As I read more about the role of women in the Italian Harlem, I was reminded of how in Jeffrey’s presentation he had thought that women were subordinate to men. Rather than being negatively condemned to the household though, women were the head of the household. Women held the power in the home and were the ones who “needed to be cajoled, entreated, or manipulated when a member of the domus wanted to do something”. I found it interesting that when people would remember their parents they would vaguely remember their fathers yet hold detailed memories of their mothers. That just goes to show how vital they were to the domus. The only time that the female sex really had a rough time in the domus was growing up. They had a reputation to uphold, which is understandable and comparable to young women in society today.
As I read the second portion of tonight’s reading which focused more on the importance of the Madonna, I began wondering if the high regards that the Madonna, the mother of Jesus, was held in related to why the women (mothers) were the heads of the household. All of the Italians in Italian Harlem believed that the Madonna was extremely important and had special healing powers. Perhaps their beliefs that she was so important does have some sort of correlation as to why the women held more power than their husbands in the domus. It could just be a coincidence but it’s something to think about that I found interesting.
As a sidenote to this reflection on the importance of women in the domus, I had visited my grandmother last weekend. This was after I wrote the cultural autobiography and so I started asking her questions about her family growing up in Manhattan. She did not grow up in Italian Harlem but she did grow up as an Italian Catholic. She spoke a lot about her mother and showed me plenty of pictures of her mother and her aunts but she didn’t speak too much about her father. Even though she didn’t grow up in the Italian Harlem, her family was immigrants from southern Italy and they seemed to have had some of the same family values that the Italians in Italian Harlem did, which I also found to be interesting.
