Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo

Abstract

122 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY developed, in part as a consequence of the author’s preoccupation with the question of Robinson’s identity. For the newspapermen who kept the mystery before the public, Robinson’s veil could only be imagined as concealing a genteel woman who had fallen into disgrace. During and after the trial, we learn, Robinson was linked to a prominent Troy family, including a former student of Troy Female Seminary. Adler considers this claim at length, before exploring the more plausible scenario that Robinson was in fact an Anglo-Irish immigrant. But Robinson’s association with fallen gentility, rather than the immigrant Irish she lived among and killed, suggests a fascinating if unexplored class politics at work, both in Robinson’s history and the history of her notoriety. Likewise, it would have helped had Adler extended her investigation into Troy’s Irish immigrant community. Indeed, there are several missed opportunities for historical analysis here. This volume might have been a gritty exploration of antebellum political culture, the urban Irish, the immigrant underworld, and conceptions of crime, madness, and sexuality; instead, Adler’s discussion of such topics serves to illuminate the trial and support her investigation into Robinson’s identity. Yet, despite these shortcomings, this remains a fascinating story, one that will be of interest to scholars of urban life, crime, politics , and gender in nineteenth-century America. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945. By Jennifer Guglielmo, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 432 pages, $41.95 Cloth. Reviewed by Denise Lynn, Assistant Professor, History, University of Southern Indiana. Jennifer Guglielmo’s Living the Revolution seeks to highlight the silences in the historical literature about Italian immigrant women engaged in radical politics in the United States from 1880 to 1945. This activism was lost to us because historians have focused primarily on English-language sources and contemporaries believed Italian women were “unorganizable” and shackled by male authority. Additionally these women were caught Book Reviews 123 up in what Guglielmo describes as a diaspora that included South America and frequent and sometimes permanent return to Italy. This activism did not resemble the radical politics of other women or even Italian men. For one, these women did not seek inclusion into the United States polity nor did they initially work within established working-class organizations, like trade unions. Rather they drew on strategies adopted from Italy that included mutual aid, neighborhood organization, and direct action. Guglielmo argues that Italian radicalism is rooted in the upheavals of late nineteenth-century Italy where women became leaders in local protests against authority and industrial abuse. Meanwhile Italian men frequently migrated to the United States or South America to find work; leaving women to fend for themselves and their children. This allowed them to push the boundaries of appropriate female behavior. Many women also migrated and had to take on work that their families depended on for survival. In America, Italian women’s skilled labor, specifically sewing, became associated with unskilled, menial, and thus low-waged labor creating a “fabricated absence.” Meaning, Italian women were portrayed in the press as physically able to do hard labor yet they were docile; so their demanding and demeaning work was slandered and devalued (77). Guglielmo argues that radical activism was also racialized. Southern Italians were portrayed as primitives in Italy. In the United States racialization took on a different form vis-à-vis nonwhites. Italians were considered whites, but inferior whites. This racialization was also gendered as Italian women were painted as victims; in contrast, Chinese and AfricanAmerican women were more often viewed as perpetrators. Therefore, middle-class, white, female reformers, who were challenging gender conventions , found Italian women worthy of rescue. This racialization meant that while Italians were still believed to be inferior they could claim white status and enjoy the benefits of citizenship and state protection. Employers also used this ethnic conflict to their advantage to ensure worker discipline and reduce turnover. Guglielmo devotes the first half of the text to contextualizing Italian immigrant women’s roots in Italian radical politics and their place in immigration history, thus the volume’s title is somewhat misleading...