Sicilian widows vendicated

Dispelling the myth of the invisible Southern Italian woman

The image of the rural southern Italian woman has dominantly been painted as one of passivity and of invisibility: an almost sexless image of a woman dressed in black who hurries quietly through the piazza of her town, eyes downcast, with her face almost entirely hidden from view. But in Linda Reeder's excellent work, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, Sicily, 1880-1920, the stereotype of the submissive Italian woman is dispelled.
Reeder, a professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia, became involved with the project due to her own interest in the island, as well as because of Sicily's fascinating migration history. Her book focuses on the agrarian central-western town of Sutera, which clings to the side of Mount San Paolino. It is this village that Reeder uses to explore the realities of southern Italian emigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reeder's book uncovers the fact that the women of Sutera acted as lynchpins in the process of transnational migration, which was viewed by the people of the village as a "temporary absence rather than a permanent condition." It was they who helped raise money to send their husbands overseas so that the family might improve their social status. Women were also central in the formation of migrant networks, which fostered a sense of community. It is this active participation by women that Reeder feels is a core message of her book: "I think one of the most important contributions my book makes to migration scholarship is to recognize that women who chose to remain [behind in Sutera] actively participated in the migration process." She also stresses that these women chose not to emigrate with their husbands to America, and were not merely abandoned victims as was previously thought.
Women, then, assumed a sort of masculinity, as they took care of duties that were formerly handled by men. Men who migrated were considered strong and manly, while their homeland was thought to be a weak, feminine place. The migrants who returned from America, the americani, were alternately viewed as effeminate. Thus, migration is revealed to be a gendered process: "I think it is important to remember that migration is a multifaceted process and is also deeply gendered," states Reeder.
Using statistics based on the documents of more than 1500 Suteran families, Reeder asserts that the process of mass male emigration profoundly transformed the lives of rural women, altering their ideas about work, motherhood, and national belonging. Because of the "necessary separation" that was migration, which was fuelled by the collapse of the Sicilian sulphur mines, women took on new roles in the absence of men. While the women of Sutera fell short of achieving equality with men, several of them became entrepreneurs, working in real estate, and opening grocery stores and cinemas. Women became more dominant figures in the home, seeing themselves not as vedove bianche, but as productive individuals who now possessed moral and economic authority within the family. For the first time since Italy's unification, women also had a growing sense of national identity. While still wary of the state, women used the political system to protect their family, to improve their social status, and as a link to their husbands, many of whom had gone to work in the coal mines of Birmingham, Alabama.
When asked which of these changes she feels is most significant, Reeder pauses: "I hesitate to say one of the changes women experienced was more significant than another, however, from my perspective one of the most intriguing effects of transnational migration was the impact it had on the relationship between rural Sicilian women and the state. Seeing how the wives, mothers and daughters of migrants began to use state agencies to improve their families' condition and protect their own interests was fascinating. Again it was a powerful reminder that what one sees is not necessarily the whole story." It is this new relationship between the women of Sutera and the Italian state that Reeder uses to help dispel the myth of the invisible rural southern Italian woman, establishing instead the image of a strong and active woman. "Until recently the prevalent stereotype of Sicilian woman described a woman who lived in 'the shadows', a nearly invisible, docile and submissive creature. The presence of these women in public life drew a very different picture of Sicilian women."

Publication Date: 2003-07-27
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2976