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

The size, diffusion, and complexity of Italian mass migration continues to challenge scholars seeking to understand this process. Between 1870 and 1970, some 27 million individuals left various parts of Italy for destinations in five continents abroad. About half of them returned yet many of them went back and forth between Italy and multiple destinations abroad at least one or more times. Among these migrations were men and women, adults and children, peasants and artisans, skilled and unskilled workers, small business people, political activists and others who came from all parts of Italy. Their reasons for emigrating and the resources they brought with them differed. Given the variation in the geographical, chronological, economic, social, political and cultural dimensions of this migration it is obvious why obtaining an in-depth understanding of it continues to challenge us.

Yet with the passing of each year and each decade, and with the emergence of new generations of migration scholars, the challenge is gradually being met; collectively we are paying increasing attention to the neglected aspects of Italian migration and in so doing we are redefining some of the major contours of the subject as well as capturing its finer nuances and subtleties. We now know as much about the experiences of Italians in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Switzerland as we do about Italians in the United States. The global/transnational dimensions and the ongoing ties among individuals in the various towns and villages of Italy with family and paesani in multiple destinations abroad have become central to our understanding of the process of Italian migration. And women and gender have increasingly received their rightful attention as integral parts of the subject.

The book of edited essays by Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, accurately entitled Women, Gender and Transnational Lives; Italian Workers of the World, is an important contribution to the recent literature on Italian mass migration, and especially on the role of women in it. The editors, well known long-time contributors to the debates and dialogues regarding the nature of Italian migration history, make clear their intent in the introduction. Their purpose is to continue to redress some of the imbalances in past studies of Italian migration, most notably the male-centeredness and United States-centeredness. With regard to women, their concern is to include the majority of women who waited at home as well as the minority of females among the emigrants, and to evaluate unpaid women's work as well as paid work. And finally, they intend to integrate women into the history of Italian radicalism and especially to investigate women's radical activities both outside traditional labor, political and radical movements as well as within them. As they sum up, "Our hope was not just to make women more visible in a migration literature focused on male migrants, but to pinpoint also the origins of persistent stereotypes of Italy's women in a literature disproportionately focused on immigrants to the United States." (ix)

Their approach is global/transnational, comparative and collaborative. One of the editors' major contributions is the global/transnational perspective they employ and their concomitant rejection of the traditional United States- centered histories of Italian migration. They remind their readers in the introduction that between 1870 and 1970 only one-third of these migrants went to the United States, and of those approximately half returned to Italy. They emphasize two specific advantages of viewing Italian migration in a global/trans- national context: first, it draws attention to the impact of emigration on Italy as a sending nation, and second, it establishes the basis for comparing Italians of similar backgrounds in various destinations. Of the twelve essays in the volume, only three are devoted exclusively to the experiences of Italians in the United States. Others focus on France, Argentina, Belgium, Canada and...