ABSTRACT
The Sicilian Mafia has remained an exclusively male brotherhood and held on to their traditional values as if the cultural change that swept Italy in the 1970s had never occurred. This chapter focuses on the cultural changes in Sicily and then on those in Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra was moving on after a difficult decade. In the early 1960s Mafia families clashed and a 'war' broke out in Palermo. The chapter explores the issue of women becoming visible in the Mafia. The role of women within the family and in wider society, and the attitude towards hierarchy were never to be the same again in Sicily, no less than in the rest of Italy. Women from the South of Italy continued to justify murder for honour even after moving to a different environment, as a survey among immigrants in Turin in the early 1960s shows.
