Re-collecting Grandmother

My Grandmother's life happened in a time and place I know very little about.

It's not a time, nor a place that gets discussed in the average college-level Western Civ. class. If I wanted to know anything about that time or place, I'd have to take special, focused history classes.

But those kinds of classes weren't part of my curriculum.

Grandmother died sometime in the mid 1960's, when she was quite old--possibly in her 90s. I vaguely remember her as a very old woman with very bad eyes behind very thick glasses. I remember heavy black shoes, her fine white hair rolled and tied in a bun on top of her head. I remember she gave me some candy cigarettes and shoo'd me outside to play with my cousins.

I don't remember hugs nor presents. I don't remember songs or food or anything like that. Perhaps it's that she died before I could have any kinds of real memories of her.

Or perhaps it's just that she wasn't that kind of a Grandma. At least not at that time in her life.

She wasn't talked about that much afterward--only in angry speeches about money, or about very cruel things she did to my Mother.

Doing a few rough calculations, I figured my Grandmother was born sometime in the 1870's--in Palermo.

Which was a very--as the Chinese would say--Interesting Time.

I did some poking around on the 'net, and found an article--The Civil Code of 1865 and the Origins of the Feminist movement in Italy from a book on Italian immigrant women in North America. A lot of revealing stuff here:

The first feminist assault on legal inequality in the unified state was Anna Maria Mozzoni's tract, Woman and Her Social Relationships (La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali), published in 1864, “on occasion of the revision of the Italian Civil Code.” Mozzoni, pre-eminent among nineteenth-century Italian feminists and soon internationally known, concentrated her early efforts on legal reform. Without class distinction, Mozzoni believed, women were “oppressed by institutions,” especially family law, which virtually equated women with minors and mental incompetents. Single women's legal capacities to control property, for example, disappeared with marriage. “A legal husband is, for a woman, intellectual castration, perpetual minority, the annihilation of her personality.” Regarding children: “The legitimate mother does not exist . . .”, “Legal paternity is the first reason for woman's slavery. . . Man's dominion, in short, is woman's servitude.” Further, legal subjection in the family led to low status in society, low wages, ultimately to prostitution; such legally sanctioned male absolutism also buttressed tyranny in public political stuctures. Women's emancipation was a fundamental social issue involving not only women of all classes, but also men and the entire social and political structure.

Mozzoni's focus on family law revision was echoed by the Neapolitan moderate, Aurelia Cimino Folliero de Luna, who began publishing a journal dedicated to legal reform in Florence in 1872. Again, legal reform was stressed as essential to improving other aspects of women's lives, like their education and economic status. Folliero was a constitutional monarchist and no democrat, but she claimed a sisterhood for all women in family life. By their work and their morality, women in all classes had proven women's capacity for and entitlement to equality in the family. Vesting all authority in fathers made women oppressed drudges or frivolous butterflies; in either case, women were denied human dignity and society missed the contribution responsible women could make. Folliero proposed that women of all classes and regions form associations to help women mistreated by their husbands; prominent ladies should advise parliament on legislation affecting women; no woman should remain indifferent to the interests of her own sex. Folliero tried to separate herself from the most radical feminists while still attacking the very basis of patriarchy, women's legal, economic, and political subjection in the family.

More radical feminists joined their legal and social reform efforts in the pages of La Donna, the leading Italian feminist periodical, published regularly from 1868-1892 by Gualberta Alaide Beccari. Even more than other women's journals, La Donna emphasized the sisterhood of women in all classes, a sisterhood often posited on women's maternal roles. La Donna also supported efforts for family law reform in the 1870s. And when it declared its all-out campaign against government-licensed prostitution in Italy in 1878, Beccari wrote, “In the degradation of one of our sisters, do we not see signaled our own?” By the end of the decade, La Donna was campaigning for women's suffrage and had linked its efforts to the universal suffrage drive.

Far less radical or less political periodicals of the 1870s also defended women's cause. L'Aurora of Modena, and La Missione della donna, begun in Palmi, Reggio Calabria, and continued at Alba in the North, were not feminist at all, but represented the right wing of the women's movement, emphasizing education and motherhood. Unlike Cornelia and La Donna, these journals did not usually follow parliamentary debates on women's issues or discuss recent books on women's legal position, but in 1880 they also became involved in questions related to family law.

Read the rest to find out about the role of "seduction" on the diminished quality of life for women....and more...

But there's an overarching history, too...of Garibaldi, and the Risorgimento, the overthrow of the Bourbon king in Sicily and terrible battles in Palermo.

And, as if that wasn't enough, La Cosa Nostra was founded in Sicily in the 1870's--yes, La Cosa Nostra is the root of the American Mafia.

When I read this stuff, the snippets my Mother told me begin to make some sense.

And I remember that my Grandmother barely spoke any English. For some reason, she never bothered to assimilate--and so, some of her children had some trouble assimilating, too.

By reading these ever-so-cursory histories of Sicily, I have a better understanding of a lot of those snippets...and of the cultural milieu that was so very at-odds with a lot of things American.

So, I get a little peeved sometimes that, in this country, if one's skin is white, and one has an Anglo name, it's immediately assumed that one's ancesty is Anglo.

I also get peeved at the idea that Anglo history is the history of everyone in the United States, and that all our beliefs and customs evolve and re-volve around what went on in England from the 1600's into the Victorian Era.

Like the Irish potato famine is the heritage of every American Catholic.

And Queen Victoria's mores were the mores that all Sufferage had to overcome.

It's annoying to walk around with this Anglo-colored skin, and green eyes and reddish hair and always be taken for Irish because I'm not-Protestant--

When I was raised with a set of beliefs that came from a non-Anglo culture that few people in this country know anything about--partly because it was so damned long ago that one has to dig in history books to get to the root of all those whacky beliefs.

And I get now that every Anglo thing I've done has been a second-generation rebellion against what was still, in the first generation, on life-support from the homeland.

Does anyone get this other than me?

I keep thinking of the books of Amy Tan--elegant novels written about Chinese-American women at odds with Mothers who try to maintain some semblance of Chinese Traditon. It's understandable there--after all, it's easy to see, physically, that Chinese people are different.

If you don't look different, how can you be different?

If you're raised different, the color of your skin and the shape of your eyes doesn't matter. Inside, you are diferent, and you are at odds with the culture that insists you are part of it when you don't understand some of its signs and signals because you're really not at one with it.

But isn't America supposed to be a place where assmilation is a good thing? Where we're not supposed to cling to the old cultures, but transcend and live to our fullest potentials? Can't we learn all we need to from pop culture and the electronic babysitter?

Not everybody believed assimilation was a good thing. And not everybody could assimlate with the same ease as changing one's underwear.

And pop culture as we know it is really only a late 20th century invention.

There were probably lots of reasons my Grandmother wouldn't assimilate. As I've said, I don't know much about the family's roots in Sicily, or the impact and effect all that social upheaval had on her.

But the history is something I can read and understand. The history gives me a framework, or a glass, however cloudy, with which I can look through and get the vague outline of a life that was probably incredibly dissimilar from the one I live now.

Would my Grandmother love me if she knew me? Who knows? perhaps not--she was a very jugemental sort.

But, in many respects, it doesn't really matter. My journey has been away from her, from that history and that world.

I'm the one who truly lives in the New World.