1. When the Men Left Sutera: Sicilian Women and Mass Migration, 1880-1920

Laboring Across National Borders: Class, Gender, and Militancy in the Proletarian Mass Migrations

“…While confirming the extent and importance of women's work, Linda Reeder instead linked male emigration from Sicily to more positive results at home-including higher rates of female literacy, improved housing, and improvements in peasant diets. 61 Overall, Women, Gender and Transnational Lives demonstrates that women's domestic worlds were not isolated or patriarchal prisons from which they escaped into independence or female autonomy via wage-earning. But neither was the domestic world a female-dominated haven for highly skilled and chaste housewives, as bourgeois Americans more often believed.…”

Women cross borders: economic migration in contemporary Italian and Polish graphic novels

“…Traditionally, the emigrants were young men, whose wives and children remained in their respective homelands, waiting for their return and inadvertently assuming some of the roles previously associated with male family members (Reeder 2002). However, recent histories, especially from 1945 onwards, saw the rise of female migration and the widening of motivations behind it, including political and social reasons.…”