Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (review)

To uncover the 'complex, transnational lives of feisty, and at times frustrated, but always formidable and fascinating women' is the goal of this ambitious anthology which traces the history of Italian women workers in seven countries and four continents. In turn-of-the-century New York, buttonhole-maker Ginevre Spagnoletti gathered her six children around the kitchen table in the evenings to read out loud the pamphlets of her Italian anarcho-syndicalist workers' club. In 1907 Buenos Aires, during the heady days of the anarchist-led rent strike, women activists of the Italian neighbourhood of La Boca poured boiling water from second-floor porches and battled police officers with brooms; the mere promise of 'a hot shower' soon sufficed to send landlords running. Half a century later, and an ocean away, a young Italian woman transformed from 'Nestore's wife' to being simply 'Enza' - a communist activist and worker in postwar Belgium who continued to attend party meetings upon her return to Italy, undeterred by the scandalized looks and harsh words of her fellow (male) communists. None of these women activists, as the editors take pains to point out, fit the stereotype of 'docile, anti-union, housebound women controlled by men or victimized by a deeply patriarchal Latin culture' that has so stubbornly persisted in American scholarship. Instead, their life-stories unearth a tradition of political radicalism and community-based activism that represents one of the unexpected, yet delightful, discoveries of this collection of twelve essays that takes its place in the burgeoning scholarship on transnationalism.

To be sure, the authors' attention is captured more by the material conditions and discursive universes that shaped their protagonists' lives than it is by transnationalism as a new conceptual model for understanding international migration. But if the theory is understated, the chapters are nonetheless rich in uncovering transnational linkages on many a level. Readers will encounter midwives on Milwaukee who prided themselves on their high-quality education at Italian midwifery schools and who refused, upon migration, to abandon their professional identity for the sake of family responsibilities. They will learn about Italian garment workers who entrusted their children to the care of women comrades for months at a time, thus putting a tactic from Italy to use in the industrial uprisings of the early twentieth century. And they might be struck, as this reader was, by women's popular role in the anarchist movement whose scathing critique of power inequalities could be readily forged into a weapon against the prevailing gender ideology. The rallying call of 'anarchist motherhood' can be heard echoing in several chapters. Transnational, too, were the lives of those women who remained in Italy. Their husbands' migration propelled them into extra-domestic responsibilities that included visits to the post office, the bank, and the notary office, thus freeing them, as Andreina De Clementi notes, 'in significant ways from the direct surveillance and control of the patrilineal extended family,' while their mental maps of the world came to span the Atlantic Ocean.

In the skilful hands of editors Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, the anthology moulds a diversity of stories into one coherent whole, thanks in large part to the excellent introduction that serves as a road map not only to the twelve essays but also to the underlying methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and historical sources (prominent among which are the dossiers of the Italian police archives and collections of oral history interviews). While the resultant work might not yet amount to a 'world history "from the bottom up,"' it invites us to rethink the power of culture in the age of the nation state; for taken together, the essays in this volume offer vivid testimony to the ways in which national identities were both tempered and shaped by transnational networks, and cultural traditions could translate into both cultural creativity and social change.