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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 Gender Relations among Italian Americans 111 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...

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