"What Could You Do With a Dollar?" An Italian-American Woman's Breadwinning and Autonomy in Coal Country,Pennsylvania,1929-1941.
详细信息
- 作者：Staffaroni ; Emma Lillian.
- 学历：M.A.
- 年：2013
- 导师：Murdo, Priscilla,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：Sarah Lawrence College
- ISBN：9781303231063
- CBH：1523488
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：4091350
- Pages：82
文摘
When the Great Depression struck northeastern Pennsylvania, coal mining towns like Carbondale--and its large population of Italian-American residents--underwent significant industrial reorganization and transformation. As a result, first- and second-generation Italian-American women experienced shifts in their identities and roles at home, at work, and in the community. Where most had been confined to traditional roles in the home, leaving the wage-earning to men, mothers and daughters in the 1930s often acted as sole or primary breadwinners in their families. Using one such daughter-breadwinner's oral history, I seek to reveal the transformation of this community by giving voice to this marginalized vantage on the desperate decade. My subjects, Joan Festa and her older sisters, labored alongside other immigrant women in low-wage, semiskilled jobs in textile and garment factories, earning cash to feed their families. Joan's mother offered her daughters one dollar out of their weekly pay envelopes； with this dollar, the young women used their leisure time beyond home and factory to claim increased personal space. Wary of union participation, these women found creative and strategic ways to resist the strictures of factory work, the economic strain of the time, the family norms of Italian immigrant households, and the stereotypes of their ethnic group in this small American coal town. The everyday, captured by oral history, is a terrain on which young women in particular carved out space for autonomy and independence. This paper seeks to complicate definitions of political subjectivity and resistance of Italian-American wage-earning women during the Depression. The story of the Festas invites us to reconsider women workers with their agency at the center.