Search

The study starts from the premise that the violence suffered by Italian migrant women has not yet been adequately considered. Identify traces of suffering and «large» and «small» violence by rereading the research that had as its object the trafficking of white women, arranged marriages, brides by proxy, women left home by the husbands, women assisted by social workers for intergenerational conflicts. It shows that a good starting point can be to identify the sources for writing the history of this violence by reading between the lines of literature and official documentation: by on-board doctors, judicial reports, social work or asylums files. But, he concludes, it is in the literature and, in particular, in some studies carried out recently in the United States, that the tragedies experienced by women can be found. Also, from memoirs we can understand the reasons for the reticence of historiography to address the topic. The family memories handed down orally and put on paper by descendants of the second or more generation seem in fact to offer the most promising fields to reconstruct their history, in particular for the older migrations of which we cannot have direct evidence, having as protagonists predominantly illiterate women, who spoke neither the language of the new countries and sometimes not even Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]