This book stems from a series of interdisciplinary workshops and public events organised between 2012 and 2014 in the framework of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project of the same name. The interdisciplinary nature of the project is evident in the range of contributors – historians, literary scholars and sociologists.
The book's content and objectives are set out by the editors in their introduction. Bearing in mind the distinction between the lived realities of mothers and the cultural constructions of their role, Morris and Willson explain their interest in motherhood as an idea that has shaped how women consider themselves and how the rest of the population view them. They deliberately engage with the stereotypes associated with being a mother in order to understand how Italian gender roles are perceived both in and outside the country. In particular, great attention is devoted to mammismo, the ‘idea of the “mamma italiana” and her dependent, spoilt, offspring’ (p. 2) as the most widespread and recognisable perception of Italian national character. The editors recall how Italian historian Marina D'Amelia traced the origin of the term mammismo back to a 1952 essay by the writer and journalist Corrado Alvaro.
The past and present uses of that stereotype are the focus of Silvana Patriarca's chapter, in which the author remarks that ‘mammismo seems a way of blaming the mother figure for the ills of society at large’ (p. 29). According to her, the stereotype had ‘more to do with the crisis provoked by the war defeat and the anxieties generated by the new postwar order’ than with an archaic habit of Italian society (p. 34). While Patriarca draws attention to the intellectual critique of the maternal in postwar Italy, Molly Tambor describes in her chapter how activist women successfully used maternalist discourse to draft and pass legislation on maternity leave and protection for working mothers in 1948–50. A cross-party group of women MPs presented it as a necessary reform ‘to reinforce family values, implement the Constitution, and shore up Italy's democratic legitimacy’ (p. 54). The final law, however, suffered amendments and revisions that diluted the proponents’ intention ‘to separate women from the role of mother-within-the-family’ (p. 67), underlining the difficulty encountered by those MPs in popularising women's citizenship rights. More bitterly, the law went largely unenforced.
In her own contribution, Penelope Morris investigates ‘the issues facing mothers and the versions of ideal motherhood that predominated in 1950s Italy’ (p. 78). She does so by examining the advice columns of four different weekly magazines that encouraged an exchange with their readers. The four columnists under scrutiny displayed a variety of attitudes to motherhood, determined by both their editorial line and target readership. While for some mammismo existed, others attempted to counter negative stereotypes about women in a changing Italian society.
Literary productions are also investigated in the chapters written by Ursula Fanning and Mary Jo Bona and, to some extent, in the one by Maddalena Tirabassi. Fanning focuses on Italian women writers to explore their elaboration of maternal modes and models differing from the traditional idea of an emasculating mother-son relationship. She finds that ‘the maternal is a problematic area of representation’ in the writings of twentieth-century authors such as Sibilla Aleramo, Annie Vivanti, Grazia Deledda, Anna Banti, Natalia Ginzburg, Oriana Fallaci, Lidia Ravera and Dacia Maraini (p.106). In their ‘reconceptualizations of the maternal’ (p. 123), these writers ingeniously engage with the creation of female subjectivities, the corporeal aspects of maternity and the potential disruptions to the self entailed by pregnancy and childbirth. In her chapter, Mary Jo Bona examines the intersectional approach to the mother-daughter relationship in the narratives of three queer US authors with Italian ancestry: Carole Maso, Mary Cappello and Alison Bechdel. Bona argues that heritage culture informs their writings, all three portraying ‘extraordinary devotion to mother figures’ (p. 189). By engaging with feminist and psychological theories, the writers wage an ongoing critique of the normative heterosexuality and patriarchy that oppressed their female parents. Maddalena Tirabassi specifically devotes her attention to the stereotypes of Italian migrant family mammas in anglophone countries. ‘Literary works depicting the first wave of emigration to the United States offer images of strong women’ (p. 166) that later turned, via television and cinema, into stereotypical representations of ‘an Italian mamma of southern origins still tied to archaic practices and traditions’ (p. 178).
Gabriella Gribaudi scrutinises the enduring images of Mediterranean mothers, often portrayed either as victims of violent men or as strong and protective mammas. The latter has become the dominant representation in the case of Naples. Gribaudi tries to understand the origin of these representations and their relationship with social reality by focusing on literary portrayals and on life stories drawn from interviews. If literary representations – especially in De Filippo's plays – ‘tell us more about how women are seen by men than about women themselves’ (p. 135), individual stories reveal a problematic reality, where alternations of power and vulnerability characterise women's life-cycles.
The book concludes with Chiara Saraceno's description of the obstacles encountered today by mothers and those aspiring to motherhood. The data presented by the Italian sociologist disclose a challenging reality in ‘the country that in the international imaginary has been “the land of the mamma” par excellence’ (p. 229). In fact, the enduring problem of reconciling motherhood and paid employment and the limited and unevenly distributed resources for social policies continue to be major obstacles to becoming a mother in Italy today.
The variety of sources, approaches and interpretations presented by the contributors makes this volume stimulating reading. Although the challenging task of holding together this diversity of theoretical frameworks and methods is noticeable at times, this book is an unmissable text for all those interested in gender, family ties and Italian culture.
