Women in the classroom: mass migration, literacy and the nationalization of Sicilian women at the turn of the century

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1998 by Linda Reeder

In January of 1908, Rosa welcomed her husband Angelo home from the United States, where he had spent the last four years working in the coal mines on the outskirts of Birmingham Alabama. In his store-bought suit, starched white collar and leather shoes, Angelo cut quite a figure as he made his way through the narrow streets of Sutera, a small hill-town in central western Sicily. His new clothes served as testimony to his success as an emigrant and to his new status as a respectable merchant. His experiences overseas had changed his place in the world. Transoceanic migration eroded the borders of the world he had grown up in, defined by village and kin. In Birmingham, Angelo came to see himself as an Italian as well as a Sicilian and a Suterese. Now back home, he was an "Americano," a migrant, with ties to faraway worlds. Although Rosa never left Sutera, transoceanic migration had also redefined her position in the village and in the nation-state. Until her husband emigrated, Rosa's life had been circumscribed by the physical and social boundaries of Sutera. From her childhood, blood and baptism defined her position in the village and the world. While Angelo was abroad earning the money needed to claim membership in the local elite, Rosa looked after the family's interests and worked toward fulfilling the couple's dream of upward mobility by ensuring the family could claim the cultural, as well as the material trappings of success. In her husband's absence Rosa learned how to read and write and she kept her children in school. Literacy, along with property ownership, was critical to claiming membership in the local gentry. Book learning and formal schooling not only repositioned Rosa in the community, it transformed her relationship to the state, and into an expanding national and transnational consumer economy.

This article uses the history of Sutera to explore why mass male migration succeeded in drawing rural women into the classroom when state reforms failed, and how literacy changed their sense of self-identification as women and as Italians. Although state legislation had made elementary education compulsory since 1861, a combination of political and personal apathy kept attendance at a minimum. Not only were southern Italian schools underfunded and mismanaged, but in the absence of any viable social or political reform movements, residents had little hope that education could improve their lives. Transoceanic migration made schooling relevant to daily life. The practical considerations surrounding long-distance communication provided powerful incentives for migrants and their families to learn to read and write, and education itself was an integral part of the dream of social advancement underlying the familial decision to send someone overseas to work. In consequence, potential migrants flocked to the schoolhouse, as did the women and children who remained at home. For rural women, the consequences of learning to read and write went beyond transoceanic communication. The classroom experience created new opportunities for rural women to forge new independent relationships with state representatives. Elementary and adult school curriculum and textbook readings served to integrate rural women as mothers and wives into the nation. Outside of the classroom, literacy gave rural women direct access to a national culture and economy. The articles and serialized novels that appeared in the regional newspapers served to further redefine ideas of maternity and femininity. Advertisements for furniture, pharmaceuticals and clothes fused women's civic roles as mothers with their roles as consumers in the national economy.(1) Through literacy, mass male migration generated a new sense of national belonging among rural Sicilian women.

Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Sicily

Between 1861 and 1900 the Italian government passed a series of educational reforms making elementary school obligatory and providing for adult education classes. Yet forty years after unification, state laws had had only limited success in rural southern provinces. According to the census of 1901, 65 percent of Sicilian men and 77 percent of the women over the age of six were still illiterate.(2) A 1907 government study showed that most villages had only halfheartedly complied with the educational laws, when they bothered following them at all. Across the island rural schoolhouses were in deplorable condition, and local governments claimed they did not have the money to build new schools or hire sufficient numbers of teachers. Residents often chose not to send their children or attend adult education classes even when schools were opened.(3) As long as daily life held little hope of economic or social improvement, there was no real reason for residents to learn to read and write.

Political ambivalence toward popular education undermined nineteenth-century educational reforms. The founders of the Italian state were fully aware that territorial unification alone did not create a nation.(4) In its struggle to forge a sense of national identity among its disparate peoples, the new government turned to its institutions and bureaucrats. Schoolteachers were foremost among these state missionaries. While telegraphs, railroads, military, municipal police and tax inspectors forced even the most remote villages to begin to recognize, if not to respect, state authority, it was the schoolteacher that brought the language, the values and the ideals of the new nation into peoples' homes. In this world where the nation-state was increasingly defined by a common ethnicity and language, leaders of the new Italy knew that if they were to succeed in creating Italians, they had to replace local dialects with Italian, local legends with a national history and regionalism with patriotism.(5) Yet, these conservative politicians feared that mass education was a threat to the social order. Effective popular education reforms would expand the electoral base to include all sorts of people, easily swayed by socialist rhetoric, who could destroy the social order. National education had to create Italians, and at the same time preserve the privileges of the ruling classes.(6)