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Connecting Spheres Women’s Work and Women’s Lives in Milwaukee’s Italian Third Ward diane c. vecchio 1995 In 1905 Mary Maglio opened a grocery store on Detroit Street in Milwaukee ’s largely Italian Third Ward. She was an immigrant from Sicily and the first Italian-born female grocer in the city. Maglio was followed by many more immigrant women who became proprietors of home-based businesses as a pattern of female Italian entrepreneurial activity became increasingly evident into the 1920s and 1930s. This article examines the business lives of Italian immigrant women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. These women provided important services to first-generation Italians who settled within an ethnic enclave. In Milwaukee, the largest Italian enclave was defined by the boundaries of the Third Ward, where businesswomen worked as grocers, restaurateurs, saloon keepers, and purveyors of dry goods. Female entrepreneurs were motivated to earn an income through business enterprises while simultaneously continuing their familial and household responsibilities. The work histories of women who owned and operated grocery stores in particular reflect how gender and domestic values shaped their working lives and how intricately immigrant women’s lives were connected between the home and workplace. Indeed, for many of these women, their workplace was their home. The majority of Italian-born women living in Milwaukee’s Third Ward during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Sicilians. Many emigrated from the small towns and villages near Palermo (Porticello, Santa Flavia, Sant’Elia, Aspra, and Bagheria), while others came from the provinces of Messina, Trapani, Girgenti, and Siracusa. Similar to immigrant 47 48 Diane C. Vecchio women in other cities, Sicilian-born women in Milwaukee assumed multiple roles in the family, their household, and the local economy. In 1910, nearly 5,000 Italians resided in Milwaukee and many Italian females were gainfully employed as dressmakers and seamstresses, fruit dealers, peddlers, confectioners, milliners, office cleaners, natatorium matrons, midwives , textile factory workers, and cigar makers.1 Many immigrant women in Milwaukee worked because few immigrant men earned a family wage. While a considerable number of men had been tradesmen and artisans in Italy, most were now reduced to laboring with pick and shovel in the streets or on the railroad. Others found jobs in foundries or steel works, tanneries, or electric car lines. The typical Italian male worked nine months a year and earned an annual salary of about $300 to $400 compared to $539 earned by native-born males; thus, it was contingent upon wives and working-age children to supplement the meager wages of the head-of-household.2 In 1915, George LaPiana, a second-generation Italian who grew up in the Third Ward, published a study of Milwaukee’s Italians for the Associated Charities. In it he noted that ‘‘generally women attend to the light business, while their husbands are at work on the tracks or in the foundries.’’3 The ‘‘light business’’ LaPiana referred to were the many business operations, particularly grocery stores, that were owned or operated by Sicilian-born women. Several patterns characterize Italian women’s work in Milwaukee. While younger, single females often worked in factories and businesses located within walking distance of their Third Ward homes, married Sicilian women with families were likely to be the proprietors or managers of small family businesses or homeworkers, sewing garments for local clothing manufactories , occupations that did not always show up in the census. Analyses of the Milwaukee City Directories and the Wisconsin State Census for Milwaukee show many Italian women as business ‘‘proprietors’’ or ‘‘retail merchants’’ in the city as early as 1900. Theresa Balbi was one of the earliest Italian businesswomen recorded in the Milwaukee City Directory. In 1900, following her husband’s murder by the Black Hand, an organized crime group, Balbi opened a fruit stand at the Chamber of Commerce Building. By 1908, she had saved enough money to open a confectionery shop where her daughter Lillie worked as a clerk. Sicilian-born women were engaged in a variety of business activities: Jennie Ferraro owned a bakery . Anna DiMaggio worked as a seamstress while her husband was alive and took over his butcher shop after his death; Anna’s eldest son was employed as manager of the shop and her youngest son was a meat cutter. Jeanette Corti came to Milwaukee from Italy in 1905 and was the proprietor [52.15.63.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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