After reading Ann Cornelisen’s Women of the Shadows: Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy I am going to examine three out of the five women Cornelisen wrote about while she lived amongst these women in the villages of Lucania/Basilicata after World War II. I am also going to describe how these women underwent many struggles in their lives at a time when all of the husbands left them to go find better jobs abroad in Germany. To my own belief, these women are the foundation that preserved their family. They kept them together without any recognition and little to no appreciation of the individuals around them. Furthermore, I will also discuss how these women were representatives of their peers and the major factors kept them in these miserable circumstances they were in.
The first of these women I am going to describe is Peppina. According to Cornelisen she is twenty-five years old, however due to having seven children and at least five abortions, has the appearance of a forty-year-old woman. She was deprived of any kind of education from an early age; but does not hide the fact that the women were considered the experts in doing sums on their fingers. In turn, she acquires any available work like …show more content…
Cettina is about one generation than all the other women mentioned in the book. Even though much has changed in the way of life between the twenty years that have past, Cettina battles with her own struggles as well. She has more of an education than the others, but never advanced past eight grade. For of her lack of education during the 1970’s, she held various jobs that did not turn out well for her. After a calculated effort to try and marry a man named Carabinieri who was of more nobility than her, she marries a man called Anthony. After the birth of her last child, she uncovers a way to defraud the government for prenatal and postnatal maternal leave, with no intentions of ever going back to
The first of these women I am going to describe is Peppina. According to Cornelisen she is twenty-five years old, however due to having seven children and at least five abortions, has the appearance of a forty-year-old woman. She was deprived of any kind of education from an early age; but does not hide the fact that the women were considered the experts in doing sums on their fingers. In turn, she acquires any available work like …show more content…
Cettina is about one generation than all the other women mentioned in the book. Even though much has changed in the way of life between the twenty years that have past, Cettina battles with her own struggles as well. She has more of an education than the others, but never advanced past eight grade. For of her lack of education during the 1970’s, she held various jobs that did not turn out well for her. After a calculated effort to try and marry a man named Carabinieri who was of more nobility than her, she marries a man called Anthony. After the birth of her last child, she uncovers a way to defraud the government for prenatal and postnatal maternal leave, with no intentions of ever going back to