Preliminary Programme

“Better morals make better maids” so wrote Minnie M. Estabrook, a Bureau of Indian Affairs Outing Matron working with the Tohono O’odham in Arizona in 1914. But whose morals and to what ends? As the twentieth century approached, the curriculum for female students BIA schools focused less and less on academics and more and more on the production of suitable servants for middle class white households. Both the homes of Outing Matrons and middle class whites were to serve as models for Tohono O’odham acculturation, but an acculturation that understood that the Tohono O’odham were naturally less capable than their white middle class brethren. Furthermore, Outing Matrons also saw their role as one of protecting naïve Tohono O’odham girls from exposure to the wrong sorts of people, especially Mexicans and lower class whites, and their backward cultures. This paper examines the experiences of female Tohono O’odham day school graduates who entered the homes of middle class whites in the early twentieth century and the attempts by BIA officials to arrange marriages for those maids who became pregnant. In doing so, it explores the ways in which they resisted the assimilative goals of their white benefactors even as they sought out their help in attaining paid work in affluent white homes. It also scrutinizes their continued involvement in the very Mexican, Catholic, and Tohono O’odham cultural practices from which Outing Matrons were trying to glean them. (Show less)

Few literature on post WWII migration provides an analysis of its (post)colonial aspects. Yet we know that in some European countries, people coming from former colonies had access to some forms (cultural, legal, economic) of recognition of the past legacies. For example cultural and linguistic ties of Britain and France with citizens of former colonies, special scholarship provisions and visa exemptions.

This is not the case however of the Eritrean migration to Italy from the 70’s on, when a protracted war with Ethiopia (other Italian ex-colony) was pushing the population to leave their country. Italy, which governed Eritrea as “colonia promogenita” for more than 60 years, did not treat these migrants differently than others. It not offered them a refugee status and welcomed only those that could provide work in the niche of domestic service. Due to the lack of legal protection of these refugees in Italy, many Eritreans were compelled to settle in some other European country or the United States

Still today, the majority of Italians (politicians, historians and the society at large) ignores or rejects the Italian colonial past, which carries unsolved questions for Italian national identity, strengthening its connection with Fascism and war domination, rather than with the patriotic saying “Italiani brava gente” (Del Boca).

In this context, Eritreans (as Ethiopians, Somalis, Libyans and Albanians) are subjects whose presence in Italy is therefore quickly subsumed into the general category of foreign workers (extracomunitari) and no recognition is made of the legacies between these people and the Italians.

Our work tries to trace back those legacies and see how they affected the migratory experience of the first Eritrean women arriving in Italy during the 70’s. The stories of the women interviewed illustrate the complex dimensions of their migratory project, going along their memories of expectations and disillusions, of affiliations and rejections. Their experiences show how a pervasive (post)colonial regime affects the identity and the imaginary of migrant subjects.

Our study will focus on women arriving to Rome from Asmara (“the second Rome” in Mussolini’s words), where language, culture, food, architecture, religion, music, education, were important aspects of the surviving Italian presence in Eritrea, at that time.
Our work is indeed an investigation on the importance of the colonisation of imaginary, which these women testify in their everyday life, at the edge of their presence both in Asmara and Rome.
Looking, at the same time, at their construction of ideas on the prospective life in Italy, and the actual reality of their lives in Rome, we will trace a kind of “journey of imaginary” which accompanied these women migratory experience.

Special attention will be given to the specificity of their work in Italian families as domestics, which in many ways manifests the subtle construction of the postcolonial legacy we are discussing. (Show less)

The governing ideas of social work changed after the Second World War across a broad part of Europe. ‘Social casework’, mainly known in North America, was widely discussed and taken up in numerous European countries in the post-war period. Social casework was a specific form of individual case management in which indigence was supposed to be examined by a diagnostic process and combated with a help-plan. In 1950s Switzerland it was unthinkable as well that this form of casework should be absent from the theories of social work.

Thereby, social casework was – as its scholars accentuated – not just a method but in addition a true “inner poise”. The method aimed at enabling social workers to build up a relationship with the needy person, which was guided by democratic principles and was free of moral judgements and spurious patronization. After the Second World War, the demand to arrange helpful relationships on democratic principles became further differentiated. A stronger discourse on human rights enriched the theories of social work with distinct norms.

However, the kind of social work that aimed at a relationship with a level of equal partnership between the helper and those in need of help, was in conflict with traditions of Swiss welfare and social work. This becomes clear, when looking at the way in which information about those in need was supposed to be collected. In Swiss welfare and social work, unannounced home visits were for a long time the main sources of getting information about clients, and thereby identify their actual need and the causes of their exigency. Social casework on the other hand demanded a different procedure: primarily, a dialogue between social workers and those in need of help was supposed to provide the information on which support measures were relied on.

In the 1950s, in Switzerland an intense discussion about the legitimacy and rightfulness of unannounced home visits in social work and welfare arose. The paper examines this debate and identifies different positions and their justification. Thereby, gender is an important category of analysis. First, female and male experts in social work and welfare advanced different views on the rightfulness of unannounced home visits: Female social workers were, following the guiding principles of the social casework method, most often critical about home visits. On the other hand, male social workers who predominantly worked in the field of public welfare defended home visits to a large extent. In the paper, the gendered position among Swiss experts in social work is investigated more closely. Secondly, the paper examines the discourses on the legitimacy of unannounced home visits and asks how gender structured concepts of privacy and individual human rights in the context of this discussion. How was privacy or the right to have a private sphere understood and how did gender influence the arguments hold in the debate? (Show less)

In July 2003 a New York Times article reported on the activities of an army of 5000 “Mujahedeen” fighters, many of them female, who were encamped in Iraq and dedicated to the overthrow of the current government of Iran. The women militants, “fanatically loyal” to their leaders, were described as an “an army of Stepford wives.” A month later another article reported on female suicide bombers in Chechnya. The media dubbed the “perpetrators as black widows,” or “women prepared to kill and to die to avenge the deaths of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.” Earlier writings that have covered women in militant groups as disparate as the “Shining Path,” the IRA, the Italian Red Brigades, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and even more distant, the 19th century Russian People’s Will describe the women as fanatical and thereby especially dangerous. Cynthia Enloe in (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (2006) points to the “flexibility of the category of women” in stories of women terrorists who can be either long-suffering and often idealized wives and mothers, or, in contrast unnatural and even depraved women. The purpose of the paper I would present at the European Social Science History Conference next year is to consider the stereotypes and images of women engaged in violent resistance and acts of terrorism, but also to measure these against women’s own identities and views of their actions and motives.
A very large literature on terrorism exists; countless books provide definitions of terrorism, explain its history, ask what it is that terrorists want, suggest means to defeat terrorism, and consider its social, political and economic consequences. In such volumes women usually appear as the victims of terrorism, or terrorist actions are elevated as efforts to defend women, children and family. A few studies directly confront what it is that motivates women to become martyrs (Mia Bloom Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, 2005) or ask “why are we so reluctant to believe that women can mean to kill?” (Belinda Morrissey, When Women Kill, 2003). I propose to move in those directions but as an historian interested in geographical and chronological comparisons. In order to meet the time constraints of a conference, my presentation will consider primarily European (broadly described) events and cultures, although the questions asked will be shaped by references to non-western experiences. To illuminate women’s own experiences and perspectives I will rely on personal narratives, interviews and other self-conscious accounts. My earlier studies of women in the Italian Resistance (1998) provide a basis for this kind of inquiry as the small group of women who were part of the “action squads” (GAP or SAP) during world war II carried out acts of violence, assassinations and bombings that in some cases resulted in the deaths of unsuspecting civilians. Their memoirs revealed the ways in which women struggled to come to terms with their violent actions, and pushed me to reconsider women’s relationship to terrorism.. (Show less)