Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1940 (review)

The second industrial revolution, starting in the latter part of the 19th century, had a profound impact on the demographic contours of the globe. The displacement of agricultural populations and the overcrowding of sprawling urban areas remapped nations, restructured household economies, redefined family relations, and extended the many movements that sought to alter and overturn the capitalist system and its reach. Italian immigrants who hurdled the globe and their kin who stayed behind in their communities were caught up in these systematic transformations. Immigration and labour historians have been reconstructing this historical narrative for the past quarter century and have shown that Italians became pivotal actors in how the changes played out in the Western world. Jennifer Guglielmo's Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 is a critically important addition to the field. The author is expansively original in her understanding of the subject and the accomplished integrative analysis of primary and secondary research is of the first order.

Guglielmo centres Living the Revolution around the ways that transnational ties fostered women's relationships over four generations. Her argument follows three intersecting trajectories which each emphasize the importance of geographical location, transmission of radical ideologies, and lived experience. First, Guglielmo establishes that the ways that women resisted the oppressive conditions of capitalism and patriarchy changed as a result of mass migration; second she argues that Italian women's industrial labour had economic, political, and social ramifications in public and private lives; and third, she shows that assimilation and the embrace of national identity were distinct though intersecting processes which continued to be connected to conditions in Italy and the US throughout the 65 years of her study.

Italian women, made radical by the living and working conditions in Italy after unification and in the US as industrial labourers, envisioned revolution at the same time they themselves were living through unprecedented revolutionary changes. The shifts began in Italy where women headed the transatlantic households while their husbands, fathers, and brothers became "birds of passage" labourers in the transatlantic economy that spread from cities in Europe and the Americas. Women survived through collective forms of solidarity and "counterideology" which brought them closer together to each other and more able to mobilize to reshape private spaces into political ones, to formulate power through traditional ceremonial and religious practices, and to mobilize protest campaigns. Major Italian peasant and labour revolts began in the 1890s and spanned multiple regions of the country. While scholars have highlighted the importance of, for example, the 1892-1894 Sicilian uprising and the 1898 fatti di maggio in Milan, they have remained blinded to the importance of women's activism in these movements. Guglielmo shows, through painstaking attention to the details of her sources, that women were key actors in these (and other) events and they brought their experiences with them in the next phase of migration history in which they became part of the labour stream that crossed Europe and the Atlantic.

Italian women became part of the factory system in the 1890s and were pulled to Northern Italy to work in the textile, cigar, pottery, paper, glass, pasta, and other trades. A very small minority of southern Italian women worked in commercial agriculture and most continued the traditional subsistence farming that was a major part of household economies. It was not until the World War I period that female and male migration patterns were equal in number. Though Italian women, like men, went to Argentina and Brazil in large numbers, "New York City was the preferred destination for Italian women by the early twentieth century," (67) with the majority entering the fashion industry as homeworkers and factory labourers. In each case, they worked in horribly grueling conditions which enhanced their radicalism and provided new outlets for its growth, even as it often went -and continued to be-unnoticed.

Anarchism, socialism, and...