Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America (review)

In Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America, Diane C. Vecchio takes on "inherent assumptions about Italian culture and male control of women as a paradigm for understanding Italian women's work and wage-earning experiences"(p. 2). Instead, she offers a portrait of working women who are agents in the economic fortunes of their families and the cultural practices of their communities, making decisions about their employment based on local economic conditions and a variety of additional variables: gender segmentation of the workforce, geographical proximity from the workplace to the residence, kinship networks, and the impact of the life cycle on women's needs. Vecchio isolates these factors by comparing three different occupations in two different locations. As the title suggests, merchants, midwives, and laboring women are examined in two different urban American settings: Endicott, New York, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The contrasts between the two locations allow Vecchio to tease out a story about choice. That is, faced with a specific set of economic options and, more often than not, the expectation and desire to care for family, Italian immigrant women engaged employment strategies calculated to help them accomplish financial, familial and, in the case of midwives, even career goals.

Vecchio's best-written and most exciting chapter, to my mind, is Chapter 2 focusing on women who worked in the Endicott Johnson shoe factories. In it, she convincingly shows that because the Endicott economy was dominated by gender-segregated opportunities in "light industry" within a company committed to female-oriented welfare capitalism programs, even married women in this upstate New York city found jobs as laborers attractive. Lured by the company-subsidized owner-occupied homes nearby, employee-funded prenatal and other healthcare, and a company tolerance for transient employment (according to women's "life cycles") and children's presence after school, women flocked to factory jobs and even passed them down to their daughters. Kinship patterns of recruitment by those within the company and childcare by those outside it supported women's ability to make this choice. The chapter deftly builds on several previous studies of the Endicott Johnson Company, including Gerald Zahavi's Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism (1988). The original contribution of the chapter is Vecchio's analysis of 475 "employment cards" for the Italian women workers in the company, as well as her interviews conducted with former workers and their descendants. The author uses these source to create an engaging account of how Italian immigrant women pursued employment outside the home, and how they used that employment to advance their own agendas.

Because Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women is a history of immigrants, its treatment of Milwaukee's female, Italian merchants focuses not on their business practices but their role in the community. Enterprise & Society readers will be engaged by the chapter's reliance on oral history—standard methodology for immigration historians, but an underutilized source for business historians. Vecchio's interviews with the city's Italian immigrants and their descendents provide insight into the women's uses of business enterprise that can only be inferred from most other sources. As a result, her insistence on the Italian immigrant women's agency as business enterprisers—an argument that puts the book squarely within the rhetorical trajectory of the recent scholarship on women business owners (refer Cleary, Lewis, and Sparks, for example)—is articulated in part through the women's own perspective and words. This is a valuable contribution. However, because the chapter does not make use of the many recent studies in business and women's history examining the economic enterprise (Wendy Gamber's Female Economy is the lone source and it is underutilized), it does not provide as rich, a historical context or as complex, an analysis of commercial engagement, as business historians will desire. To be fair, however, what the author's omission of business history scholarship pushed me...