Laboring Across National Borders:
Class, Gender, and Militancy
in the Proletarian Mass Migrations
Donna Gabaccia
University of Pittsburgh
Franca Iacovetta
University of Toronto
Fraser Ottanelli
University of South Florida
Abstract
A decade-long project on the migration of Italian laborers around the world during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries points to the methodological challenges, theoretical
debates, and some of the rewards of transnational analysis of class, ethnicity, and gender
in the making of modern national states. Analyses of internationally mobile laborers historicize current transnational studies, problematize the historiography of national groups,
and reveal how profoundly—and usually also how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.
At a time when activists call for an anticapitalist, international movement of
“globalization from below,”1 We scarcely need to ask “why study labor transnationally?”2 Capitalism, labor markets, labor regimes and workers’ movements
have never been phenomena enclosed within national territories. Working-class
historians might do well to reflect on earlier internationalists who thought globally and acted locally despite their status as foreigners and noncitizens. On that
foundation, scholars of labor and social movements that cross national boundaries can move beyond the question “what is do be done?” to “how is it to be
done?” and “what difference can it make?”
This paper offers one set of possible answers to these questions. It presents
reflections on researching global and feminist labor history and on what such research taught us about work, workers, labor movements, gender, nation-states,
and labor historians. In it, we draw from an ongoing research project affectionately called “Italians Everywhere.” That project examines the migrations of
more than 26 million workers over two centuries, tracing the global trajectories
of their movements, work, and labor activism on five continents, and their incorporation into national states around the world. To date, the project has generated two research collaborations, one focused on labor radicalism, migration,
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 66, Fall 2004, pp. 57–77
© 2004 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
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and the making of multiethnic states, and the other on women, work, militancy
and transnational family economies (both are discussed below); two additional
collaborations are currently in planning stages.3
While focused on one particular labor migration, our ongoing research project highlights issues to be pondered by historians of all mobile people. One is
the relative blindness to class, economic power, and the state in theoretical work
on transnationalism. A second is the on-going challenge of gendering class in labor history, particularly when analyzing immigrant workers who are regarded as
outsiders. Our search for the best organizing concepts for empirical research on
transnational labor migrations and labor movements suggest also that historians
should treat national and transnational studies as entwined levels of analysis. A
fourth issue is that analyses of internationally mobile labor problematize the historiography of national groups and reveal how profoundly—and usually also
how “nationally”—every multiethnic nation-state understood relations among
ethnicity, race or color, class, and gender.4 Our work thus historicizes current debates about globalization by showing that nationalism emerged and national
states consolidated their power during an earlier era of globalization. States
sometimes grew in power through the very global circuits that today’s theorists
predict will undermine the power of the national. One result is that the complex
identities of our supposedly postmodern era have a long modern history of entwining class, gender, and nation.
How We Did It: Crossing Frontiers
Perhaps because labor historians associate the study of single immigrant groups
in the United States with the conservative politics of the white, so-called “unmeltable” ethnics of the 1970s or because histories of individual groups seem too
respectful of national boundaries, labor history has focused increasingly on multiethnic working-class communities or on interethnic relations in local places.
This allows labor historians to begin to write, from the bottom up, a history of a
culturally diverse nation.5 In probing Italian workers’ border-crossing and migratory lives, we hoped to avoid the problem of replicating the provincialism of
localized ethnic nationalisms on a global stage by using analyses of mobile workers to problematize both the nation of Italy and the nations where Italy’s migrants worked.
Although trained as specialists in North American immigration, labor, and
radicalism, we had all lived, studied, and worked abroad and so knew personally how the border-patrolling policies of national states have constrained the mobile and also how profoundly Italy, Germany, Canada, France, or Argentina
have been shaped by international migrations. When applied to our shared interest in Italy’s migrants, such experiences made us acutely aware of the disproportionate scholarly influence worldwide of a huge US literature on immigration.6 By the 1990s, we saw the transnational study of mobile workers as a way
to de-center this scholarly hegemony of US understandings of immigration, immigrant workers, and the ethnic left.
Laboring Across National Borders
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Of course, the 1990s also generated a great deal of millennial and ahistorical “global-babble” about the supposedly unprecedented, transformative power of globalization.7 As historians, we knew that the features of globalization,
notably economic inequality, were already obvious a century ago. We also knew
that between 1914 and 1930, this earlier industrial era of globalization had
collapsed under the “backlash” from a variety of nationalist movements. We assumed, however, that connections among the various parts of the earth also began to thicken again after the Second World War and decolonization. Globalization then accelerated with the end of the Cold War and of the USSR. As
postwar barriers to trade, commerce and capital fell, however, international migration remained draconically restricted—a legacy of the backlash against the
globalization of a century earlier.8
We found that we had to assert repeatedly the significance of migrations
from Italy in this long history of globalization largely because Italy’s migrants
have been misunderstood as primarily US-bound and family- and communityoriented “urban villagers” from southern Italy in the years between 1890 and
1930.9 In fact, the US did not draw the majority of Italy’s migratory millions:
most left Italy’s north and center, not the country’s notoriously impoverished
south. Because male migrants dominated, rates of return were also consistently
high (estimated at 50 – 80 percent for various regions and eras), as were repeated migrations (sometimes to several continents). This out-migration continued
into the 1920s and 1930s, providing the largest early group of officially recruited “worker settlers” and “guest workers” on three continents.10
The global labor markets within which Italian migrants moved were thoroughly gendered. Abroad, men worked in construction, commercial, or plantation agriculture, mining and in a number of heavy industries; women took jobs
almost exclusively as machine tenders in the so-called “light industries.” Most
women and children, however, remained in Italy to feed themselves through subsistence agriculture. Men’s foreign wages subsidized both reproduction of family patrimonies and improvements in family consumption. Men and women occupied different places in a global division of labor, even as their private
intimacies and family economies linked precapitalist and capitalist workplaces
around the world.11
When we initiated the “Italians Everywhere” project the terminology of
transnationalism was practically unknown and theoretical work on globalization
in the social sciences was just beginning.12 We responded to these theoretical developments but continued to draw inspiration primarily from the internationalist ideals of nineteenth and twentieth century workers and radical movements.
What Is to Be Done? The Challenges of Mobile Labor
Our project alerted us to problems that all researchers of mobile labor will face,
including choices of theory, historiography, method, and organizing concepts.
Lurking behind this special issue on transnational labor, for example, are social
science theories about transnationalism that had interested but also troubled us.
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Historians interested in transnationalism typically cite just two key works from the
early 1990s by anthropologists (many specializing on contemporary Caribbean
migration to the US). In Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration, editors Nina Glick-Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton sensibly defined transnationalism as social practices among migrants that occur on the territories of more than one nation-state.13 This phenomenon was already well known
to historians of international migration. Glick-Schiller et al. seemed at first to suggest that “trans-migration” and transnationalism signaled the diminishing power
of national states, but a subsequent collection suggested that migration instead
created long-distance forms of nationalism.14 At least initially, Glick-Schiller et al.
treated transnationalism as a new phenomenon, unimaginable without the technologies of air travel, telephones, satellites, and digital communication. They
also assumed too easily that the nations and national states of the past were allpowerful and that today’s migrations were unprecedented in scale.
We were instead acutely aware both of the newness and instability of most
of the states touched by Italy’s global migration and of their capacity to gain power and influence during an earlier period of equally massive international mass
migration. Finally, US social scientists’ longstanding hostility to Marxist theory
seemed to render many transnational theorists inattentive to class, though less
often to gender (partly because so many of today’s international migrants and
scholars of migration—quite unlike the past—are female).15
Without inventing the term transnational, historians of Italy’s migrants had
much earlier produced a rich (if often gender-blind) literature on border-crossing. As early as 1919, Robert Foerster compared Italy’s migrants in over half a
dozen different countries.16 In 1962, Ernesto Ragionieri’s Marxist, internationalist analysis of Italy’s migrations made them a central theme in global labor history.17 By the mid-1960s, Latin Americanist Samuel Bailey was comparing Italian laborers in Argentina and the US, and in the early 1980s, Italian colleagues
extended the comparison to four continents.18 From the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s, immigration and labor historians Ferdinando Fasce (Italy), Donna Gabaccia (US), and Bruno Ramirez (Canada) scrutinized Italian laborers’
multiple and connected work sites.19 Gabaccia had experimented with a
methodology that Bailey, writing in the same year as Glick-Schiller et al., later
called “village outward.”20 Baily’s work acknowledged the predominance of localism over nationalism—but only now, a decade later, do anthropologists also
write about “trans-local” phenomena. Already in the 1980s, too, Dirk Hoerder
and his Labor Migration Project conceptualized Italy’s migrations as part of the
“proletarian migrations” of the Atlantic world, a concept that sent historians
back to the study of labor internationalism (in anarchist, socialist, syndicalist,
communist, and some Pan-Africanist expressions) and also encouraged comparative labor history by acknowledging the power of national boundaries while
focusing on the laborers who cross them.21
In evaluating competing theoretical concepts we explored relationships
among social history, poststructuralist theory, and the social sciences. For example, we asked the readers of Diaspora, a journal oriented toward humanists,
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61
postmodernists, and literary scholars, whether Marx’s “international proletariat” or social scientists Robin Cohen’s and J.A. Anderson’s “proletarian diaspora” best described networks of ideas, social relations, and capital among Italy’s
migrants.22 Gabaccia and Ottanelli’s Italian Workers of the World evoked but
also critiqued Marx’s influential concept for labor historians,23 while Gabaccia’s
Italy’s Many Diasporas historicized Robin Cohen’s typology and theory of diasporas.24 We also found transnationalism (at least as we understood it—as “a
working class way of life”) most useful in analyzing gender relations.25 Collaboration allowed us to draw on archival research in a variety of times, places, and
languages.26 Most contributors produced finely grained analyses of particular
villages, workplaces, or cities, while comparativist and Atlantic historians helped
us to link local, national, and global histories of labor and gender.27 Our collaborative and border-crossing research methodology thus closely approximated
the lived lives of migrants who moved repeatedly, crossing the many scales of
group solidarities.
What Difference Does it Make? Labor Movements and the Making
of Multiethnic National States
If nations are imagined communities, nation-building—the conferring of rights
of citizenship to some but not to others—long remained the privilege of the
few.28 Studies of nation-building and of international migration can intimately
entwine the national histories of regions that export labor and those that import
it. Collectively, the essays in our first published volume, Italian Workers of the
World, examined the complex relationships among migration, class, cosmopolitan and internationalist ideologies, nation-building, and the development of ethnic consciousness.
Nation-building among Italy’s humble peasants and workers began outside
Italy. For most of Italy’s residents in 1800, the village or paese was the only real
territorial focus for identity and affection and the foundation, along with family and kin groups, of social solidarity. At a time when the peninsula was politically fragmented, nationalists already declared that Italy existed as a cultural nation, created by Catholic clerics or by urban humanist intellectuals and artists
who had exported their cultures widely around Europe between 1000 and 1500.
Few nationalists accepted uneducated, rural peasants and urban plebeians as
members of the Italian nation. (Those who defined the nation as the speakers of
Italian, for example, meant Dante’s language, which only a small percentage of
Italy’s citizens spoke in the nineteenth century.) Our contributors showed how
only the many republican exiles of the Italian Risorgimento—such as Giuseppe
Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi—actively and with some success recruited
humble migrants into their campaigns for national unification and independence. Many labor migrants first began to think of themselves as Italians while
living and working abroad. Not a few joined Garibaldi in fighting for republican
ideals in Latin America and significant numbers then returned with him to Italy
to defend the Roman republic in 1848 – 9, to fight against Austria in 1859 and to
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invade Sicily, sparking Italian unification, in 1860. Italy’s moderate new rulers realized quickly, however, that the country they governed was not yet a nation; the
task of “making Italians” of the rural majority remained.29
To the shock of Italy’s new rulers, the citizens of the new nation immediately began to abandon it as migrants. Abroad, these humble male migrants
were initially greeted by angry “natives” and workers who may have feared them
as wage-depressors but who expressed their hostility in national terms. Italian
Workers of the World illustrated how Italian migrants after 1870 first exposed,
then challenged, the prevalence of what Robert Paris called the “proletarian nationalism” of early labor movements around the world.30 In the 1870s, 1880s,
and 1890s, in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Canada, and Australia, “native” workers struck when Italians were hired in direct competition
with them. Periodically bloodier confrontations typically occurred when mobs
went on anti-Italian rampages. Most national labor movements in countries
where Italians worked initially advocated restrictions on migration; this was especially so in Australia but also in North America. Even European Socialist parties (with their focus on electoral strategies to enfranchise workers and capture
state power) had little initial interest in mobile foreigners. During the 1880s
French Socialists advocated immigration restrictions and limits on foreigners’
access to jobs.31
Contrary to contemporary stereotypes, however, Italian migrants were not
scabbing wage-breakers impervious to unionization; everywhere they displayed
a notable degree of combativeness, as they had also to the imposition of new
laws in unified Italy. In France and Argentina, Italian migrants frequently initiated labor struggles. In North America, Italian workers struck spontaneously
and—when faced with nativist discrimination from unions of skilled workers—
formed their own labor organizations. Socialist and anarchist internationalist
ideals quickly appealed to Italy’s migrants: In 1881, when attacked by French
workers, one migrant cried out in vain that he was an “Italian, but a Socialist!”32
Italian Workers of the World demonstrated how the integration of Italy’s mobile
workers into working-class organizations abroad was promoted by exiled Italian labor leaders in the name of labor internationalism.
During the half-century between 1870 and 1920, exiled Italian-speaking anarchists formed an especially far-flung and distinctive, if also contentious, ideological diaspora. Typically two steps ahead of the police, anarchists led peripatetic lives, circulating through as many as a dozen countries advocating either
propaganda of the deed and terrorism or direct action in the workplace and general strikes against the state. Italian newspapers in Argentina were in touch with
and excerpted news from their counterparts in Europe, North America, and
North Africa; they reported on developments and activities among Spanish,
Russian, French, and English-speaking anarchists. Research by Michael Miller
Topp on Italian syndicalism demonstrates how organizing failures and successes in Argentina directly affected strategies and principles adopted in Italy; the
US Italian radicals’ debates and correspondence clearly document the existence
of internationalism organized across national borders by mobile workers.33
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63
In ways that differed somewhat from country to country, Italy’s exiles became what Elisabetta Vezzosi termed “radical ethnic brokers” who mediated between Italian migrant workers and nativist labor movements in receiving countries.34 Wherever they settled, radical activists linked Italian workers to local
labor organizations, nurtured networks of social, cultural, and literary institutions that sustained immigrant left communities, and pioneered a range of border-crossing, multiethnic, and multiracial organizing strategies that transcended
ethnic and national divisions. In Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, Italian exiles quickly joined with local organizations on the basis of a common socialist
ideology to recruit and ensure protections for Italian migrant workers. What
they did not demand for immigrant workers was the right to enter as citizens into
the nations where they worked. The most successful example of multi-national
solidarity was in France, where, beginning at the turn of the century, prominent
exiles led Italian workers to join French coworkers in local unions and jointly to
participate in strikes. French republicanism opened a door to citizenship for foreign workers in ways not possible in most other European countries.35
In countries such as Argentina and Brazil, where native labor movements
were nonexistent or small, Italian radicals (mostly anarchists and syndicalists)
joined with Spanish and Portuguese immigrant workers in the 1880s and 1890s
to create and lead “cosmopolitan” or “internationalist” multiethnic labor organizations that blended the languages and customs of several nations. Angelo
Trento shows that the amalgamation of workers of many ethnic origins into single unions extended beyond artisan circles to the emerging urban proletariat
(such as railroad workers), and to agricultural workers and settlers (as in Brazil’s
Santa Caterina and São Paulo provinces or on the pampas of Argentina), as Carina Silberstein demonstrates.36
In the United States, by contrast, the American Federation of Labor’s hostility to unskilled laborers, socialism, and internationalism, and its adamant opposition to free immigration, initially prevented the integration of Italians. At
first, Italian labor activism flourished outside the American Federation of Labor
(AFL), and mainly in syndicalist unions—either the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) or in organizations for Italian immigrants. As industrial unions
for unskilled workers developed, Italians found their place within the AFL
through the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and in the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), but, like other foreign workers, they
typically did so as activists in separate “language locals.” Ethnic and class solidarities were developing in tandem—a point that labor historians of AngloAmerican and British immigrant workers initially resisted or misunderstood.37
By the eve of the First World War, mobile workers from Italy found themselves everywhere juggling international, national or ethnic, and local ideals and
expressions of class solidarity. With the onset of a half-century of world wars and
the ostensible collapse of labor internationalism in 1914, warring states made
more assertive claims on their loyalty. Following the armistice in 1918, renewed
antiforeign and antiradical nativist sentiment led to growing restrictions on immigration in most receiving countries, while in Italy, Mussolini’s hostility to em-
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igration was obvious from the onset of his regime in 1922. For Italy’s migrants,
the interwar years of the twentieth century were a turning point in the process
of nationalization worldwide; their attitudes toward fascism in Italy and racial
assumptions in the receiving countries helped to shape this process.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, wherever Italian migrants had settled, fascists and antifascists warred over what it meant, politically and ideologically, to
be a “true” Italian, shifting workers’ entrenched localism toward issues of nation-building both in and outside Italy. These battles helped to guarantee that
receiving countries’ efforts to “nationalize” foreign or immigrant workers mirrored earlier efforts of their national labor movements. In France, Belgium and
Argentina, opposition to fascism helped to strengthen and expand ties between
Italian immigrants and multiethnic working-class movements, often influenced
by left ideologies. By the mid-1930s, in France, for example, Italians accounted
for over half of the 400,000 foreign members of the pro-Communist union, the
Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT).38
While the French left used antifascism for its own domestic purposes, immigrants expressed simultaneously in antifascism their internationalist commitment to the struggle against oppression in Italy, their cultural identities as Italians, and new national solidarities with French workers.39 Similarly, Plata River
region immigrant antifascists embraced the myth of Giuseppe Garibaldi as a
symbol of the struggle for independence and freedom both in Italy and in Latin
America. Many rejected Mussolini’s claim to their loyalties while also claiming
Argentine, Uruguayan, and Italian national identities. But those claiming new
identities as Argentines often eventually supported populist and nationalist
movements that resembled Mussolini’s fascism in Europe.40
In Australia, Canada, and the United States, a history of discriminatory immigration laws, hostile labor movements, and the violent repression, deportation or execution of radicals such as Sacco and Vanzetti also pushed Italian immigrants beyond village loyalties to embrace new ethnic identities as Italians.
Seeing in Mussolini a positive symbol of strength, fascists in these countries successfully built a diaspora nationalism that merged love of homeland with glorification of the fascist regime. This definition of identity persisted until the early
stages of the Second World War.41 Mussolini’s hostility to Bolshevism also initially endeared him to antiunion and conservative American natives; unlike in
France, antifascism never became an overweening concern of most Englishspeaking unions. However, as Fraser Ottanelli shows, Italian and American antifascists did find common ground in the left unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But even the quick shift of Italian immigrants’ loyalties
to their new countries, as they entered the war against Italy, left them with identities marked by their ethnic origins and new US racial identities as whites.42
The nationalization of Italy’s mobile millions seemed complete by war’s
end. While countries such as Canada and Australia recruited Italian workers as
permanent settlers, the vastly increased power of national states became particularly evident in the rise of what in post-1945 Europe came to be called “guest
worker programs.” Beginning in 1946, in exchange for trade and other privi-
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65
leges, Italy signed a series of bilateral treaties with Belgium, France, Sweden, the
Netherlands, Great Britain, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and later still, with
Germany (1955), and with Switzerland in the 1960s, to recruit, select and transport negotiated numbers of workers from Italy. In return, the receiving governments stipulated wages, housing provisions, or guaranteed social services for the
recruits. What Italian padroni had provided a half-century earlier—connections
to employers and landlords—was now handled by government bureaucrats.43
Whether in Italy or abroad, these bureaucrats assumed that the guest workers were—and would remain—Italians. But by the time of the economic recession
of the 1970s, it was clear that many guest workers would not return permanently to Italy. Countries that accepted immigrants as potential citizens—notably
France and Belgium—permitted Italian guest workers to bring up fiancés and
wives once they had fixed employment and residence abroad. Less sympathetic
to the permanent settlement or political incorporation (citizenship) of guest
workers, Switzerland and Germany were shocked to discover that the temporary collapse of their economic miracles in the early 1970s did not result in the
immediate repatriation of hundreds of thousands of guest workers.44
By 1990, five million Italians still lived abroad, a small minority among the
more than sixty million persons of recent Italian descent scattered worldwide.
Identities diverged sharply in this larger group. In Canada, Australia, and the
United States, many of them participated in ethnic revivals that occurred as
these nations in the 1970s began to encourage national solidarity through official ideologies of multiculturalism. They typically expressed sentimental, familial or cultural attachments to Italy but few knew that country either linguistically
or culturally. Cultural stereotypes that originated in the English-speaking world
helped construct the hyphens that marked identity for Italy’s descendants,45 who
have not yet escaped from images of Italians as Catholic, hard-working, familyoriented, and food-loving, yet also mafia-linked, racist, and highly sexed proletarians.46 They had found incorporation into multicultural yet national “mosaics” much as they had once entered the labor mainstream through their ethnic
or “language” locals.47
In sharp contrast, the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants in
France, Argentina, and Brazil, while aware of their cultural origins, did not make
ethnicity a central component of their identities. Accepted on arrival as Europeans and whites, they had intermarried extensively with natives and thought of
themselves simply as French, Argentine, or Brazilian nationals or citizens; more
than a few viewed the hyphenated identities of the English-speaking world as
the distasteful product or direct continuation of past racist prejudices. Just as the
labor movements of these countries had blended workers of many backgrounds—often uniting across ethnic barriers through common ideologies—
both republican France and authoritarian Brazil and Argentina had imagined
their nations as successful biological melting pots.48
In several European countries, the children and grandchildren of guest
workers faced particularly complex choices. In Germany and Switzerland,
where race and nation were largely coterminous, migrant workers did not auto-
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matically acquire access to citizenship nor did their children born abroad. Many
(but not all) Italians living elsewhere in Europe continued to hold Italian citizenship, maintained close familial and linguistic ties in Italy, and identified with
their homeland regions; regional governments in the 1970s began to organize
programs to assure continued contact with all migrants.”49 When the formation
of the European Union opened opportunities for Europe’s Italians (along with
other national groups) to work and migrate freely, this added an additional layer to migrants’ already complex identities.
In exploring how labor migrations, internationalist activists and national labor movements shaped the racialized construction of multiethnic nations, we often sensed gender’s influence but, with few exceptions (notably in the work of
Topp, Vezzosi, and Trento), participants in our first research collaboration did
not probe this connection. We also remained acutely aware that by focusing on
the many men who left Italy, we had ignored women who remained behind, and
the impact of men’s migration on gender and class in Italy. We addressed these
issues with a second research collaborative; whereas the first one demonstrated
the relative ease with which labor historians could link border-crossing class dynamics and national narratives of working-class movements, it proved more difficult to entwine gender and class analysis in the study of border-crossing phenomena. But we also felt encouraged by the many parallel and ongoing feminist
efforts to internationalize women’s history.50
What Difference Does it Make? Feminist Labor History
Our shift in focus produced a numerically female-dominant team of mostly feminist researchers familiar with interdisciplinary approaches (such as ethnic or
women’s studies) and with negotiating a variety of theoretical, methodological
and research objectives, and involved more contributors with scholarly homes
outside labor history. If some participants did not entirely share our material
feminist perspective, all acknowledged the importance of material conditions—
especially hard physical labor and material scarcity—in shaping women’s lives.
We also broadened our understanding of labor to include unpaid as well as
waged work, the lives of peasant woman in Italy as well as emigrants abroad, and
female activism both within traditional labor, political and radical movements
and outside them. Finally, we benefited from (and hoped to contribute to) the
now extensive feminist scholarship on women as “unequal sisters.”51
The challenge of decentering US paradigms loomed very large in this collaboration. North American historians had produced almost all work on immigrant Italian women, thereby replicating the coldwar pattern of US anthropologists’ influential portrait of the supposedly familist and apolitical peasants of
Italy’s South.52 Stereotypes of Italian women as reluctant wage-earners, docile
workers, and victims of Latin patriarchal traditions continue to dominate narratives of US history largely because neither their activism nor the Italian-language sources had been scrutinized. As Jennifer Guglielmo notes, scholars re-
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67
lied on English-language sources and used the more documented histories of
East European and Russian Jewish women’s militancy and class-consciousness
as the yardstick by which to assess Italian-American female activism. Stereotypes of Italian women, or their absence altogether, also still characterize most
male-dominated studies of Italian-American working-class activism where,
Guglielmo adds, “narrow definitions of the political have obscured female activism.”53
By involving researchers from sending and receiving societies, and by paying attention to the unorganized everyday acts of resistance,54 our project confirmed Ardis Cameron’s insight that “[i]t is not at either the so-called point of
production or consumption that we best understand the lives of proletarian
women, but rather at the myriad intersections of the two, where the bits and
pieces of female labor converged in the daily struggle to make ends meet.”55
Such conclusions emerged clearly from our bottom-up approach that—as Alice
Kessler-Harris and others advised years ago—treated gender, like class, as an
historical process.56 For the women we studied, however, daily struggle and convergence of male and female work as often occurred within transnational family economies as in any one Italian village or Little Italy abroad.
We fully expected that a comparison of the lives of women in countries such
as Italy, France, Argentina, the US, Belgium, Canada, and Australia would offer more complex and engaging portraits of women as peasants, workers, wives,
mothers, consumers, and militants, and we hoped to recover the voices and actions of at least some militants and radicals. Still, the numbers and powerful
voices of Italian women that we uncovered surprised us.57
This new research clearly challenged simplistic contrasts between a premodern Italian south peopled by competitive and conservative familists and cloistered
women “in the shadows,” and a more prosperous, industrializing Italian north of
emancipated, wage-earning men and women with few economic incentives to emigrate. While gender ratios did vary in northern and southern migrations, both
North and South generated massive migrations between 1870 and 1945. Stereotypes of a stable north and a migratory south originated in Italy among urban,
northern middle-class government officials, surveyors and social scientists who
drew negative portraits of rural Italy’s many sending villages and plebeian classes
and described emigration as a sign of collapsing patriarchy and morality.
In the 1970s, social historians of Italian immigrants in North America reacted to these negative portraits but their important efforts to rehabilitate
Italy’s mobile millions were largely confined to the men of southern Italy. Such
men became reconceptualized as migrant “men without women” who were
guided by strongly-felt family values and who subsidized (not financed, as some
mistakenly assumed) their families with wages from abroad before returning to
reassume authority over them. Social historians who critiqued US depictions of
Italian immigrant families as disorganized and pathological also criticized Oscar Handlin’s seminal but problematic interpretation of immigrants as uprooted and alienated.58 Nevertheless, these well-intentioned efforts to rehabilitate
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the morality of southern Italians helped to produce an imbalanced historiography that privileged men’s agency, mobility and work but left women as static,
almost folkloric, figures.
Surprisingly, the equally ideological and moralizing documents produced
by Italy’s bourgeois surveyors also proved enormously helpful: they described
women’s heavy work duties; their comments about the gruff, almost beast-like
manner with which women attacked their many tasks revealed how they disparaged and marginalized such women. As part of subsistence production in an
agricultural economy, women’s duties included both domestic chores shared
with men and children and tasks allotted to women alone, such as spinning wool,
weaving, laundry, and food preparation. Census enumerators typically ignored
women and children’s domestic chores done without pay, whether in the home
or fields.59 Rural women worked full time, but housekeeping and child-minding
were not their main, or even second, occupation; this troubled investigators who
hesitated to label such women as casalinga or housewives.60
Ironically, bourgeois Italians saw patriarchy collapsing in the same Italian
countryside where American scholars would later claim to find the roots of immigrant women’s conservative gender ideals. Government surveys showed that
men’s emigrations from Italy meant women had to work harder to guarantee
family subsistence, and, in response, the investigators criticized male labor migrants for their callous and utilitarian approach to marriage and wives. While
confirming the extent and importance of women’s work, Linda Reeder instead
linked male emigration from Sicily to more positive results at home—including
higher rates of female literacy, improved housing, and improvements in peasant
diets.61
Overall, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives demonstrates that women’s domestic worlds were not isolated or patriarchal prisons from which they
escaped into independence or female autonomy via wage-earning. But neither
was the domestic world a female-dominated haven for highly skilled and chaste
housewives, as bourgeois Americans more often believed. Conflicts between a
peasant Italian discourse that posited the home or private sphere as the preferred workplace for all—male and female—and discourses of the home as a female sphere apart from the public world of male work seemed particularly intensive in the English-speaking world. One result was a fairly consistent portrait
of Italian immigrant women as homebound, family-oriented wives and mothers
rather, as was the case in other countries, as workers (Australia) or Communist
activists (Belgium).62
In US studies of working-class women, Italian immigrants’ absence from
domestic service was sometimes labelled a failure to take the same jobs as other immigrant women and was attributed to Italian men’s rule over women’s sexuality. Our research suggests it might be more helpful to view women’s work as
keepers of male boarders in their homes as a form of domestic service (or even
female entrepreneurship) and as a way to earn incomes within their own ethnic
and working-class, rather than American women’s, domestic sphere. Such work
never registered as wage-earning in America but was otherwise similar to the
Laboring Across National Borders
69
work done by live-in Irish and other immigrant domestics. Boarding housekeepers, much like other domestic servants, and much like factory workers,
faced sexual risks. Alternatively, illicit love affairs, usually between young male
boarders and their housekeepers’ daughters, suggest that houses with boarders
were sites of both pleasure and danger. That large numbers of Italian immigrant
women kept boarders shows a willingness to take on new forms of income-earning, for the practice of boarding was almost unknown in Italy.63
Although transnational in its approach to women’s labors, our research deexoticized Italian immigrant women and portrayed them as quite like other
working-class women who juggled family and waged work to guarantee survival
and reproduction. Whether in northern or southern Italy or abroad, and whether
Italian, eastern-European Jewish, African-American, or Mexican, women’s work
choices depended on a range of factors, including availability of jobs in the local economy, timing of arrival, age, lifecycle stage, and motherhood. The task of
piecing together livelihoods involved women in a complicated set of activities
that were seldom completely distinct from or independent of the home, neighborhood, or community.
Here, we would also warn against exoticizing working-class Italian immigrant women in studies of domestic violence. Eager to rescue immigrants from
pathological portraits, ethnic scholars have generally avoided the subject. Yet
feminist scholarship shows that domestic violence crosses all class and racial/
ethnic boundaries. Abusive men, regardless of class or race/ethnicity, typically
justified their actions by claiming to have a stubborn, disobedient, or inferior
wife who failed to fulfill her duties.64 On occasion, the victims turned to violence,
as did Angelina Napolitano, in 1911, when she killed her abusive husband. She
admitted her crime and was sentenced to death. A worldwide clemency campaign of first-wave feminists and Italian radicals (including IWW poet Arturo
Giovanitti) convinced Canadian authorities to commute her sentence to life imprisonment—a testament to the internationalist character of both feminism and
Italian radicalism.65
Since the least understood feature of Italian immigrant and working-class
women’s lives has been their agency as militants and radicals, it bears stressing
that our contributors easily uncovered activists in North and South America, in
Italy, and in northern Europe. In many ways, women radicals resembled Italy’s
male activists: they organized across national borders and preferred anarchism
and anarcho-syndicalism before the First World War and antifascism and communism during the interwar and postwar years. But their activism was also distinctive. Italian women were often “radicals of a different sort.” Like other radical proletarian immigrant and ethnic women, Italian anarchist women in North
and South America and in Europe were both politicized by and their activities
and ideologies rooted in the everyday material world; they tended to value relationship and informal organization over union membership or discipline. José
Moya’s and Caroline Merithew’s analyses of the newsletters and debates of formally uneducated militant anarchist Italian housewives and miners’ wives in
turn-of-the century Argentina and the US, and Anne Morelli’s work on rank-
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and-file communist women workers in interwar and post-1945 Belgium, reminds
us of the limitation of top-down analyses of left or militant women that assume,
implicitly or explicitly, that party cadres or leaders were representative of the unorganized, the rank-and-file and grass-roots organizers.66
So, too, does Guglielmo’s study of New York garment workers, which explores the meaning of a proletarian feminism that joined community, workplace,
and family in distinctively female ways. Thus, for example, in the famous 1909
uprising that led to the massive influx of women into the ILGWU and the AFL,
Italian women appeared as reluctant union members partly because they supported the IWW (as did more Italian men) and so were not part of the informal
family and neighborhood networks that facilitated Jewish women’s entry into
the union. Together, this research suggests that labor and political activism for
migrant Italian women were not battles for autonomous individualism, equal
rights and economic independence, as they were for Anglo-American feminists,
who were more likely to understand women’s liberty in terms of a liberal discourse of individual rights and citizenship.67 In contrast to celebrated leaders
like Emma Goldman, and to socialist and middle class advocates of suffrage, ordinary anarchist wives and mothers spent the bulk of their time discussing motherhood, children, and social or collective equality.
Maternalism, however, should not be confused with either passivity or with
respectable womanhood, as it is usually understood in the Anglo-American
world. While certain women radicals achieved notoriety as individuals,68 Italian
women from humble backgrounds more typically became radicals and practiced
their radicalism as members of families and communities; central to their identity as daughters, wives, and mothers was their location in and sense of belonging to a family and to communities of subversives. Rather than reject familism
as a supposedly conservative influence on Italian women’s lives, our analysis redefined the meaning of familism and its consequences for collective action.
Familism did not make such women less radical than prominent feminists and
radicals; they did not fail to value personal dignity or to challenge the very
men—fathers, husbands, lovers, and brothers—with whom they shared so much
ideologically. In gender battles (like the one that erupted in an Illinois’ anarchist
mining town over men’s refusal to permit women into their political club),
women talked back: when the men called them “worse than dogs because they
are bitches” the women warned them “to remember another much wider—if
crude adage—‘women’s hair pulls much further than a hundred oxen.’”69 Nor
did tough talk and clenched fists preclude political analysis. Our research outlined the sophisticated political ideas developing among formally uneducated
and supposedly uncouth radical Italian migrant women in New York, Buenos
Aires, Paris, Brussels, and Montreal.
The female political culture that emerged in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives was earthy, and it was based simultaneously on women’s capacity for
and pride in their incredibly harsh physical labor, their sharp tongues (the “belle
e buone lingue”—good and beautiful tongues—noted in an Italian union ditty
of the time), and the close connection between their often-rough and violent
Laboring Across National Borders
71
protest strategies and their commitments to family obligations. Street protests
and labor militancy were normal, acceptable, and respectable elements of family and community life, completely consistent with women’s identities as wives,
daughters, and mothers.70
The presence of rank-and-file women who acted in strikes as in daily life—
with an earthy, assertive, and mouthy femininity rooted in the harsh realities and
struggles of peasant and proletarian life—pose a major challenge to an older but
still influential paradigm in North American feminist labor history. It stresses
how working-class women were constrained in protesting and mounting militant
campaigns by their aspirations to feminine propriety in either bourgeois (i.e.,
hegemonic) or proletarian-defined notion of domesticity and motherhood. Of
course, not all Italian militant working-class women expressed their contempt
for gouging landlords or exploitative employers in a violent way: fear, age, and
other factors kept many from joining the female mobs or smashing windows.
Still, our findings suggest the need to de-center more fully white Anglo-Celtic
North American women’s notions of gender respectability but to do so without
creating romantic ethnic heroines or golden ages of female militancy.71 We also
ask here a question that feminist studies of female militancy, including our own,
have not yet adequately addressed: should we problematize the actions of tough
proletarian women who accosted scabs, broke windows, or—as Moya describes
for Buenos Aires— resorted so often to the tactic of pouring boiling water on
opponents that it generated a slogan of working-class anarchist resistance—
“Evictions? Boiling Water?” Feminists labor historians have occasionally critiqued celebrations of male violence but few have applied a comparable critique
to female violence.72
Our research collaboration on women and gender transnationally did not
create a periodization of nationalization comparable to the one uncovered in
Italian Workers of the World but it did confirm the prevalence of complex and
multi-layered identities among women, too, during an earlier epoch of globalization. While the challenge of postmodernism (with its sometimes ahistorical
claims to the uniqueness of the present) has sometimes led to strained relations
between younger and older generations of labor historians, we experienced no
major tensions among our rather eclectic group of authors. No debate developed
over whether our project required a shift from material feminist to post-modern
feminist perspectives. For us, a sensitivity to women’s multiple identities
emerged from our fairly traditional bottom-up approach to women’s lives and
from an understanding of a feminist labor scholarship that—as Carole Turbin,
Sonya Rose, Neville Kirk, and others note—had already begun in the 1970s and
1980s to deconstruct class and to demonstrate the complicating influence of language, rhetoric, and ideology on social practice, class consciousness, hierarchies
of power, and contested meanings and identities.73
In ways that recall the earlier efforts of Marxist feminists to work through
the uneasy alliance between analyses of patriarchy and class—an exercise that
effectively demonstrated the symbiotic relationship of gender and class and of
working-women’s multiple identities74 —many class-oriented and left feminists
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ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004
are grappling with ways of transcending the postmodern/material divide while
insisting on rigorous class analysis and politically engaged scholarship. Many
have become concerned to bridge what appears to be an increasingly dual-division along generational and methodological lines precisely because, as feminists
who have long advocated pluralist and mass-based coalition politics, and who
recognize that many younger scholars have progressive politics, they wish to
form intellectual and political alliances with such scholars.75 Less confident
about possessing the truth and concerned to avoid defensive or aggressive denunciations of younger scholars or feminists,76 the colleagues involved in our ongoing “Italians Everywhere” research project are probing, reflecting, engaging,
and trying to create local, national, and international forums for debate across
generational, theoretical and methodological boundaries.77
Conclusion
Of course, our agenda of entwining class and gender analysis on a global stage
remains incompletely fulfilled. The need to link such analysis to the nationalization and racialization of mobile women and men workers also remains a
pressing one. Still, we believe that our collaborative research on mobile labor
offered one possible way to address quite a number of tough scholarly issues.
Colleagues working together across national boundaries problematized the national character of some of the sharpest historiographical debates among labor
historians. Both conflicts over postmodernist theory, for example, and the popularity of gender analysis, are far more pronounced in the English-speaking
world than they are in Italy, France, or Argentina. By beginning to write a border-crossing or transnational history of conflicts across gender, racial, class, and
national lines, we had found room for Italy’s feisty woman as well as for the propagandist of the deed, the sojourner, and for the manly labor stalwart along with
the multinational, multiethnic and multiracial families, communities, and workplaces—connected through migration—where men and women loved and battled with each other.
NOTES
1. Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The
Power of Solidarity (Boston, 2000).
2. A related concern for historians is the proliferating use and diverse meanings of the
term “transnational.” For some scholars the “trans” in transnational means activities that “transcend” that national and refers to phenomena that occur “above” or “beyond” the national
scale. In other studies “trans” has the meaning it does in “transcontinental”—across—meaning phenomena that cross national territories or national borders. In this usage, national states
are constitutive of transnational practices and nations are scarcely rendered irrelevant by border-crossing practices. We use the term transnational to refer to ideas and practices that cross
national boundaries. Useful critiques include David Fitzgerald, “Beyond ‘Transnationalism’:
Mexican Hometown Politics at an American Labor Union,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (forthcoming); Peter Kivisto, “Theorizing Transnational Immigration: A Critical Review of Current
Efforts,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (2001): 549 –77.
3. Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard at the Sorbonne has initiated a new collaboration that
Laboring Across National Borders
73
will focus on neighborhood and community; a second, interdisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists and historians is also now interested in sexuality, intimacy and the diasporic private sphere.
4. Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Italy’s Transnational Migrations and the
Immigrant Paradigm of American History” Special Issue on Transnational History, Journal of
American History 86,3 (December 1999): 1115 –1134.
5. For just two examples, James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930,” Journal
of American History 79 (December 1992) 996 –1020; Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort:
Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana, 2001).
6. Donna R. Gabaccia, “Italian History and ‘gli italiani nel mondo,’ Part II.” Journal of
Modern Italian Studies 3,1 (1998) 73 – 97.
7. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Going Beyond Global Babble,” in Anthony D. King, ed. Culture,
Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity 2nd Ed. (Minneapolis, 1997).
8. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in their book Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Boston, 2000), especially emphasize the role that international migration played in diminishing economic inequality and in
improving the position of Italy relative to Portugal and Spain across the twentieth century.
9. Key portraits include Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life
of Italian-Americans (New York, 1962); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community:
Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880 –1930 (Ithaca, 1977).
10. For an overview see Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London, 2000).
11. Donna Gabaccia, “When the Migrants are Men: Women, Transnationalism and Italian Family Economies,” in Pam Sharpe, ed. Women and Labor Migration: Global and Historical Perspectives (London, 2001) 190 –208; Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the
Transformation of Rural Women, Sicily, 1880 –1928 (Toronto, 2003).
12. Theorists of globalization—a group that includes Roland Robertson, Stuart Hall, Arjun Appadurai, Ulf Hannerz, and Mike Featherstone—are themselves a diverse lot; among the
most historically oriented are those working within an older global scholarly paradigm, of the
world systems theorizers—Immanuel Wallerstein himself, and Christopher Chase-Dunn and
Thomas Hall, Janet Abu-Lughod, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank.
13. Nina Glick Schiller, et al., eds Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race,
Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992). Eugenia Georges used the
term somewhat earlier in The Making of a Transnational Community: Migration, Development,
and Cultural Change in the Dominican Republic (New York, 1990).
14. Linda Basch et al., Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Projects,
Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-states (Langhorne, 1994)
15. See particularly the work of Patricia Pessar and her co-authors: Between Two Islands:
Dominican International Migration, ed. Pessar and Sherri Grasmuck (Berkeley, 1991); Sarah J.
Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar, “Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across
Transnational Spaces.” Identities 7,4 (2001): 441– 459.
16. The Italian Emigration of our Times (New York, 1968; orig. pub. 1919).
17. Ernesto Ragionieri, “Italiani all’estero ed emigrazione di lavoratori italiani: un tema
di storia del movimento operaio,” Belfagor, Rassegna di Varia Umanità 17, 6 (1962) 640 – 69.
18. Samuel L. Baily, “The Italians and the Development of Organized Labor in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, 1880 –1914,” Journal of Social History 3 (Winter 1969–70)
123 – 34; and “The Italians and Organized Labor in the United States and Argentina,” International Migration Review 1 (Summer 1967) 55 – 66. Bruno Bezza et al. Gli italiani fuori d’Italia;
Gli emigrati italiani nei movimenti operai dei paesi d’adozione, 1880–1940 (Milan, 1983).
19. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street; Housing and Social Change among Italian
Immigrants, 1880–1930 (Albany, 1984) and Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians become
American Workers (New Brunswick, N.J, 1988); Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860–1914 (Toronto, 1991); Ferdinando Fasce Tra due sponde: lavoro, affari e cultura fra Italia e Stati Uniti nell’età della grande
emigrazione (Genova, 1993).
20. Samuel L. Baily, “The Village-Outward Approach to Italian Migration: A Case Study
of Agnonesi Migration Abroad, 1885 –1989.” Studi Emigrazione 29, 105 (1992). Bailey’s
methodological suggestions also paved the way for early portraits of Italy’s migrations as a diaspora: George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez, eds., The Italian Diaspora: Migration across
74
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the Globe (Toronto, 1992); Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Diaspora, 1876–1976,” in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration I (Cambridge, 1995). Gabaccia’s fuller
study, Italy’s Many Diasporas, soon followed.
21. Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and
North American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization (Westport, Conn.,
1985). Representative of the work of the University of Bremen Labor Migration Project is Dirk
Hoerder, Inge Blank and Horst Rössler, Roots of the Transplanted (Boulder, 1994).
22. Donna Gabaccia and Fraser Ottanelli, “Diaspora or International Proletariat? Italian
Labor Migration and the Making of Multi-ethnic States, 1815–1939,” Diaspora 6,1 (Spring
1997): 61–84.
23. Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor,
Migration, and the Making of Multi-Ethnic Nations (Urbana, 2001).
24. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997).
25. Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender and Transnational
Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto, 2002). We found transnational theory more useful than Appadurai’s typology of ethnoscapes and ideoscapes, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). Nevertheless, Appadurai’s linkage of imaginaries and mobility could be useful for rethinking gender and sexuality among migrants.
26. We were fortunate to have as models the early 1980s “Chicago Project” of the Free
University of Berlin and the University of Munich and Dirk Hoerder’s somewhat later Labor
Migration Project at the University of Bremen. For the former, see Hartmut Keil and John
Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850–1910: A Comparative Perspective
(DeKalb, Ill., 1983); for the latter, see n. 21 above.
27. We thank again Nancy Green, Samuel Bailey, Dirk Hoerder, Nando Fasce, Sal Salerno, and Bruno Ramirez.
28. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Donna Landry and Gerald McLean eds., The Spivak Reader (New York, 1996); C.T. Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indianapolis, 1991); Ruth
Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri eds., Colony, Nation, Empire (Bloomington IN,, 1999); Tania
Das Gupta and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Special Theme Issue, “Whose Canada Is It?” Atlantis:
A Women’s Studies Journal 24:2 (2000).
29. Donna R. Gabaccia, “Class, Exile and Nationalism at Home and Abroad: The Italian
Risorgimento”; Fernando J. Devoto, “Programs and Politics of the First Italian Elite of Buenos
Aires, 1852–80,” both in Gabaccia and Ottanelli eds., Italian Workers of the World.
30. Robert Paris, “Le mouvement ouvrier francais et l’immigration italienne (1893–
1914),” in Bruno Bezza, ed., Gli italiani fuori d’Italia (Milano, 1983): 638.
31. Gabaccia and Ottanelli, “Diaspora or International Proletariat?” 65–67; David
Goutor, “Walls of Solidarity: The Mainstream Labour Movement and Immigration Policy,
1870–1933” (PhD diss. University of Toronto, 2003).
32. Quoted in Teodosio Vertone, ‘’Antecedents et causes des évenements d’AiguesMortes,” in Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and Enrico Serra, L’emigrazione italiana in Francia prima
del 1914 (Milano, 1978), 109.
33. Gabaccia, “Worker Internationalism and Italian Labor Migration;” Michael Miller
Topp, “The Lawrence Strike: The Possibilities and Limitations,” 151–2 in Italian Workers of
the World.
34. Elisabetta Vezzosi, “Radical Ethnic Brokers.”
35. Gabaccia and Ottanelli, “Diaspora or International Proletariat?,” 67–68.
36. Angelo Trento, “‘Wherever We Work, That Land Is Ours’: The Italian Anarchist Press
and Working-Class Solidarity in São Paulo” and Carina Frid de Silberstein, “Migrants, Farmers, and Workers: Italians in the Land of Ceres,” in Italian Workers of the World, 79 –101.
37. For the now large body of work on the overlapping and mutually reinforcing relationship of class identity and class consciousness and radical ethnic culture, see for example, Iacovetta, “Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities, and Defiant Domestics: Writing About Immigrants in Canadian Historical Scholarship,” Labour/Le Travail 36 (Fall 1995), 217–252.
38. Milza, Voyage en Ritalie, 352– 354, 261–264; Paolo Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, vol. 3 (Turin, 1976), 84; Anne Morelli, Fascismo e antifascism nell’emigrazione
italiana in Belgio, 1922–1940 (Rome, 1987): 60 –78.
39. Antonio Bechelloni, “Antifascist Resistance in France from the ‘Phony War’ to the
Liberation: Identity and Destinies in Question,” in Italian Workers of the World, 214 –231.
Laboring Across National Borders
75
40. Pietro Rinaldo Fanesi, “Italian Antifascism and the Garibaldine Tradition in Latin
America,” 163–177.
41. Stefano Luconi, La ‘diplomazia parallela:’ Il regime fascista e la mobilitazione politica
degli Italo-americani (Milan, 2000).
42. Fraser M. Ottanelli, “‘If Fascism Comes to America We Will Push it Back into the
Ocean’: Italian American Antifascism in the 1920s and 1930s”; Nadia Venturini, “‘Over the
Years People Don’t Know’: Italian Americans and African Americans in Harlem in the 1930s,”
both in Italian Workers of the World.
43. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, chapter 7.
44. Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (London, 1973).
45. Robert F. Harney, “Italophobia: An English-speaking Malady?” Polyphony 7 (1985).
46. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? (New York, 2003).
47. Gabaccia, “Race, Nation, Hyphen: Italian-Americans and American Multiculturalism
in Comparative Perspective,” in ibid.
48. Gabaccia and Ottanelli, “Introduction,” Italian Workers of the World, 13 –14.
49. Loretta Baldassar, Visits Home: Migration Experiences between Italy and Australia
(Melbourne, 2001).
50. For just one example, Karen Offen and Ruth Roach Pierson eds., Writing Women’s
History: International Perspectives (Bloomington IN, 1991). See also Gabaccia and Iacovetta’s
early research report in Labour/Le Travail 42 (Fall 1998): 161– 81.
51. For just a few examples, Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicky L. Ruiz eds., Unequal Sisters:
A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York, 1990); Tera Hunter, To Joy My
Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Hewitt, Southern Discomfort; Ruth Milkman ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of US
Women’s Labour History (Boston, 1985); Vicky Ruiz, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930 –1950 (Albuquerque, 1987); Ruth
Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto, 1992); Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour
and the Left in Canada, 1890 –1920 (Toronto, 1998); Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, Frances
Swyripa eds., Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History (Toronto 2003).
52. Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Il, 1958).
53. Guglielmo, “Italian Women’s Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment
Trades, 1890s-1940s,” in Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives
(Toronto, 2002): 248–9.
54. In part, this involved following the lead of feminist and critical race scholars such as
Dana Frank and Robin Kelley, whose work helped to reconceptualize labor history by recognizing what, in another context, James Scott calls the “hidden scripts” of oppressed or marginal people. Robin D.G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class
Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, 1 ( June 1993); his Race
Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994); Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Seattle Labor and the Poltics of Consumption, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, UK,
1994), and “White Working Women and the Race Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (Fall 1998); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). See also Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure:
Working Women, Popular Culture and a Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century (New York,
1999) and Guglielmo, “Proletarian Feminism.”
55. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912
(Urbana, 1993).
56. Alice Harris Kessler Harris, “Where are the Organized Women Workers?” Feminist
Studies 3 (Fall 1975); see also her Out To Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982).
57. We chose our subtitle (Italian Workers of the World) to underscore the discovery, especially for Anglo-American readers unfamiliar with the notion of Italian women as militants,
without ever suggesting they were more than a minority.
58. Robert Harney, “Men Without Women,” in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North
America ed., Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi (Toronto, 1977): 79–
102; Yans McLaughlin, Family and Community; Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1950).
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ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004
59. Stefano Jacini, Atti della Giunta per l’inchiesta sulle condizioni della classe agraria
(Rome, 1881–5) vol. 12, pp.158 – 9, cited in Maddalina Tirabassi, Gabaccia, and Iacovetta,
Women, Gender and Transnational Lives.
60. Gabaccia, “In the Shadows of the Periphery: Italian Women in the Nineteenth Century,” in Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert eds., Connecting Spheres: European Women in
a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present (2nd ed.) (Oxford, 2000): 194 –203.
61. Linda Reeder, “When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and the Mass Migration,
1880–1920,” in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives.
62. Roslyn Pesman, “Italian Women and Work in Post-Second World War Australia: Representations and Experience” and Ann Morelli, “Nestore’s Wife? Work, Family and Militancy
in Belgium,” both in Women, Work and Transnational Lives.
63. In addition to Women, Gender and Transnational Lives, see contributor Diane Vecchio’s “Work, Family and Tradition: Italian Migrant Women in Urban America, 1900–1930,”
(manuscript) ch 3, which shows that Italians and Russian Jews in Milwaukee had the lowest
wage-labor force rates but highest rates of immigrant women earning income through “business dealings,” including keeping boarders; Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street. On the
pleasure-danger paradigm within histories of sexuality, see early important contributions such
as Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New
York (Philadelphia, 1986); for “delinquency” studies that consider Italian daughters, Mary
Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920; Franca Iacovetta, “Gossip, Contest and Power in the Making of Suburban Bad Girls, Toronto, 1945 – 60,” Canadian Historical Review 80:4 (December 1999).
64. See, for example, Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988); Annalee Golz, “Uncovering and Reconstructing Family Violence: Ontario Criminal Case Files,” in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson eds.,
On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto, 1998).
65. Karen Dubinsky and Franca Iacovetta, “Murder, Womanly Virtue, and Motherhood:
The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911–1922,” Canadian Historical Review 72:4 (1991) 503 –
31; On Giovanitti,”La donna e la Forca,” Il Proletario, XV,25 (June 30, 1911); Angelo Principe,
“Glimpses of Lives in Canada’s Shadow: Insiders, Outsiders and Female Activism in the Fascist Era,” in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives; Topp, “Lawrence Strike.”
66. Moya, “Italians in Buenos Aires: Anarchist Movement; Gender Ideology and
Women’s Participation, 1890 –1910,” Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood: Toward the Making
of a Revolutionary Proletariat in Illinois Coal Towns”, Ann Morelli, “Nestore’s Wife? Work,
Family, and Militancy in Belgium” all in Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives.
67. Jennifer Guglielmo, “Italian Women’s Proletarian Feminism in the New York City
Garment Trades, 1890s-1940s” in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives; Ann Bravo, “Solidarity and Loneliness: Piedmontese Peasant Women at the Turn of the Century,” International Journal of Oral History 3 (1982); Donna Gabaccia, “Immigrant Women: Nowhere at Home?”
Journal of American Ethnic History 10,4 (1991).
68. Such as anarchist, antifascist poet Virgilia D’Andrea: see Robert Ventresca and Franca Iacovetta’s essay in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives.
69. Cited in Merithew, “Anarchist Motherhood.”
70. A recent Canadian study of multiethnic female militancy that draws in part on Women,
Gender and Transnational Lives portrays such acts as part of the “rough—and-tumble” culture
of women strikers’ everyday lives, see Julie Guard, Authenticity on the Line: Women Workers,
Native ‘Scabs’, and the Multi-Ethnic Politics of Identity in a Left-Led Strike in Cold War Canada,” in Eileen Boris, ed., Special Issue: “Women’s Labours,” Journal of Women’s History 15:4
(Winter 2004).
71. This is one of the aims of the conference, “Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond,” to be held at the University of Toronto, Sept.
29-Oct. 2 2005. For a discussion of the similarities but also differences (i.e., the dominant racial
paradigm of militancy has been more seriously challenged in the US than in Canadian women’s
labor history), see Franca Iacovetta, “Feminist Transnational Labour History and Rethinking
Women’s Activism and Militancy in Canadian Contexts,” paper for the Canadian Historical Association, (Winnipeg, June 2004). See also Guard, “Authenticity on the Line”; Robert Ventresca, “Cowering Women, Combative Men?: Femininity, Masculinity, and Ethnicity on Strike
in Two Southern Ontario Towns, 1964 –1966,” Labour/Le Travail 39 (Spring 1996).
72. Besides Guglielmo and Moya in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives, examples
include Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort; Ensted, Ladies of Labor; and, for Canada,
Laboring Across National Borders
77
Carmela Patrias, Relief Strike (Toronto, 1990); Ventresca, “Cowering Women, Combative
Men?”; Guard, “Authenticity on the Line.” On revising male-defined models of militancy and
identity and on developing more expansive models of female militancy, examples include Alice Kessler-Harris, “A New Agenda for American Labor History: A Gendered Analysis and
the Question of Class,” in Alice Kessler-Harris and J. Carroll Moody eds., Perspectives on
American Labor History: The Problem of Synthesis (DeKalb, 1989); Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering, Community of Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Dana Frank, “‘Girl Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win
Big’: The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike of 1937,” in Howard Zim, Dana Frank, and Robin D.G.
Kelley eds., Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last
Century (Boston, 2001), Ava Baron ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American
Labor (Ithaca, 1991). A recent debate on H-labor dealt almost exclusively with male violence;
Nancy Forestell first raised the critique in Canada.
73. For example, see Carole Turbin, “Roundtable: What Social History Can Learn from
Postmodernism, and Vice Versa?-Or, Social Science Historians and Postmodernists Can Be
Friends,” with Laura L. Frader, Sonya O. Rose, Evenlyn Nakano Glenn, Elizabeth Faue, Social Science History 22,1 (1988) and discussion below; the term “complicating” is from Neville
Kirk, “History, Language, Ideas and Post-modernism: A Materialist View,” Social History 19:2
(1994). See also race critiques such as Evelyn Brooks Higgibotham, “African-American
Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17:2 (1992); Pierson and Chauduri, Nation, Empire, Colony.
74. A small sample of the theoretical and empirical socialist feminist works includes Lydia Sargeant ed., Women and Revolution (Boston, 1981); Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution (London, 1972); Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: Problems
in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London, 1980); Sarah Isenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the
Case For Socialist Feminism (New York, 1979); Kessler “Where Are the Organized Workers?”;
her Out to Work; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the
Nineteenth Century (London, 1983); Frank, Purchasing Power; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil:
Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870 –1918 (Oxford, 1993); and, for Canada, Janice Acton et
al., Women At Work: Ontario, 1880 –1930 (Toronto, 1974); Janice Newton, The Feminist Challenge to the Canadian Left, 1980 –1981 (Montreal, 2003); Frager, Sweatshop Strife; Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause; Iacovetta, “Gossip, Contest and Power.”
75. Compare the “turf-wars” of some earlier labor history exchanges, in both Social History and this journal (Spring 1987) to contemporaneous feminist efforts to begin a dialogue
about postmodern and material gender analyses as mutually intelligible feminist alternatives:
Turbin, Frader, Rose, Nakano-Glen, and Faue in “Roundtable”; essays in the special issue of
Journal of Women’s History (1993) and in Baron ed., Work Engendered, and in Kathryn
McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell, Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada (Oxford, 1999). On one Marxist-feminist labor historian’s dialogue with a younger postmodern feminist critic, Franca Iacovetta, “Post-Modern Ethnography, Historical Materialism, and Decentring the (Male) Authorial Voice: A Feminist
Conversation,” Histoire Sociale/ Social History 32:64 (November 1999), a response to Nancy
Cook, “The Thin Within The Thick: Social History, Postmodern Ethnography, and Textual
Practise,” ibid. 32:63 (May 1999).
76. Marcel van der Linden has noted a diminishing interest among younger scholars in
what they see as old-style, male Marxist labor history; see his “Transnationalizing American
Labor History,” Special Issue on The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American History 86 – 3 (December 1999). For Canada, see Lynne
Marks, “Heroes and Hallelujahs—Labour History and the Social History of Religion in English Canada: A Response to Bryan Palmer,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 34:67 (May 2001),
169 –186; Bryan Palmer, “Historiographical Hassles: Class and Gender, Evidence and Interpretation” and Mariana Valverde, “Some Remarks on the Rise and Fall of Discourse Analysis,” both in ibid. 33:65 (May 2000).
77. This is a major objective of the international planning committee organizing the
“Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History” conference in Toronto in 2005.
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