Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America

Diane Vecchio, Furman University

Challenging long-held patriarchal assumptions about Italian women’s work in the United States, Diane Vecchio discusses the regional variation of Italian women’s work, as well as the skills they transplanted to America.  Vecchio’s recently published book Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America (University of Illinois Press, 2006) on Endicott, New York sheds light on the gendered nature of life in a “company town” governed by welfare paternalism, while her research on Milwaukee, Wisconsin emphasizes how Italian immigrant women worked as midwives and turned to small business enterprise when local opportunities for wage earning were limited.