Carter Review of Derounian

Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmis20 Women’s work in post-war Italy: an oral and filmic history by Flora Derounian, Bristol and Chicago, Intellect, 2023, 218 pp., $134.96 (hard cover), ISBN: 9781789388121 Jim Carter To cite this article: Jim Carter (23 Sep 2024): Women’s work in post-war Italy: an oral and filmic history, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2024.2398959 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2024.2398959 Published online: 23 Sep 2024. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmis20 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES BOOK REVIEW Women’s work in post-war Italy: an oral and filmic history, by Flora Derounian, Bristol and Chicago, Intellect, 2023, 218 pp., $134.96 (hard cover), ISBN: 9781789388121 Like other countries at war during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Italy saw women enter the workforce in great numbers. With the return of peace in 1945 the question of female labour could not simply be dismissed: women were, in effect, already part of the working population, and their presence on the job was reinforced by the culture of democratic modernity. Nevertheless, to much of Italian society the image of the working woman remained deeply unsettling. Conservative public opinion saw in female labour the ruination of traditional institutions like the family and the potential for the construction of divisive, gender-based political subjectivities. Flora Derounian’s book explores how film and oral history dealt with this tension, namely by admitting the fact of female labour while attempting to accommodate it within the framework of patriarchy. The book is organized in three sections, about rice weeders, seamstresses and nuns. Each section is further divided into three chapters, giving the history of the profession, an analysis of filmic materials and a discussion of oral interviews. Twenty-three of these interviews were realized by Derounian herself, and they represent a major contribution to the archive of working women in Italy. That they are here placed in dialogue with cinematic narratives is richly rewarding, as it allows the reader to sense where ‘fiction’ film and ‘non-fiction’ oral history harmonize and where they are dissonant. It is telling to note that all films analysed in detail were directed by men while all oral interviews were given by women. We might expect, therefore, to learn that film was more anxious about female labour, but in fact the memories of real rice weeders, seamstresses and nuns are just as careful to blunt the potentially emancipatory wedge of women in the workplace. For example, seamstresses are reluctant to adopt the masculine language of professional ambition, opting instead to describe their entrance to the atelier as akin to a ‘dream’ or ‘fairytale’ (123). By the same token, nuns downplay their own individual agency by emphasizing a sense of ‘vocation’ that made choices on their behalf (169). These strategies illustrate how both men and women come to see female labour in ways that are most acceptable to patriarchal society. More often than not, that means emphasizing the female and de-emphasizing the labour: women’s work was not ‘really’ work and thus could not partake of its associations in postwar Italian culture, namely politics and activism along progressive lines. The section about rice weeders is the least successful. In particular, Derounian’s analysis of films like Riso amaro (De Santis, 1949) and La risaia (Matarazzo, 1956), along with her discussion of twelve oral interviews realized 2 BOOK REVIEW by other scholars, seeks to show that the various identities of rice weeders were systematically transmuted into a collective symbol of the national working class, especially by the Italian Communist Party. But if the goal is to demonstrate how gendered narratives prevent women from being remembered as workers (‘This chapter assesses the impact of portraying female workers as part of nature, rather than as real-world citizens or workers’ [34]), then focusing on their symbolization as workers risks providing evidence of the opposite (‘Silvana, and the mondine more widely, symbolized a politicized working-class identity’ [43]). While I acknowledge that there is a difference between being a worker and being made to symbolize one, we must remember that many rice weeders were Communist Party members and many more had engaged in anti-fascist politics, a fact that renders their symbolization as left-wing activists less exploitative than Derounian suggests. If anything, this section proves that, far from being stripped of their professional identity, rice weeders were allowed to figure in film and oral history only if they did so as workers. The section about seamstresses more than makes up for this. Situated at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, the seamstress is a waged and upwardly mobile urban professional with a conventionally feminine job. This is one instance where film and oral history disagree in their assessment of the ‘menace’ of female labour. As Derounian’s analysis makes clear, films like Sorelle Materassi (Poggioli, 1943), Le ragazze di piazza di Spagna (Emmer, 1952) and Le amiche (Antonioni, 1955) tended to accept the idea that seamstress work was inherently transgressive, especially because it required women to move through public space, and directors took pains to present the city as a dangerous environment where female labourers might meet an undesirable fate. In contrast, oral history draws attention to nonthreatening aspects of seamstress work, whose supposedly feminine nature is guaranteed by its connection to the curation of the body, the need for nimble, delicate fingers and its involvement of emotional labour, especially if the seamstress, when granted some intimacy, ‘become[s] a psychologist to her clients’ (130). Finally, the section about nuns stands out as a remarkable addition to Italian labour history. In fact, as Derounian points out, nuns are an enormous piece of the Italian labour puzzle, having dominated healthcare and education since at least the Middle Ages. If we wish to write a more inclusive history of work in Italy – one that takes account of female labour – then there is probably no better place to start than in the convent. Why might patriarchy fear nuns? For one thing, they live in all-female communities with very little male oversight. They are veiled and thus not entirely available to the male gaze. They are potentially asexual. And above all, they are workers, with a degree of agency in career choice that is often one reason for pursuing vows. Under Derounian’s clever eye, films like Anna (Lattuada, 1951), Suor Letizia (Camerini, 1956) and Lettere di una novizia (Lattuada, 1960) are revealed to discharge male anxieties by assigning to their nun protagonists recognizably feminine jobs like nurses or instilling in their characters an insatiable desire for motherhood. In oral interviews, real nuns avoid couching their experiences in the language of labour. They prefer to speak of a ‘calling’ (169) which emerged in the context of the family, and of the ‘passion’ (188) with which they obeyed a divine decision. JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES 3 If the recent turn to questions of labour in Italian Studies has been confined to male factory work, then Derounian’s book makes clear that the reason is not academic sexism (though this surely plays its part). Our inability to see female labour as labour is rather continuous with a gendered postwar culture that systematically undermined the agency and desires of working women. When women themselves find it difficult to see their own labour, it’s no surprise that scholars miss it too. Derounian’s book foregrounds this problem and gives us the tools to redress it. [email protected] Jim Carter Boston University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9495-9989 © 2024 The Author(s) https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2024.2398959