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‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’ The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York lorett treese 1990 It was 1943, wartime, when the Italo-American Women’s Club of Williamsburg staged a homegrown play set in 1938 depicting the then gloomy situation of the first-generation female Italian immigrant. Their play was entitled Why, It’s Mother. In the first scene, leading lady Mrs. Passarella ruefully hears her grown daughters inform her they’re going out again—this time to a conference. ‘‘What’s that you mean, conference?’’ Mrs. Passarella asks. ‘‘Oh, dear, it would be so difficult to make you understand,’’ daughter Amelia replies. ‘‘Besides, you wouldn’t be interested.’’ Yet in the course of the play, Mrs. Passarella is transformed. Her English vastly improves, she begins subscribing to Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping , and she cooks wholesome American meals that cure her husband’s hypertension. She learns first aid and takes up interior decorating. Her previously neglectful family is delighted—once they get over their shock. What miracle creates this thoroughly modern woman with just a trace of an Italian accent? One thing the play lacks is subtlety. The credit all goes to Mrs. Passarella’s recent membership in her local Italian Mothers’ Club.1 The establishment of Italian Mothers’ Clubs was a short-lived twentiethcentury phenomenon. These clubs filled a need for many first-generation Italian immigrant women. The structure and mores of the Italian family isolated these women both from each other and from their American neighbors . They had little idea how to use the resources open to them in America and their ignorance tended to distance them from their own children. Many recognized something lacking and lamented their loneliness but did little about it themselves. In a scene in Why, It’s Mother, Mrs. Passarella 32 ‘‘Why, It’s Mother’’: The Italian Mothers’ Clubs of New York 33 glumly fingers her Mother’s Day gifts in an empty apartment. The gifts are symbols that her family loves her and respects her role in the family structure , but this does nothing to alleviate her isolation or bring a friend to the door.2 Various United States institutions intent on Americanizing immigrants attempted to reach out to women and children. The Italian Mothers’ Clubs established in New York in the 1930s and 1940s were examples of this trend. Many of these clubs were organized by Elba Farabegoli, an energetic second -generation Italian woman. The clubs touched off a brief period of synergy in which Italian women used the clubs both to learn American customs and to preserve their own culture while they willingly made the transition from Italian women living in America to Italian-American women. The activities of the various clubs offer insight into the nature and mentality of immigrant women in general as well as the specific experience of first-generation Italian immigrant women. They show ‘‘why it’s mother’’ who had a particularly tough time adapting to a new world. To understand the development of Italian Mothers’ Clubs, one must understand a woman’s role in the family structure of southern Italy. Virtually every historian who has studied the subject agrees that the Italian family was the only meaningful social institution in the Mezzogiorno culture from which most southern Italian immigrants came. A village was just a place, a government could rise or fall, but the family was constant.3 Italian families were nuclear families headed by the father or eldest male. One’s family also included one’s in-laws, other nuclear families to whom one was related by marriage. Among these people, there was solidarity; there was little more than distrust for anyone else. Mezzogiorno Italians felt no concept of community, because the family met all one’s social needs. Private associations with those outside the family were not encouraged and the American concept of friendship was unknown.4 Relationships with those unrelated by blood or marriage could only be formed through comparaggio or godparenthood. A person became a godparent through a ritualized series of steps that might have little to do with the actual baptism of a child. A godparent was considered technically a member of one’s family and therefore within the charmed circle of people one could trust.5 A girl born into a Mezzogiorno family quickly learned she had little importance as an individual. Her father and brothers had authority over her; her mother took precedence. From a very early age, she would be separated from the opposite...