I may not be Italian, but coming from a very closely linked family, I can completely understand the idea of the domus having complete control over the younger generation. As Toni-Ann mentions in her posts, it is hard for anyone to be put under such harsh pressures as the Italian girls were in Italian Harlem. Like Silky says, families in East Harlem at the turn of the 20th century were brought together through their familial traditions and this placed restraints on the younger generation, who would have preferred to Americanize themselves.
The role of women was extremely surprising for me to read about in these chapters. Usually, Italian women are seen as the housewives, who must do the cooking, the cleaning, and the care-taking. They are the softer, more fragile members of the family and must take care of the househole from the inside. However, in these chapters, women are portrayed as the more dominant of the household, and the ones to dispense punishments and money. The wives took care of the family’s paychecks and bills, the punishment of misbehaved children, while still taking care of the assumed female responsibilities. In society though, women had to feign subservience to their husbands, and although everyone knew it wasn’t truthful, it was made to seem that the men had the dominant position. Women were shunned from society by silence imposed on them. It’s actually very interesting topic, because in another of my classes, we’ve been speaking of this repression in books such as “Lessico Famigliare,” “Casalinghitudine” and “Autoritratto di Gruppo.” The silence imposed on women is meant, as Orsi says, to keep them from having complete control.
The important role of women in society was also seen by the admiration of the statue of la Madonna. This statue helped the immigrants come to terms with their removal from Italian society, by having a little light of hope, a monument that gave them strength to continue on in their plight in their new home. As Silky says though, la Madonna wasn’t what held the community together: it was the domus-their ideals and traditions that kept them together. La Madonna was merely a symbol of this, a tangible object that could be turned to out of desperation, when they felt like the domus was falling apart, and they were losing their ties to their native culture.
