After the havoc of the Second World War, a civil war and the active participation of women in the Resistance and workforce, the postwar years in Italy were complex on many levels. On the one hand, women who fought in the Resistance saw that their role in the new Italy had been diminished and relegated to traditional spaces of family and motherhood. But, on the other, important changes took place in the economy and in society in general as women took on important roles. Despite the many conflicts that characterised different parts of society and the geographical differences between southern and northern Italy, as well as the agendas of political parties, women gained visibility as members of the workforce in the new Italy and became official citizens when they won the right to vote. This very complex picture, as Flora Derounian’s book clearly demonstrates, requires new scholarship on the political and cultural context of the time that analyses in depth the relationship between women and work and its many facets, contradictions and hardships. More precisely, such research must focus on the at times contradictory and conflictual forces – including political and religious institutions such as the Catholic church – along with women’s desires and aspirations. In this way, as Derounian notes, one can track the delineation and unfolding of a culture of tradition interacting with the process of modernisation, the negotiation of new gendered identities, and ultimately the construction of a national identity. In the last few years, in the field of Italian, Film and Media Studies, attention has been paid to the many forms of gendered labour. Derounian’s book is a welcome and important addition to this scholarship.
The book is structured in three sections. Each section contains an introduction to the type of work taken into consideration: in the first part, the rice weeders/mondine; in the second, seamstresses/sarte; and in the third, nuns. Maintaining this structure throughout, the volume offers a well-balanced analysis of these three different kinds of work. After an introduction to the postwar history of each, the author analyses three cinematic representations of the three lines of work. In the third part of each section, Derounian provides a critical examination of the oral history testimonies of women from all three types of work. In the first section on the mondine, she relies on interviews conducted by other scholars and documentary sources. In the other chapters, she conducted the interviews herself: for the sarte in Bologna and its vicinity; for the nuns in the city of Rome.
It is certainly interesting from the methodological point of view to integrate a wider interdisciplinary mode that allows her to open up questions and spaces for understanding the complexities in the ways women have perceived their work, what the work meant for them and how they negotiated between the aspiration to independence and freedom and the exploitation and sexualisation of their bodies, especially for the mondine and the representation of their work in films such as Riso amaro and La risaia, and the instances of emotional and affective labour in the work of the sarte and the nuns, although in different forms and capacities.
I found the attention given to emotional labour in the book to be very appropriate and worth further exploration in critical and historical studies of labour. The section on the nuns is the most successful in the book; as the author states in the conclusion, this area deserves more attention (which she plans to grant it in her future research endeavours). This is an important history in Italy that harks back at least to the Middle Ages and to nuns’ agency in creative work and labour. We might recall the case of Arcangela Tarabotti, who did not choose out of freedom or personal vocation to become a nun but nevertheless had the chance to write and publish powerful pages about her status, women and gendered labour.
The section on seamstresses is the one where I found that the author does not fully capture the complexity of this kind of work, which was an integral part of the fashion industry that thrived in postwar Italy and which contributed, along with the textile industry, to the economic and cultural reconstruction of the Italian nation, building a new and more attractive identity, especially abroad. Derounian reflects on these issues, but they are not explained in depth in the examples she offers. For instance, in one of the films she analyses, Le amiche by Michelangelo Antonioni, the focus deviates from the sarte to centre on Clelia, the protagonist, played by Eleonora Rossi Drago, who has a managerial role in the hierarchical organisation of the fashion house, where custom-made fashion is produced for wealthy Italian ladies. So, she does not really belong to the same category of sarte who feature in the other films, such as Sorelle Materassi or Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna, that Derounian takes into consideration. Although in her introduction to this section Derounian reflects on the different roles that women have had in the fashion industry at large, these roles do not emerge in the analysis of the films or in the oral history sections. Indeed, many of the women interviewed in this section can be considered not only as ‘artisans’ but as entrepreneurial leaders who have built and owned their own businesses. More attention to the nuances and differences in the material analysed would have made this section more cohesive.
This leads me to the nature of women’s different occupations and how they inevitably shape their lives, experiences, and roles as mothers, wives or single women. The mondine’s body and work, which requires them to show their bare legs while immersed in water, is a body sexualised and objectified in the workplace by the men who supervise them, as in the case of Riso amaro, whereas the sarte worked in a completely different context and work environment, which had a bearing on their experience and relationships.
In the oral histories Derounian has collected, several of the women talk about their work as a ‘passion’ and a ‘vocation’. The sarte emphasise their skills and boast of their ability to transform the appearance of their customers. This would be a whole new chapter and a very important one, uncovering the many stories behind the making of a dress and the final product. The word ‘vocation’ is used as a link to connect the work of the sarte and the nuns. The analysis of films such as Anna by Alberto Lattuada is an eloquent example of Derounian’s ability to unpack the complex choices of women who opt for a religious life, while remaining an integral part of the politics and practice of caring for people.
Overall, Derounian’s book is timely and shows how fertile it can be to examine not only the representation of work in film but how film and the audiovisual are powerful and useful tools that allow scholars to gauge new understandings and knowledge of women’s lives. In addition, the wide range of bibliographical references as well as the impact of the oral histories bring the topic and the past histories of women alive.
