The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies

Immigrant Women

5Immigrant Women It is rare to find women’s voices among immigrant autobiographies. In the early years, there were fewer female than male immigrants, although the proportion increased steadily over the century, comprising a third of the total immigrants in the 1830s but more than half of the total after 1930s.1 The sample of our women seems to follow that pattern. Only two of them, Rosa Cavalleri and Bruna Pieracci, belong to the earlier type of peasant immigrants. Anna Yona and Amalia Santacaterina were wives of political refugees, a Jew and a Socialist, who emigrated during Fascism. The majority of the women—Giuseppina Liarda Macaluso, Leonilde Frieri Ruberto, Elvezia Marcucci, Elisabeth Evans, and Maria Bottiglieri—belonged to the wave of U.S. immigration after the World War II. Evans and Bottiglieri were war wives, married to American soldiers. Even though they belonged to different times and recounted different stories, these immigrant women touch similar themes. Women’s autobiographies need to be explained by different kinds of critical instruments.2 Scholar Estelle Jelinek has noted the many oppositions that characterize women’s autobiography: men write ‘‘history ’’ while women write ‘‘story’’; men’s autobiography usually centers on public lives while women privilege their private lives; men tell events, women write about people and family; the center of man’s autobiography is the idealized life, while for women it is selfconsciousness and self-analysis. These opposite approaches, a basis of 116 one strand of the criticism, are useful but not completely true among our female authors.3 Our Italian immigrant women complicate the notion of the ethos of work we have seen so far, because for almost all of them, having a job is their first taste of an independence they had never felt. Female immigrants are twice crushed under history, both by society and by their own families. These stories give a modern inflection to the concept of quiet individualism because women’s individualism is generally a recent discovery.4 Many of our women writers define themselves as being in the backgrounds of other people’s stories , as mothers, sisters, or daughters with a limited scope of action, such as Anna Yona, who started writing as a way of completing her husband’s task. Some of these women are the prototype of the Italian American grandmother, a figure of mythic proportions in Italian American writing . This matriarchal figure is present as an origin myth that gives successive generations a sense of continuity with their ancestral past, and she provides a strong model of a powerful woman, even if it is one who is only in the background. These autobiographies are the voices of those mute grandmothers often depicted in film and novels.5 The prototype of women’s autobiography in Italy is the novel Una donna by Sibilla Aleramo (1906), a work that celebrates autonomy and independence; some of our women authors reflect that tone of her work. Aleramo’s book is considered to be one of the first Italian feminist books, with its deep cry for the liberty of a young woman, a fervidly vivacious spirit tied down by social conventions and the lack of comprehension. She decides to be a happy woman, rather than a tired, negative, hateful mother (‘‘Why do we love sacrifice in maternity? . . . From mother to daughter we transmit this serfdom. It is a monstrous chain’’).6 But the first woman to write an immigrant memoir was a nun, Sister Blandina Segale, whose diary At the End of the Santa Fe Trail reads more like an adventure tale.7 Although their lives are not as full of Sister Blandina’s excitement, some of our writers—Amalia Santacaterina, Elvezia Marcucci, Elisabeth Evans, even Maria Bottoglieri and Leonilde Ruberto—started new lives in America as autonomous women. Immigrant Women  117 rosa cavalleri  In the story of Rosa Cavalleri we clearly see the imbalance between individualism and communalism in many works by Italian-American writers. Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant is the as-told-to story of Rosa, a large Chicago cleaning lady,8 but we should not forget the intervention of the secondary narrator.9 Born in 1866 or 1867 in Lombardy, Rosa Cassettari (whose real name was Ines and whose last name was changed to Cavalleri in the narration) was raised in Bugiarno (the real town of Cuggiono, according to Ernesto Milani) by her foster mother, Mamma Lena, who...