 37, 99; divorce and, 20, 29, 93, 94, 220, 251, 298; sexuality in, 2, 10, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 84, 167, 203, 226, 227, 264, 302, 314, 316; women’s attitude toward, 1840– 1930, 34 Marxist literary criticism, 181 masculinity, 112, 302, 317 ‘‘Materia Prima,’’ 225, 227

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360 Index Mathias, Elizabeth, 5, 159–65 matriarchy, 117; and Ann Cornelisen, 117 memoir, 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 211, 241, 242, 260–67 memory, 6, 59, 64, 85, 122, 123, 131, 147, 161, 170, 180, 181, 192, 235, 260, 262, 263, 265, 266, 266n2, 266n5, 276; childhood, 16, 25, 29, 85, 143, 159, 161, 170, 177, 179, 180, 221, 233, 235 Messina, Elizabeth, 2, 84, 119, 215–18, 220, 221 Metropolitan Opera, 7, 42, 285, 287, 288, 293, 296, 297 Mezzogiorno culture, 3, 33, 34, 37 migratory female workers, 339 Milwaukee, 6, 47–56, 134, 242, 310 minestra, 129, 131 mining camps, 64, 69, 70 Mintz, Sidney, 127 mobility: geographic, 85, 99, 102, 342, 347n54; occupational, 18, 85, 103; upward, 7, 54, 69, 71 Modotti, Tina, 8 Moonstruck, 301 mother-daughter ties, 11, 312, 326n38 mothers’ clubs, 3, 32–46 multiculturalism, 12, 111, 138, 181, 262, 320, 321 music, 2, 42, 149, 186, 200, 236, 285– 87, 290, 293, 297, 298, 302 Mussolini, Benito, 128, 167, 168, 243, 279. See also cookbooks: during fascism mutual aid societies, 36, 117, 139, 333, 342, 344 Naples, 16, 125, 126, 290 National Endowment for the Arts, 225 Neidle, Cecil, 57, 309 neighborhoods, 7, 19, 24, 38, 50, 54, 83, 84, 85, 99, 101, 137, 138, 142–46, 148, 149, 162, 163, 194, 195, 201,

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209, 272, 301, 309, 311, 312, 314, 315, 316; Bensonhurst and South Richmond, 82, 83; clannishness of, 36; destruction of, 145, 172, 188 New Year’s Day, 150 New York City, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 15, 42, 51, 78, 79, 82, 83, 88, 99, 100, 101, 102, 145, 222, 251, 271, 272, 274, 279, 294, 302, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344 New York Society of Women Artists, 273 Newark, New Jersey, Churchill’s study of, 334 newspaper reviews of Mary Caponegro’s work in: Los Angeles Times, 228; New York Times Book Review, 227; Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 152; San Francisco Chronicle, 228; La Stampa, 257; Sun, 296; Times, 3, 6, 41, 119, 227, 228, 255, 274, 288, 296; Washington Post, 228 newspapers: La Stampa, 257; Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 152; Sun, 296; Times, 3, 6, 41, 119, 227, 228, 266, 274, 288, 296 Night Bloom, 260, 261, 263, 264 Notari, Delia and Umberto, 127 Old World values, 3, 7, 8, 185, 202, 271 only child, 118, 243, 248 out-marriage, 100, 103 Pagano, Jo, 174 Paglia, Camille, 111 Paper Fish, 6, 177–83, 185, 186, 187, 189–97, 199, 200, 201, 266n5 pasta, 50, 125, 128, 129, 131, 151, 253 patriarchy, 34, 78, 110, 111, 114, 116, 182, 183, 310, 312, 324, 339 Pavarotti, Luciano, 7, 285, 298, 350 Pellegrini, Angelo, 123, 127, 134 Piedmont, 167, 169, 338 Pieracci, Bruna, 3, 4, 59, 68, 69, 71

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Index 361 poetry, 1, 2, 5, 12, 66, 167, 179, 180, 183, 185, 190, 203, 230, 232–39, 241, 242, 246, 247, 249, 261, 263, 264; Vermont Poetry Society, 167 politicians, 42, 175, 215, 274, 279, 298 politics, 114, 123, 125, 128, 154, 162, 186, 190, 200, 232, 246, 252, 253, 262, 263, 264, 318, 321, 333, 334, 344 Ponzillo sisters, 286, 287, 290, 292, 293 ‘‘Portrait of the Puttana,’’ 263 post-traumatic stress disorder, 215 Prix de Rome, 7, 271, 278 Proceedings of the Third Symposium of American Studies, 331 Prose, Francine, 303 Protestants, 11, 58, 110, 202, 321, 328, 334 Protestant evangelism among Italians in America, 334 Protestant mission societies, 334 publishing subculture, 122, 123, 150, 154, 186, 194, 196, 262, 265, 316 Puzo, Mario, 5, 101, 112, 186, 187, 205, 343 quarries, 169, 172 Raspa, Richard, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 rebellion of daughters, 211, 233 Reddy, Maureen, 257 religion, 100, 102, 104, 107, 117, 145, 168, 170, 185, 190, 199, 204, 227, 313, 337 reproductive practices, 21, 41, 118, 315, 316 research issues, 307–32, 333–36, 337–48 Rhode Island School of Design, 226 Rigante, Elodia, 155 Rome, 7, 136, 160, 226, 228, 229, 230, 235, 251, 253, 254, 271, 276, 278, 279 Rome Prize in Writing, 225

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rural culture, 58, 99, 116, 128, 134, 160, 162, 185, 215, 310, 324; women in, 126, 318, 335 Sansone, Vivian Pelini, 151 Sayles, John, 301 Scaravaglione, Concetta, 271–83 Sceats, Sarah, 206, 209 Schiavo, Giovanni, 333 schools, 37, 39, 57, 58, 73n5, 209, 225, 338 La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, 123, 127, 134 Scorsese, Martin, 300 secrets, 5, 21, 194, 195, 200, 241, 242, 253, 254, 255, 256 secularization, 99, 100, 103 Seidelman, Susan, 301 Seller, Maxine, 4, 11, 66, 309 settlement houses, 11, 38, 39, 41, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75n38, 76n46, 76n48, 164, 313, 343, 344. See also language sexuality, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 84, 112, 167, 209, 226, 227, 228, 264, 308, 314; abusive, 263; gay, 252, 264, 316; in marriage, 2, 15, 16, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 198, 302; lesbian, 254, 253, 257, 316, 321, 329n69; repression of, 22, 34, 79, 203, 218; taboos in, 21, 23 siblings, 54, 71, 244, 256 Sicily, 16, 47, 51, 53, 62, 145, 146, 244, 279, 342, 349 sisterhood, 114, 312, 315 sisters, 18, 24, 51, 52, 71, 78, 161, 166, 175n6, 177–79, 185, 187, 192–94, 197, 198, 199, 201, 208, 226, 227, 242, 244, 250, 286, 287, 290, 292, 293, 313, 341, 344 The Sisters Mallone, 10, 208 Smith, Timothy, 59 social networks, 19, 116, 207, 309, 311, 312, 314 social sciences, 114, 309, 319, 321

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362 Index social workers, 38, 39, 57, 62, 63, 65, 66, 72 socialism, 338 Son of Italy, 333 Sons of Italy, 36, 137 Stanford, Susan Friedman, 59 status: academic, 262; low, 79; marital, 11, 87, 93, 94, 338, 341; occupational, 7, 37, 63, 91, 97, 107, 212n4, 223n3, 342; professional, 4, 6, 9, 12, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 72, 81–84, 91, 118, 334; social, 12, 17, 58, 68, 72, 86, 99, 114, 130, 136, 208, 211 Stella, Antonio, 333 stereotypes, 11, 40, 59, 72, 112, 115, 116, 121, 230, 300, 304, 309, 335 The Stone Cutters Journal, 172 storytelling, 66, 160, 161, 164, 165, 195 suicide, 209, 298 Sundance Film Festival, 301 supernatural, 162, 181 superstition, 164, 168, 303, 339. See also witchcraft surnames, 164, 209, 243, 251, 252 Tarantino, Quentin, 300 teachers, 39, 57, 61, 62, 64–68, 71, 72n4, 209, 244, 271, 273 Theophano, Janet, 154, 155 Thomas, Norman, 333 Timpano, 129, 131 Tomasi, Mari, 5, 34, 99, 166–76, 343 tombstones, 170, 173 transposition, 216, 217 trauma, 2, 3, 64, 201, 215, 216, 221, 222, 223 trickster, 181, 182, 199 Trinity College, 9, 166 ‘‘Trouble’’ novels, 250–59 True Love, 1, 2, 300 Turturro, John, 300 Tuscany, 150, 151, 153, 354 Umbertina, 2, 10, 208, 209, 217, 220 union activism, 4, 11, 37, 313, 335, 341, 342; ‘‘Bread and Roses’’ strike, 117

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University of Illinois, 179 unmarried, 39, 78, 96, 272, 273, 311, 313, 340 urban culture, 9, 37, 38, 72, 78, 82, 83, 85, 128, 137, 160, 163, 215, 321, 344; renewal, 134, 137, 142, 145; women and, 79, 126, 314, 322, 333 vaudeville, 7, 285, 288, 290, 292, 295 Veneto, 159, 163, 338 Vermont, 5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 173, 175n6, 343; Green Mountains, 166; Vermont History, 172; Vermont Literature: A Sampler, 166; Vermont Writer’s Project, 172 Vertigo, 10, 211, 261, 262, 263 violence, projected onto Italian Americans, 118, 186–87 Walton, Priscilla I. and Manina Jones, 257 war: of 1812, 172; Kuwait, 150; Spanish Civil, 40; U.S. Civil, 38; Vietnam, 302, 303; World War I, 20, 39, 42, 100, 127, 136, 161, 163, 254, 294; World War II, 41, 42, 83, 88, 100, 123, 125, 126, 129, 131, 136, 162, 163, 167, 215, 243, 249, 272 Wayne State University Folklore Archive, 5, 159 Wheaton College, 166 ‘‘Why, It’s Mother,’’ 42 Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, 1, 12n1 Williamsburg. See Brooklyn witchcraft, 339 Women of the Shadows, 116 Woolf, Virginia, 263, 249 work. See employment; ‘‘juggling’’ work and family writing, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 42, 59, 61, 65, 116, 121, 122, 123, 125, 146, 148, 149, 166, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189, 191, 195–97, 200, 225, 226, 228, 235, 238, 241, 254, 258n3, 261, 264, 265,

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Index 363 266n5, 292, 308, 319, 339; as act of God, 180; avant-garde, 8; ethnic issues in, 8, 265, 319; increase in, 1; as madness, 180; process of, 123, 179, 180, 181, 195, 196, 197, 266n4, 266n5, 258n3; as solitary activity, 184

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Yale University, 218 Yezierska, Anzia, 65 YMCA, 333 YWCA, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43 Zia Carolina, 129

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