The dynamic of the domus is very complicated. Orsi repeatedly states that the woman is the center of the Italian Harlem family, and thus the real person of power. However, through the examples shown, that is not necessarily the case. The mother always answers to others when an issue concerns the traditions of the family. The mother may not have to answer to her children, or even her husband, but when resolving an issue, or even conducting daily rituals, women do not make decisions or traditions themselves.
A mother of the family must answer to four different people. Her own mother, who instilled her own traditional values unto her, her mother-in-law who continually tries to instill her own, different, values onto her daughter in law, the community, who constantly scrutinizes and judges every move the mother makes, and finally, the Madonna, or rather the idea of the most ideal mother, that every Italian woman seems to strive to.
Keeping all of this in mind, it becomes a lot easier to understand why women were considered so inferior to men. Their roles were too important, and no one expected a mother to instill the proper values to her family alone. A woman may have seemed powerful in her domus, but that power stemmed from a collection of values and ideas that were instilled onto her, and were constantly being instilled onto her by other women.
Men on the other hand, were more or less free from this type of judgment, and did not have to necessarily answer to anyone. Their decisions and their judgments were final, because that’s what they were raised to believe. Women were, perhaps, the ones who strove for some sort of perfection in the domus, while men were the ones who made the hard and fast decision for his family. Women were expected to judge and scrutinize the actions of other women, perhaps as a means to perfect their own domus. Men, however, did not have to strive for this type of perfection. They had to worry about the survival of their family, not the survival of their traditions. Surviving in itself, in a new city as an immigrant, was all that was necessary. As a poor immigrant, all men were in the same shoes, and so no man could judge another.
And so, the woman may have been considered inferior simply because she was always being judged by everyone in the community, whereas men were not.
-Christina Torossian
