The only unsuitable part of this book is the title. The book is about the pioneer women migrants from former Soviet republics who started coming to a northern Italian town in the 1990s. And although the study is indeed about the personal and collective transformations of this group of women care workers, these transformations are not about marrying an Italian man and becoming “a Soviet Signora” but about reclaiming dignity and respect. During the more than a decade of ethnographic research in which Martina Cvajner followed their lives, some of them did marry, but this is not the book's point. The point is a truly fascinating portrait of complex strategies invented by women migrants to elevate themselves from the degrading position in a receiving society to a self-constructed social position of moral worth and recognition. These women are also not Soviet women but members of different ethnic and national entities. This fact became decisive at the end of the over a decade long process of constructing the social space for themselves in the society of the Italian town when their tight informal group of support and empowerment dissolved into national/ethnic formal immigrant organizations.

We follow the research story from the beginning when the author met a group of Russian-speaking women strolling on the streets of the town to which she had also emigrated as a refugee from former Yugoslavia and began communicating with them. They are middle-aged women who migrated to Italy because of economic hardship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, in the book's prologue, which describes the party after the end of the research, we encounter the women not as a homogenous group but as individuals with personal and unique views, opinions, and moral stances as well as particular national, ideological, and educational backgrounds. After the prologue, in which we meet the protagonists and their different contemporary social situations, the author takes us back more than a decade and reveals the complex, dynamic, and dramatic story of lost and found self-esteem and pride. The pioneer women migrants left their places as respected middle-aged, mostly divorced, highly-educated women with careers and children. They had lost their middle-class position, income, and jobs due to the post-Soviet era economic crisis. In the Italian town, they took on jobs as live-in care workers for elderly members of working and middle-class families. The work, regarded as the lowest of all jobs, became the only defining factor of their social status. None of the former attributes of their identity—motherhood, education, maturity, class—mattered any longer. They became invisible, insignificant, genderless, poorly paid, despised, live-in domestics with no room or voice of their own—they became lavaculi (those who wipe elderly asses).

Cvajner vividly describes the evolution of their unstoppable resistance and the role of the informal community they established to support it. The women slowly developed strategies to become less invisible, less insignificant, less silent. The context of an Italian town with cafés and bars along the streets and the culture of observing passers-by is crucial here. In this specific setting of the public space, in their free time, the migrant women gradually invented a way to become visible by strolling for hours; to become heard by talking and laughing loudly; to become feminine by wearing high heels and heavy make-up; to become significant by shopping and spending; to have a room of their own by appropriating public spaces for their gatherings. Cvajner describes the most intimate aspects of the identity transformations that the women experienced in the process of resistance against the designated social status as lavaculi. She also describes the group dynamic, support and control essential in overcoming the social oppression, powerlessness, humiliation, and degradation in their migration trajectories.

This micro-ethnographic study of a particular group of pioneer migrant women who did not have any existing support network, established organizations or transferred knowledge for orientation in the receiving society is a valuable contribution to the field of migration studies. Moreover, it offers a glimpse of the subjective experiences in the complex process of invented self-representation as a resistance strategy to the devaluing and dehumanizing status designated for migrants in our societies.