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features. The increasing number of these masculine women could
cause a deep disturbance to the natural order on which social and
sexual relations were based. The aim of these theories was obvi-
ously to justify the relevant gender difference in the wage system, a
difference which functioned to reaffirm male hegemony.
The political tendency was to make female emigration invisible
or non-existent. Until at least 1905, statistics on emigrants did not
make any gender distinction, and often women were not even men-
tioned in family or group passports. They only emerge from ano-
nymity as they reached the new country, when they had to appear in
documents or administrative records. Their names were often modi-
fied when they were adapted to a new language (Grandi 2007: 46).
Still, in 1908, in Lamberto Paoletti’s collection of migratory
statistics based on twenty works on the subject published between
1876 and 1905, the only reference to gender distinction claimed
that “the number of emigrant males is much greater than that of
females”.46 This is a trivial reference which ignored the destiny of
hundreds of thousands of women. The quality of their choice to
emigrate (in terms of reasons, motivations, achievements, for in-
stance) was ignored as well as their actual numbers.47
Perhaps as a reflection of reality, Italian emigration literature
during this period did not put emigrant women at the centre of the
narration. From Guerrazzi to Corradini, female characters essen-
tially had supporting roles, or figured in the more romantic and
adventurous aspects of the plot. In those few cases where women
appeared as protagonists they were deeply marked by emigration,
but their traumas were due principally to an indirect or passive
experience of emigration. Instead of leaving their homes and coun-
try, they spent long periods of their lives waiting for the men to
return (i.e. husbands or sons). Prevailing attitudes within society, as
46 Grandi 2007: 35. “La massa emigratoria maschile è assai maggiore della femminile”.
47 Grandi 2007: 60. It is logical that women migrants’ lives left very few traces in national historical
documentation, while they were evident in medical case histories or arraignments. Histories of
women’s ordinary life were missing, but not their exceptional events. In the memory of hospitals,
mental institutions and courthouses, the presence of women was recorded in detail. It served to
strengthen public opinion that female emigration, with its self-determination, implied a moral
decline. Between the nineteenth and twentieth century, the same political articles that criticised
emigration stereotyped female migrants as poor devils detached from their own people, women
who would face a fatal destiny of isolation and slowly lose contact with the real world.
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND