Class, Gender, and Militancy in the Proletarian Mass Migrations

Laboring Across National Borders: Class, Gender, and Militancy in the Proletarian Mass Migrations

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 his- toricize 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 glob- ally 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 affection- ately 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. 58 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 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 “un- meltable” 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 personal- ly 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 dispro- portionate 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 59

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. Global- ization 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 community- oriented “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 repeat- ed 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 thor- oughly gendered. Abroad, men worked in construction, commercial, or planta- tion 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 oc- cupied 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. 60 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004

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, edi- tors 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 tech- nologies of air travel, telephones, satellites, and digital communication. They also assumed too easily that the nations and national states of the past were all- powerful 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 Ital- ian 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), Don- na 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, Laboring Across National Borders 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 Collab- oration 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 62 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 invade Sicily, sparking Italian unification, in 1860. Italy’s moderate new rulers re- alized 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 immedi- ately 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 Aus- tralia, “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 par- ties (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 Ital- ian 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 peri- patetic lives, circulating through as many as a dozen countries advocating either propaganda of the deed and terrorism or direct action in the workplace and gen- eral 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 success- es 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 Laboring Across National Borders 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 institu- tions 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 Ca- rina 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 Anglo- American 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- 64 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 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 mir- rored 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 commit- ment to the struggle against oppression in Italy, their cultural identities as Ital- ians, 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, deporta- tion 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 suc- cessfully built a diaspora nationalism that merged love of homeland with glori- fication 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 English- speaking unions. However, as Fraser Ottanelli shows, Italian and American antifascists did find common ground in the left unions of the Congress of Industri- al 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- Laboring Across National Borders 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 trans- port 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 permanent- ly 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 tempo- rary 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 offi- cial 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, family- oriented, and food-loving, yet also mafia-linked, racist, and highly sexed prole- tarians.46 They had found incorporation into multicultural yet national “mo- saics” 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 Euro- peans 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- 66 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 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 lay- er 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 dy- namics and national narratives of working-class movements, it proved more dif- ficult 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- Laboring Across National Borders 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. Stereo- types 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 pay- ing attention to the unorganized everyday acts of resistance,54 our project con- firmed 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 con- vergence 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 of- fer 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 premod- ern 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 em- igrate. While gender ratios did vary in northern and southern migrations, both North and South generated massive migrations between 1870 and 1945. Stereo- types 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 re- acted 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 Os- car Handlin’s seminal but problematic interpretation of immigrants as uprooted and alienated.58 Nevertheless, these well-intentioned efforts to rehabilitate 68 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 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 dis- paraged 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 in- tensive 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 de- exoticized 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 cam- paign of first-wave feminists and Italian radicals (including IWW poet Arturo Giovanitti) convinced Canadian authorities to commute her sentence to life im- prisonment—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 com- munism 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- 70 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 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 ex- plores 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, or- dinary 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 belong- ing to a family and to communities of subversives. Rather than reject familism as a supposedly conservative influence on Italian women’s lives, our analysis re- defined 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 out- lined 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 Transna- tional 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 72 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 de- nunciations 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 pop- ularity 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 pro- pagandist 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 bat- tled 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 “tran- scend” 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 (forth- coming); 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: Im- migration 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 Iden- tity 2nd Ed. (Minneapolis, 1997). 8. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, in their book Globalization and Histo- ry: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Boston, 2000), especially em- phasize 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 Ital- ian Family Economies,” in Pam Sharpe, ed. Women and Labor Migration: Global and Histori- cal 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, Ar- jun 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 Argenti- na, 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,” Interna- tional 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-Cana- dian and Italian migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860–1914 (Toronto, 1991); Ferdi- nando 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 ILWCH, 66, Fall 2004 the Globe (Toronto, 1992); Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Italian Diaspora, 1876–1976,” in Robin Co- hen, 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 Di- mensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). Nevertheless, Appadurai’s linkage of imagi- naries 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 Saler- no, and Bruno Ramirez. 28. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Donna Landry and Ger- ald McLean eds., The Spivak Reader (New York, 1996); C.T. Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lour- des 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’Aigues- Mortes,” 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, Farm- ers, 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, Ia- covetta, “Manly Militants, Cohesive Communities, and Deﬁant Domestics: Writing About Im- migrants 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 comu- nista 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 West- ern 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); He- witt, 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, Union- ization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, 1987); Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toron- to, 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 His- tory (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 recog- nizing what, in another context, James Scott calls the “hidden scripts” of oppressed or margin- al 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, Pur- chasing Power: Seattle Labor and the Poltics of Consumption, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, UK, 1994), and “White Working Women and the Race Question,” International Labor and Work- ing-Class History 54 (Fall 1998); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hid- den 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 Unit- ed 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). 76 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 Cen- tury,” 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: Rep- resentations 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 Vec- chio’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 “busi- ness 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 Unit- ed States, 1885–1920; Franca Iacovetta, “Gossip, Contest and Power in the Making of Subur- ban 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 Histo- ry of Family Violence (New York, 1988); Annalee Golz, “Uncovering and Reconstructing Fam- ily 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 Fas- cist 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, “Soli- darity and Loneliness: Piedmontese Peasant Women at the Turn of the Century,” Internation- al 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 Fran- ca 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 Cana- da,” 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 Work- ing-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 As- sociation, (Winnipeg, June 2004). See also Guard, “Authenticity on the Line”; Robert Ven- tresca, “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 Al- ice 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, Commu- nity of Suffering, Community of Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Min- neapolis, 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, So- cial 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, Na- tion, Empire, Colony. 74. A small sample of the theoretical and empirical socialist feminist works includes Ly- dia Sargeant ed., Women and Revolution (Boston, 1981); Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resis- tance 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 Chal- lenge to the Canadian Left, 1980–1981 (Montreal, 2003); Frager, Sweatshop Strife; Kealey, En- listing Women for the Cause; Iacovetta, “Gossip, Contest and Power.” 75. Compare the “turf-wars” of some earlier labor history exchanges, in both Social His- tory 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 Fem- ininity and Masculinity in Canada (Oxford, 1999). On one Marxist-feminist labor historian’s dialogue with a younger postmodern feminist critic, Franca Iacovetta, “Post-Modern Ethnogra- phy, 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 Unit- ed 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 En- glish 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 Inter- pretation” and Mariana Valverde, “Some Remarks on the Rise and Fall of Discourse Analy- sis,” 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. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.