Women in the Classroom: Mass Migration, Literacy and the Nationalization of Sicilian Women at the Turn of the Century

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In January of 1908, Rosa welcomed her husband Angelo home from the United States, where he had spent the last four years working in the coal mines on the outskirts of Birmingham Alabama. In his store-bought suit, starched white collar and leather shoes, Angelo cut quite a figure as he made his way through the narrow streets of Sutera, a small hill-town in central western Sicily. His new clothes served as testimony to his success as an emigrant and to his new status as a respectable merchant. His experiences overseas had changed his place in the world. Transoceanic migration eroded the borders of the world he had grown up in, defined by village and kin. In Birmingham, Angelo came to see himself as an Italian as well as a Sicilian and a Suterese. Now back home, he was an Americano, a migrant, with ties to faraway worlds. Although Rosa never left Sutera, transoceanic migration had also redefined her position in the village and in the nation-state. Until her husband emigrated, Rosa's life had been circumscribed by the physical and social boundaries of Sutera. From her childhood, blood and baptism defined her position in the village and the world. While Angelo was abroad earning the money needed to claim membership in the local elite, Rosa looked after the family's interests and worked toward fulfilling the couple's dream of upward mobility by ensuring the family could claim the cultural, as well as the material trappings of success. In her husband's absence Rosa learned how to read and write and she kept her children in school. Literacy, along with property ownership, was critical to claiming membership in the local gentry. Book learning and formal schooling not only repositioned Rosa in the community, it transformed her relationship to the state, and into an expanding national and transnational consumer economy. This article uses the history of Sutera to explore why mass male migration succeeded in drawing rural women into the classroom when state reforms failed, and how literacy changed their sense of self-identification as women and as Italians. Although state legislation had made elementary education compulsory since 1861, a combination of political and personal apathy kept attendance at a minimum. Not only were southern Italian schools underfunded and mismanaged, but in the absence of any viable social or political reform movements, residents had little hope that education could improve their lives. Transoceanic migration made schooling relevant to daily life. The practical considerations surrounding long-distance communication provided powerful incentives for mi? grants and their families to learn to read and write, and education itself was an integral part of the dream of social advancement underlying the familial de? cision to send someone overseas to work. In consequence, potential migrants flocked to the schoolhouse, as did the women and children who remained at home. For rural women, the consequences of learning to read and write went