As I was reading through the material, what struck me was the complexity and utter chaos that characterize the lives of women of all ages in the domus. In Orsi’s words, “the power of the women is their powerlessness.” I think that in this profound line lies the the crux of the conflict that women in Italian Harlem faced. On one hand, women were portrayed in public as submissive and silent. Beneath the exterior, however, the women were the powerhouses that run the domus in Italian Harlem.
Married women were the primary disciplinarians and the final authority in the household on mostly every matter that arose. In Italian Harlem, the women symbolized power and resilience. Yet, with all their authority, women seem to have the toughest burden to bear from all the members of the domus. Young women in particular had difficult lives in the domus. A family’s entire reputation was dependent on the character of their young girls. They were viewed as symbols of continuity, but simultaneously as a symbol of fragility. The young women of the domus were brought up in an extremely restrictive manner, and were expected to defer to their male family members in most areas of their lives. The men felt that it was their duty to “protect” the girls, so they exerted tremendous control over their sisters’ and daughters’ lives, even in their dating experience.
All the control that the men attempted to exert over the women indicated an undercurrent of anger and resentment that broiled beneath various relationships in the domus. Men were expressing their rage and anxiety that they subliminally felt towards their mother’s, whose immense power they viewed suspiciously. I was blown away by the huge struggle that women faced on a daily basis. They were forced to juggle the need to exercise the only power they had in the privacy of their homes, and to appear powerless at the same time, which is no easy feat. Even though they found some solace in their relationships with other women, the primary method by which they expressed their frustrations was by pouring out their hearts to the Madonna.
