BOOK REVIEWS 367

In summary, the book consists of several essays, most of which are well worth
reading as separate entities. They are studded with brilliant apercus and wry ironic com-
mentary. There is a fertile, erudite mind at work here, best expressed in the essay form.
In The Other Victorians’* Marcus did give us a sustained coherent work; alas, he did
not do so here.
NOTES
1. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Viking, 1959); and The Triumph of the
Therapeutic (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
2. Benjamin Nelson, “The Future of Illusions,” Psychoanalysis (later called PsychoanalyticReview) 2 (1954):
16-37; and “Sociology and Psychoanalysis on Trial,” Psychoanulytic Review 49 (1962): 144-160.
3. Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962).
4. Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
5. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Serf(New York: International Universities Press, 1971).
6. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979).
7. Peter L. Giovacchini, The Treatment of Primitive Mental States (New York: Jason Aronson, 1979, p. 14.
8. Robert Endleman, Psyche and Society: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Sociology (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1981), pp. 38, 414.
9. Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (New York: International Universities Press, 1950).
10. Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolf Loewenstein, “Some Psychoanalytic Comments on ‘Culture
and Personality,’ ” in Psychoanalysis and Culture, eds. George Wilbur and Warner Muensterberger (New
York: International Universities Press, 1951), pp. 3-32.
11. Rbheim, Psychoanalysis.
12. Weston LaBarre, The Human Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); and The Ghost
Dance (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970).
13. George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (The Hague and Paris: Mouton,
1967); and Basic Problems in Ethnopsychiatry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
14. Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Goldy ParimMatthey, Die Weissen Denken Zuviel (Dogon tribe,
West Africa] (Zurich: Atlantis, 1963); and Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyserf[Anyi tribe, West Africa] (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980) (English translation).
15. Anne Parsons, Belief, Magic and Anomie: Essays in PsychosocialAnthropology (New York: Free Press,
1969).
16. Robert Endleman, Psyche and Society; and Personality and Social Life (New York: Random House, 1%7).
17. Parin et al., Fear.
18. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians:A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Cen-
tury England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).

Journal of the Hisfory of fhe Behavioral Sciences

Volume 22, Ociober 1986

Donna R.Gabaccia. From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social ChangeAmong
Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.
174 pp. $34.50 (cloth) (Reviewed by Michael Ceddia)
Donna Gabaccia undercores three important themes in her book From Sicify to
Elizabeth Street: (1) The working hypothesis that “the tenements of New York would
match Sicilian needs and desires rather poorly, and that the immigrants would change
their social behavior as they responded creatively to new environmental restraints” (p.
xx). (2) The idea that southern Italians were so dedicated to the nuclear family that they
could not cooperate with others, an idea stemming from Edward Banfield’s work in a
southern Italian town in the 1950s. (Banfield called the inhabitants of the town “amoral
368 BOOK REVIEWS

familists.”’ (3) The notion that the emigration-immigration process itself had differen-
tial effects on the changing social behavior of immigrant men and women. These three
themes are effectively worked out in the study, yielding a thoroughly readable and op-
timistic book comparing western Sicilians and Lower East Side Sicilian immigrants in
New York City.
Much of the feeling of optimism derives from Gabaccia’s exciting discovery of the
historical value of the proverbial phrase as a new source for studying past social values
and behavior. It is clear that the author is at best skeptical about earlier social scientific
work concerning the social values and behaviors of southern Italians in general, and
especially Sicilians, because of the difficulty in establishing empirical fact without con-
trolled experimentation. Thus the author introduces a unique set of data as the founda-
tion of her work: the collection of Sicilian proverbs gathered by a nineteenth-century
physician and folklorist from Palermo, Giuseppe Pitre.2
We are warned that these proverbs, “like all folklore sources,” have an “inherently
conservative bias” (p. 2). The reader should not be alarmed by this forewarning, however,
for the conservatism is as it should be. Well-settled communities, like folklore, are also
inherently conservative in that those who control the economy of the community usu-
ally have enough power to keep things structurally as they are. The Sicilian agrotown
described in this study seems quite settled and, as the author says, is heavily peasant class.
Using the proverbs the author depicts a people with a strong desire for both close
kinship relations and for social ties outside of the kin group, a picture that belies the
description of southern Italians as so familist as to exclude any instrumental ties to in-
dividuals and institutions beyond their own close kin (casa). She further notes that the
proverbs provided rules for social behavior and morality outside of the nuclear family
and that they simultaneously comprised principles of patriarchy and matriarchy. We
also learn that the proverbs tended to reduce all social distinctions to those between
rich and poor when speaking to the proper relationship between members of different
classes. One of the most important statements in the study is as follows:
In sum, nineteenth-century Sicilians were not amoral familists; Banfield was wrong
in his historical reasoning. They did, however, face huge obstacles, some of them
environmental, in achieving their social ideals. Many never succeeded in building
a network reaching much beyond the casa- in that respect alone they resembled
the amoral familists that Banfield described. Many Sicilians in the nineteenth cen-
tury hoped to escape restraints imposed on them by emigrating. When they emigrated
they set into motion a process that would transform not just their social relation-
ships to others, but their social ideals as well (p. 10).
Gabaccia takes issue with Banfield‘s characterization of southern Italians and also asserts
that the emigration-immigration process brought about a great deal of change for the
peasants of the Italian south. That is, in a single statement, she puts together two of
the three themes that seem to be at the core of the study. Much of her effort early in
the book directs the reader to the conclusion that immigration to the United States in-
duced change in both social behavior and social ideals and that therefore those who
studied turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants studied a group of people who were very
different from those who remained and evolved in Sicily and the southern provinces
of the mainland.
To further develop her theme Gabaccia discusses residential habits in the Sicilian
agrotown. Although Sicilian houses in the agrotown varied in size, only a few of them
could be seen as models of the ideal level of Sicilian housing. Owning low-standard hous-
 BOOK REVIEWS 369

ing was usual for the Sicilian peasants, whereas owning land was very unusual, and ac-
quiring housing for one’s children was an important family objective. Sicilians valued
social ties to others but did not open readily their households to anyone outside the
household. If the limited available housing was not satisfactory, they did not display
their dissatisfaction by moving frequently. Most importantly, we learn that the agrotown
is a very conservative settlement, good for those who control the economy and have
access to social networks, and bad for those who do not.
Gabaccia carefully points out that an increasing discrepancy between what could
be realized in agrotown life and the reality of everyday living yielded the great migra-
tions. She shows how this gap was widest for peasant men but that both women and
men had a very poor foundation upon which to build their lives and strive for the social
ideals of their culture. For example, the peasant men worked very far from their families
and spent days, weeks, and sometimes months away from home. Thus, they could not
watch over the sexual behavior of their wives or maintain intimacy with them, nor could
they guide their families economically and socially, both of which were important ideals
for men in western Sicily. The women mothered their children in the idealized way, super-
vising their behavior very closely, but nonetheless suffered under the assumption that
they would probably not remain faithful to their husbands.
We also learn that southern Italians tried to keep the nuclear family together dur-
ing migration, but because the “decision to migrate represented a nuclear family’s desire
to compete” and improve its position in the agrotown, migrating as a family unit was
not always possible or appropriate (p. 58). That is, “migration did not depend on ex-
isting social relationships but provided for the creation of new ones” (p. 58). Therefore
the immigrants were unable to re-create the multigenerational family network (casa))
in their early arrival years. As a result, the Sicilian distinction between casa and parenti
(more distant relatives) diminished, while la famiglia, the network of close and extended
kin living in several neighboring households peculiar to the migration itself, developed
(p. xv). The immigrants immediately moved beyond the narrowness of their former social
habits in southern Italy and Sicily. This point is strengthened when the author draws
on John Briggs’s research on immigrant social networks in which he concluded that social
historians overemphasized the importance of village-based loyalties as the basis of im-
migrant solidarity.
Once in New York life was certainly different for these immigrants. For example,
they moved frequently, because now they were renters, not owners, living in housing
that was in some ways below the standards to which they were accustomed. Still, mov-
ing meant that they could now choose to live near some families and not others, which
was mostly out of the question in the agrotown. They could also choose to live near
their work, which was also not possible for most peasant men in the old country. These
changes in mobility and proximity to work allowed them to achieve the social ideals
of the old culture in a way that the old culture itself did not offer. But now housing
became a problem; as Gabaccia says:
The tenements matched Sicilian social ideals far better than they matched Sicilian
housing ideals (p. 84).
The housing problem in New York was part of the irony of the emigration-immigration
process for southern Italians. Although Sicilian culture did not allow peasants to achieve
Sicilian ideals, in some basic ways it met their housing ideals, for they usually owned
their houses and prior to the late nineteenth century they often acquired housing for
370 BOOK REVIEWS

their children. Contrarily, on Elizabeth Street in New York home ownership and the
acquisition of housing for one’s children were not feasible.
On the other hand, in New York the men were able to commute daily to work and
return home in the early evening. Similarly, the married, immigrant women from the
peasant class now often worked inside their apartments. The proximity of work for men
and the ability to do work in the house for women were in fact characteristics of the
artisan class in Sicily, and hence the peasant immigrants were now living day to day
in the same manner as the Sicilian artisan class. Many of the men gained several degrees
of freedom by emigrating to the United States, mostly because of employment oppor-
tunities available to them, whereas the women lost some freedom. They became
increasingly tied to their households, a position that they had regarded ideally in Sicily.
Meanwhile, the men often left in the early evening after dinner to socialize with other
men in the neighborhood, returning home a few hours later to retire for the night. Thus,
the men were “networking” and the women were not. This is the irony of the immigra-
tion for the southern Italians.
In Sicily the women networked all the time, performing much of their daily work
out of doors. In questa terra nova, however, women could not network easily, nor could
they supervise their children at play, being separated by the physical structure of the
tenements, inhibited by the ease of mobility for the boys in the neighborhoods, and
confined to their tenements. For women and girls the increase in private space was ac-
companied by a decrease in shareable space. As the author says:
Certainly immigrant women had good reason to complain a little about their every-
day lives in the tenements. Whereas the move to Elizabeth Street freed men to pur-
sue Sicilian ideals, it limited immigrant women’s opportunities to interact with others.
Although immigrant women lived lives more like artisans’ wives as a consequence,
they seemed unsatisfied. Immigrant women’s dissatisfaction helped reshape social
relationships as much as their husbands’ newfound freedom (p. 99).
It is in this context that we can best understand the author’s position that “Elizabeth
Street’s Sicilians experienced fundamental cultural change during migration to and urban
life in the United States (p. 112). They were no longer the people they had been.
Of course this review is but one glimpse of the author’s work. Others may get
different impressions from the book. However, I believe that From Sicily to Elizabeth
Street is a well-written and well-researched study because: (1) It offers an alternative
source of data, the old proverbs, for the researcher who studies social values in the past.
(2) It is a contribution to research that focuses on the emigration-immigration process
and its effects on social behavior and social ideals. (3) It offers substance to the view
that southern Italian immigrants were not bound by the limitations of an “ismatic” view
of the world. (4)It supports the argument that southern Italian men and women did
not live in a stereotypical, male-dominated society, but rather in a society with elements
of both patriarchy and matriarchy. ( 5 ) It suggests that a tilt toward men as controlling
the economic and social well-being of the family occurred in the United States as part
of immigration and that such a leaning was not characteristic of the lifestyle of the
peasants of the “mezzogiorno.”
NOTES
1. Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1958).
2. Giuseppe Pitre, Proverb Siciliani, 1-4, Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Popolari Siciliane, vol. 8-1 1 (Palermo:
Luigi Pedone Lauriel, 1880).
3. John Briggs, An Italian Passage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).