Is a life as a married woman given the utmost respect and the power in which “no family decision [can] be taken without [your] participation” (131), worth being “reduced to silence and subservience” (129), with no choice but to “obey all male relatives, even those only distantly related and much younger than [you]” (129), in your formative years? In a life where “the only future imagined for women was marriage” (129), the idea that once that union was forged a woman would go from completely powerless and at the mercy of her male relatives to the most revered and important member of a domus seems wildly counterproductive. The only way for a woman to secure influence in her family would be to allow herself to act entirely at the whim of every relative of hers fortunate enough to have been born with a Y-chromosome.

A woman on whom the burden of mourning, administering discipline, controlling finances, and deciding whether or not their children’s dates are suitable falls is the very same woman who in public is not allowed to show affection toward her husband for fear of seeming anything but respectful. The hierarchal ordering demonstrated to the public eye completely contradicted the actual, in which the matriarch was tasked with making all the important decisions, but only if she’d followed the single path toward marriage and motherhood as prescribed by the family members she will then be looked up to by. It seems contrary for a person to go from the wildly ordered submissive by way of circumstance to a figurehead constantly needing to be on the lookout for relatives who mean to manipulate their power for their own self-interest.

The domus seems a paradoxical structure in which women go from the slaves of a sort of their male relatives, doing jobs that would be embarrassing for men to do to preserve their honor, to the real “head” of their families, with a word in every decision and the face of the family being reflected in everything from her “cleanliness” to the way she maintains the reputations of her children and grandchildren. The shift of no power to absolute authority of a woman is both undermining and senseless, in which you must surrender your aspirations outside of the single mother/wife role in order to become all-powerful and an invaluable asset to your domus (as was the woman whose death lead her grandsons toward a fear that all members would go astray) seems unfair and illogical to an outside eye, but is a respected turn of power in the domus-dominated society of Italian Harlem.