Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945

by Jennifer Guglielmo

Overview

Italians were the largest group of immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands led and participated in some of the period's most volatile labor strikes. Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian working-class women of New York and New Jersey who helped shape the vibrant radical political culture that expanded into the emerging industrial union movement. Tracing two generations of women who worked in the needle and textile trades, she explores the ways immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday resistance and political activism. She also shows how their commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements diminished as they became white working-class Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807898222
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	05/03/2010
Series:	Gender and American Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jennifer Guglielmo is associate professor of history at Smith College. She is coeditor of Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Living the Revolution will alter what you thought you knew—about Italian women, about immigrants, and about radicalism. Read this book!—Donna R. Gabaccia, University of Minnesota

Living the Revolution is a very special achievement—researched with extraordinary depth, conceptualized with sophistication, and written with both power and charm. Working from a fully bilingual archive, Guglielmo has arranged a thousand tiny fragments and shards into a coherent, compelling, and always soundly reasoned historical portrait. This is one of the best studies on any European ethnic group I have read in a very long time.—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University

Here is the new paradigm in the history of gender and immigration. Guglielmo's careful attention to transnational capitalism and diaspora as well as to Italians' shifting political formations around race make this book as innovative and inspiring as the voices of Italian women anarchists she so vividly documents. A must-read!—Nan Enstad, University of Wisconsin, Madison

A groundbreaking piece of scholarship that finally shatters the notion that Italian American women were either apolitical or marginal players in U.S.-based immigrant politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This beautifully written and argued account restores Italian American women to the center of our historical understanding of anarchism in the United States as well as both pro- and antifascist organizing in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. Guglielmo's book also deepens historical understanding of race and whiteness in the urban North.—Annelise Orleck, author of Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

A riveting history that left me feeling inspired, moved, and proud.—Annabella Sciorra

Editorial Reviews

Brilliantly researched. . . . [A] powerful narrative. . . . Beautifully edited, sourced, and indexed. An extraordinary book. . . . Essential. Recommended for all levels/libraries.—Choice



An important work about the intertwining of class, ethnicity, and gender as well as race. . . . Rich in biographical details of Italian women culled from a treasure trove of oral history, memoirs, and fascinating material from archives on both sides of the Atlantic, the book brings to life moments of collective action in defiance of powerful agencies and the subsequent marginalization of class militancy.—American Historical Review



Jennifer Guglielmo offers a commanding corrective to earlier images of immigrant women as weak pawns in a larger scheme of American immigrant history with this exacting study.—Fra Noi



This book is destined to change the way historians think about Italian American working-class women. . . . A groundbreaking, compelling, and inspiring narrative that reveals a rich history of female resistance and radicalism. . . . [An] immensely important contribution. . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of feminism, radicalism, immigration, and working-class life.—Left History



Living the Revolution is a brilliantly argued, exhaustively researched, and beautifully written analysis. . . . The only quarrel I have with this book is that the title does not do justice to the scope and breadth of this groundbreaking narrative that sets a new standard for gender, immigration, and labor scholarship. Living the Revolution should be required reading for anyone interested in those fields.—The Journal of American History



A critically important addition to the field. The author is expansively original in her understanding of the subject and the accomplished integrative analysis of primary and secondary research is of the first order. . . . This work is sure to become one of the fundamental historiographical classics of our era. Guglielmo and the University of North Carolina Press must also be commended for the inclusion of so many phenomenal photographs . . . which give the nuanced narrative even more profound strength.—Labour/Le Travail



[This] well-written study . . . makes a significant contribution to our understanding of a key period of radical activity in the United States. . . . A pathbreaking work that will hopefully inspire others to study the many overlooked dimensions of this critical period of transnational radicalism, including women's role in it.—Journal of American Studies



Guglielmo offers new insight to labor and gender scholars who seek fresh information on the anarchist and socialist movement among female workers.—The History Teacher



Meticulously researched and with a remarkable command of the bilingual archives.—Women's Review of Books

From the Publisher