Italian American Women Research Articles

Lingua/Lenga'/Language: "The Language Question" in the Life and Work of an Italian American Woman

Lingua/Lenga'/Language: "The Language Question" in the Life and Work of an Italian American Woman

The Hungry Self

The importance of food as a cultural marker of difference has until fairly recently been neglected in multicultural discourse. This is probably because food – the acquisition, preparation and serving of it as well as oral and written expressions about food – has traditionally been the domain of women, who have often been relegated to the back of the bus (or literally sent to the kitchen) when it comes to multicultural/political issues. Yet very often activities connected to food are the sole source of power and expression for ethnic American women, serving as a means of self-affirmation, as well as a repository of familial memory. For Italian American women especially, who traditionally spend so much time in the kitchen, food has been a means of controlling a world in which they have very little power, a creative outlet, and a source of the sacred. Like Alice Walker's foremothers, who expressed themselves in quilts and gardens, Italian American women have recreated in their very sites of confinement sites of creative expression and empowerment. On the other hand, many Italian American women, writing about their lives, have rejected food and the production of it as a means of protest against a culture that has denied them opportunity for personal and artistic growth. This study examines the various ways in which Italian American women have written about food and food issues as they relate to their own experiences. I hope in this way to contribute to the discourse on food in multicultural studies particularly as an issue in ethnic American women's lives.

Exploring Personal History: A Case Study of an Italian Immigrant Woman

This paper is a study of an Italian immigrant woman based on interviews conducted with my grandmother in 1996. Her testimony alongside traditional conceptual frameworks shows that interpreting oral history is a work that must be handled with care. With this article, I have tried to give validity and context to the uniqueness of the experience of an Italian-American immigrant woman. I also argue against Virignia Yans-McLaughlin's interpretation of interviews and the basis of her comparative work. Following Jürgen Habermas's call for self-knowledge in Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), this paper is a work of personal discovery as well as an attempt to liberate and take responsibility for the ways in which interpretation of immigrant testimony can enforce presuppositions and suppress careful and interested dialogue about gender difference and ethnic diversity.

Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors; Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles; Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors; Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles; Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Persephone Goes Home: Italian American Women in Italy

Journal Article Persephone Goes Home: Italian American Women in Italy Get access Alison D. Goeller Alison D. Goeller The University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 28, Issue 3, September 2003, Pages 73–90, https://doi.org/10.2307/3595261 Published: 01 September 2003

The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women

The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women

"I Have Found My Voice": The Italian-American Woman Writer

I Have Found My Voice explores the literary traditions of Italian-American women novelists. Beginning with a consideration of the autobiographical roots of Italian-American fiction, Dr. Pipino examines the work of seven contemporary writers. She analyzes their voices: how they speak about their culture; their histories as women; and as members of an ethnic community - a community long assumed to lack an identifiable literary tradition.

Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers

Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers

Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors

Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors

Writing with an accent: contemporary Italian American women authors

Writing with an accent: contemporary Italian American women authors

Italian American women as comic foils: Exploding the stereotype in my cousin vinny, moonstruck, and married to the mob

Italian American women as comic foils: Exploding the stereotype in my cousin vinny, moonstruck, and married to the mob

Malignant Lymphoepithelial Lesion of the Parotid Gland: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

Malignant lymphoepithelial lesions are rare tumors of the major salivary glands. They most often occur in Asians and Greenland Eskimos and are strongly associated with Epstein-Barr virus infection. We report a case of a malignant lymphoepithelial lesion of the parotid gland that developed in an Italian-American woman whose serology was positive for Epstein-Barr virus antibody. The patient underwent a left total parotidectomy and upper neck dissection, followed by radiation therapy. At the 2-year follow-up, she remained free of disease.

Independence and Interdependence: Relationship in Selected Pieces of The Voices We Carry

writings in new and sometimes startling ways. Mary Jo Bona's 1994 The Voices We Carry is an anthology of contemporary Italian-American women writers. Bona subdivides her fourteen selections into four thematic areas: the history of Italian-Americans, new encounters with Italy, the family, and the end of the immigrant generation. I approached Bona's anthology trying to determine what I could deduce about the identity of Italian-American women writers from the evidence in the fictions. Were they all addressing the same issues? Did they all feel similarly about those issues? What I noticed was that although each story dealt with individuals in relationships, the relationships were very different: some were happy, bringing the individuals portrayed closer because of their interactions, while others were sterile and joyless. It seemed that the relationships that showed a high level of conflict and stress involved at least one person who was seeking independence and self-determination and whose behavior placed his or her individual interest and desire over that of the group. Relationships that were portrayed as fulfilling and mutually satisfactory proved to have reciprocity, empathy, and interdependence as the central values. They were not hierarchical, and the individual felt empowered by

From Home to Hospital: Jewish and Italian American Women and Childbirth, 1920-1940 (review)

From Home to Hospital: Jewish and Italian American Women and Childbirth, 1920-1940 (review)

Claiming a tradition: Italian American women writers

Mary Jo Bona reconstructs the literary history and examines the narrative techniques of eight Italian American women's novels from 1940 to the present. Largely neglected until recently, these women's family narratives compel a reconsideration of what it means to be a woman and an ethnic in America.Bona discusses the novels in pairs according to their focus on Italian American life. She first examines the traditions of italianita (a flavor of things Italian) that inform and enhance works of fiction. The novelists in that tradition were Mari Tomasi (Like Lesser Gods, 1949) and Marion Benasutti (No Steady Job for Papa, 1966).Bona then turns to later novels that highlight the Italian American belief in the family's honor and reputation. Conflicts between generations, specifically between autocratic fathers and their children, are central to Octavia Waldo's 1961 A Cup of the Sun and Josephine Gattuso Hendin's 1988 The Right Thing to Do.Even when writers choose to steer away from the familial focus, Bona notes, their developmental narratives trace the reintegration of characters suffering from a crisis of cultural identity. Relating the characters' struggles to their relationship to the family, Bona examines Diana Cavallo's 1961 A Bridge of Leaves and Dorothy Bryant's 1978 Miss Giardino.Bona then discusses two innovative novelsHelen Barolini's 1979 Umbertina and Tina De Rosa's 1980 Paper Fishboth of which feature a granddaughter who invokes her grandmother, a godparent figure. Through Barolini's feminist and De Rosa's modernist perspectives, both novels present a young girl developing artistically.Closing with a discussion of the contemporary terrain Italian American women traverse, Bona examines such topics as sexual identity when it meets cultural identity and the inclusion of italianita when Italian American identity is not central to the story. Italian American women writers, she concludes, continue in the 1980s and 1990s to focus on the interplay between cultural identity and women's development.

Book Review: Claiming a Tradition. Italian American Women Writers

Book Review: Claiming a Tradition. Italian American Women Writers

Constructing an Image: Crossdressing, Female Subjectivity, and the Italian-American Woman

Constructing an Image: Crossdressing, Female Subjectivity, and the Italian-American Woman

Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900-1950

In turn-of-the-century New York, Italian immigrant daughters spent their youth in factories while their mothers did irregular wage labor as well as domestic work at home. By the I940s, Italian-American girls were in school, socializing and preparing for white-collar jobs that would not begin until they were eighteen. Drawing on a range of sources from censuses to high school yearbooks, Miriam Cohen examines shifting patterns in the family roles, work lives, and schooling of two generations of Italian-American women. Paying particular attention to the importance of these women's pragmatic daily choices, she documents how major social and political changes helped create new opportunities and constraints for the second generation. While financial need was a powerful factor in determining the behavior of the first generation women, Cohen shows, they and their daughters succeeded in adapting family survival strategies to new work patterns. Once the second generation was married, their careers mirrored those of the first in many ways: they raised children, cared for the home, and took on paid employment when necessary. Unlike their mothers, however, these Italian-American wives could also participate in the growing consumerism surrounding home and childcare. Throughout, Cohen compares the changing Italian-American experience with that of Jewish women, discovering significant similarities in these experiences by 1950. As well as presenting a nuanced portrait of one group of ethnic working-class women, Workshop to Office demonstrates the impact of political developments on individual lives. It will spark lively debates among students and scholars of social history, immigration history, labor history, women's history, and the history of education in the United States.

A MELUS Interview: Helen Barolini

Helen Barolini, the author of numerous stories, essays, translations, and poems which have been published in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Saturday Review, and The Yale Review, is the recipient of many awards, among them the 1987 Susan Koppelman Award of the American Culture Association for The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women. Her novel Umbertina, a saga of four generations of Italian-American women, carefully explores some of the tensions of women caught between two cultures and between traditionalism and feminism. The primary interview was conducted by Dorothee von Huene Greenberg in the author's home in Ossining, N. Y., on April 8, 1988. It is supplemented by material from an interview with Kay Bonetti in December 1982. Interviewer: How did you happen to become interested in your grandmother who seems to be the focus of the first part of Umbertina? Barolini: It really began when my mother was cleaning the house and came upon the tin heart that my grandmother had brought as a young woman from Calabria. In my diary entry on February 25,1965, I say, My parents were here, and Mother brought Grandma's knitting needle over: a crude piece of tin shaped like a heart with a hammered-on border design and a piece of black yarn through it to tie around the waist. I can imagine the goat girls herding their flocks on the rocks of Calabria wearing such a holder to keep the needles steady as they knit and watch the herd. And for the first time I am touched by these rude, poor, unintelligible forefathers. Theirs was an epic in American life, and it should be written, for they who lived it kept no diaries. But we descendents can write and tell, and it's time before the last of them die out. I am sure their story is unique, and that Mario Puzo's book [The Fortunate Pilgrim] has raised their theme, why not other books? The blacks, the Jews, the Irish all have their spokesmen, why not the Italians? So there you have the quote. It goes way back, a good many years before the book actually came out and a good many before it was actually written. But the seeds were set. Interviewer: So your interest in your grandmother was really triggered by that tin heart. Barolini: Yes! In fact, that's why the heart plays such a part in it and is on the cover. It is quite a good duplication of the original. And the theme runs throughout. Very consciously I use certain motifs in it. The heart is one, which to me stands for the unforeseen; and the rosemary stands for the strong woman of the house, and the rooting stands for tradition. Interviewer: So it was really your interest in your grandmother that sparked your interest in your ethnic heritage? Barolini: It seems to have been, because I know that she was always a mysterious figure, and I felt if I could figure her out, maybe I could figure out something about myself. What I wanted to know about myself is what all women wanted to know about themselves at that particular time. It was the feminist movement of 1963 that said, now is the time to explore, but you know a lot of women carry these questions and never vocalize. Then the opening came with the '60s, and it was the blacks who released all of the turbulence. Interviewer: Where were you when you started reading Betty Friedan? Barolini: I was here in the States. My husband was a correspondent for an Italian paper, and I was here, and it certainly galvanized me. It did many women, because we each thought of ourselves as being so isolated that each of us had some kind of vague discomfort which we couldn't articulate, and then suddenly Betty Friedan put it together. She spoke for an awful lot of us, and then, very soon after, comes Mario Puzo's book, and then comes my mother bearing this symbol. …

Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolina's Journey in Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish

The Italian woman writer is part of a significant, but overlooked, forty-year old literary tradition in the United States. From Mari Tomasi's Deep Grow the Roots (1940) to Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish (1980) women of Italian descent in America have fictionalized the immigrant experience from the double perspective of ethnicity and gender, and have concomitantly inscribed into their writing a double marginality - as ethnic Americans and as women. Virtually ignored by reviewers, critics, and academics, the Italian American woman writer has had to forge her own literary identity, an identity often expressed in fictional representations of transplanted Italian families in America.1 Helen Barolini's compilation of fifty-six Italian American women writers in The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985) provides the necessary corrective for the lack of visibility from which these writers have suffered. Barolini's instructive introduction emphasizes the two major factors that have contributed to the unnatural silence of this literary group: the cultural assumptions informing the Italian American's self-perception and those that govern literary opinion in America. Fundamental cultural differences complicate attempts by southern Italians or their immediate descendants to adopt American models of identity. The primary cultural difference between southern Italian and American self-concept stems from the Italian's unrelenting belief in the family as giver of identity to the exclusion of individual autonomy. In contrast, the traditional, masculine model of American selfhood holds individuality and self-reliance as the criteria by which a person gains identity. In this model, the family often limits or prohibits individual growth; the mother places social pressure on her children to conform to society's norms. The ties to family and community are resisted by the protagonist, usually a male, who lights out for a territory away from the purveyors of culture. Although feminist criticism has challenged this paradigm, it has done so primarily by offering Anglo women's fiction as a critique and alternative to it.2