ABSTRACT
The fact that Italian American women are regularly and perniciously depicted in perpetual mourning, doing domestic penance, allows them to be circumscribed by a comfortable, non-threatening image that needs no explanation. The multifaceted nature of Italian American women begins with the grandmothers, the women most likely dressed in black, who made the transatlantic journey from Italy to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the small Italian villages, then, the mother’s “value was inviolate”. In America the Italian immigrant woman was often perceived as unable to adjust to the American beliefs in change, mobility, and independence. The Italian American woman has unceasingly functioned as a role model for her daughters and granddaughters. Ann Cornelisen described the women in southern Italian villages as “women of the shadows.” Italian American women deeply respect their foremothers, but they recognize the necessity of coming forward and showing their faces, speaking the truths of their Italian American identity.
