ABSTRACT
Even though a woman’s domestic work is seldom accorded a financial value or acknowledged as important, the routine of domestic housekeeping, domestic life itself, at times has served as a stepping stone towards social and economic advancement for the Italian-American woman. The Italian-American woman’s search for autonomy and self-fulfillment has often emerged from the shadows of the private domestic spheres where “home work” improved her family’s living conditions. Two women, Umbertina Longobardi in Helen Barolini’s novel Umbertina and Rosa Della Rosa in Daniela Gioseffi’s “Rosa in Television Land,” underscore the Italian woman’s business savvy and resourcefulness. As Umbertina and Rosa take an active role in the household economy, they subvert a domestic ideology that bespeaks a woman’s innocence, ignorance, and submissiveness in a culture that has specified and limited the role of the female. Both women integrate the dynamics of family life and the economics of business. They negotiate with familial duty, personal integrity, and social responsibility as they struggle to achieve economic and familial goals. In a socio-cultural power system that oppresses and contains them, they reinscribe themselves, Rosa to a lesser degree, in a new social order written and enforced by them, even while they are denied the public recognition granted to men.
