Anastasia Hayes: Friedan and Serpico

The readings on the Knapp Commission and Friedan’s Feminine Mystique both spoke to broken systems that went unchallenged by the silence surrounding them. I found them both very relevant to the experiences of my Sicilian-American family members. My great aunt, mother, and grandmother have all spoken to me about the expectations that shaped their lives both in the madre terra and in the United States. I hesitate to contribute to the discourse that paints all Italian-Americans as just one degree removed from the Mob. It exerts real harm, casting doubt on community members’ integrity and ties into a long tradition of Othering southern Italians, casting them as lawless and amoral in opposition to the more European northerners. Yet within the context of my own family, I have been told and have witnessed how omertà functions. Just like New York’s cops in the ’60s, even those operating within the confines of the law are expected to participate (at least passively) by turning a blind eye. Those who proudly display addiopizzo signs in their own windows still hesitate to discourage those who continue to deal with the Mafia. In the Sicilian context, there is an especially heavy burden put on the women whose agency remains limited and stand to lose the most when excluded from the family. To this day in Sicily, the family remains an essential structure for personal life, especially because there are so few economic opportunities available.  In my family’s telling, Sicilian-American communities of the 1950s and 60s functioned much in the same way. I wonder to what extent Staten Island’s relative isolation from the rest of the city played into that. Whatever the case, to a lesser extent, I can find concepts of what a women’s place is alive and well in Sicilian culture, both here and on the island itself. It does not bother to shroud itself in Freud’s pseudoscience but instead draws on the power of tradition. The old ways still exert meaningful power, providing models of what women can be that are still intrinsically linked to home life. While this work is a legitimate choice for many in the community, it should not be constructed as the only or ultimate choice. It calls on us to seize Benjamin’s presence of mind and examine these discourses which construct our lives until they can seem unchallengeable. Some of my female family members have done this, but it required them to largely divorce themselves from their culture leaving them feeling, at times at least, unmoored.