An Interview with Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

 

by Francesca Roccaforte

 

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, a second-/third-generation Sicil­ian American, was born in Kansas City, MO and is seventy-one years old. An independent scholar and history professor, Lucia is author of Liberazione della donne: Feminism in Italy (1986/ 1988); Black Madonnas: Feminism, Realism, and Politics in Italy (1993); Le Madonne Nere (1996); and is currently working on a book-length study Godmothers and Others of Colors: Le Comari. Lucia is a professor in the doctoral program in Feminist Spiritu­ality of the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Fran­cisco.

FR:     What was the educational background of women in your family?

LCB:    My mother was born here in the 1900s. My grandparents came in the last decade of the nineteenth century from all parts of Sicily. My mother was born in 1900. She was the eldest of all her sisters and she had a thing about rejecting all the greenhorn ways. She was the “Queen” of the North End because my grand­father made a lot of money in the fruit and vegetable business. Anyway she rejected it all, and married my father who was from the old country. They had lots of marital problems. He was a womanizer. She rejected it doubly because she was married to someone from the old country and I must have rejected it also in my childhood because I was upwardly mobile. I simply went in­doors and read when all the kids were in the street having a good time. So I was upwardly mobile and I went to college. My mother scrubbed floors to see to it that I went to college because grandma said “She can’t go to college because her father is sick and she should go to sewing school and learn how to sew so she can help bring in money for the family.” But my mother said the hell with that! Anyway, she saw to it that I went to college and then I became very overeducated, got a Ph.D. and did all that and it took me a long time to realize what I had left behind me.

Not until the end of the 60s, did I realize that I left something behind me. I had worked in the Panthers and the Chicano movements in which they were looking for their own identity and I was certainly helping that at S.F. State. They gave me a plaque in 1988 for valor for helping them secure the first depart­ment of ethnic studies in the world. Anyway that was 1969.

It turned out wonderfully for me because I got fired. I became a very fine scholar. I went to Italy and I began looking at my own background and I wrote that book liberazione della donne—Fem­inism in Italy, which is regarded now as a definitive work. As a matter of fact, on International Women’s Day next Tuesday in Washington, DC, both of my books are being celebrated by the Italian embassy because they think those books are the defini­tive works on Italian-American women. It’s about an Italian-American woman looking for her roots in Italy. The first step is looking at the women’s movement in Italy, which is an extremely impressive women’s movement. It continues to be one of the rea­sons I’m going back to Italy in April. For the first time in Italy, the left can govern the country. It will be like Clinton coming to power, they’ll have all these problems at first. The left has been very important regionally and locally in the Christian Democrat government because of all the corruption and the left is extremely healthy. The women are strategically placed all through that area of the left not just as a women’s movement, but strategically located culturally and politically.

FR:     Do you think there are more roles than mother and wife?

LCB:    They’re different in Italy. The Italian women’s movement has been very strong since it’s put all this stellar legislation into the Italian code. They’ve done it with the help of Italian men. Now there is a strong left. One of the reasons the Italian women’s movement has worked very well is because they had their hus­bands and lovers to throw darts at. They had a strong left with whom they could fight with and whom they loved.

FR:     Italian women are not marrying Italian men like they once did in this country.

LCB:    In this country they marry out because they’re trying to escape the stereotyped roles and subordinate roles.

FR:     Does the Italian culture accept your success?

LCB:    The relationship with my mother has been problematic all my life although she was happy to see me excel. At the end of her life she said to me “I found a picture and I don’t know if it’s you or me”. I felt it was a very moving thing to say.

I don’t have any problems with my Italian relatives thinking I’ve jumped the fence. They’re pleased with me. That’s because I’ve done a crazy thing. Overtly, I’m not that successful. I’m a fired professor from S.F. State. I just happen to have written some important books and I’m a fine scholar and that’s related to being fired. I haven’t done it conventionally. I am an independent scholar affiliated with the Institute of Research on Women and Gender at Stanford.

I’ve taught on and off at the College of Arts and Crafts. I need to write, although teaching is important for hearing myself and I will teach at California Institute of Integral Studies this fall. Teaching is minor, because I need to write.

FR:     Do women govern the Italian family?

LCB:    Oh, for certain. They let the men have “la bella figura” which is smarter then making a big thing about it which is not dumb. He knows he has to empty the garbage because it’s Wednesday and I did the laundry or some damn thing. It’s a kind of organic equality that you work out. It doesn’t have anything to do with arithmetic.

FR:     Do you think the woman is revered?

LCB:    It’s the nurturing mother who is revered. Italian men never got to the point that she’s devouring. Jewish men have written all these novels on how that kind of mother can be consuming and devouring, a negative stereotype. In Verga novels when La Lupa (the she-wolf) talks, the Italian woman is really vivid. She’s very beautiful and she’s going toward him with her hands full of red poppies and she has this look and this sensuality and she can never ever be satisfied. The negative stereotype for Italian men is this unlimited, sensual female.

FR:     Isn’t this the Madonna/Whore thing?

LCB:    Yes, calling the Madonna a puttana (whore) which is the deepest heresy of Italian vernacular beliefs. They don’t believe she conceived immaculately, she’s not a virgin. It’s the Church who wants to think these things. The folklore says that Jesus is just a person like anyone else. If you ask the women that’s what they’ll say about the Easter Mysteries. In this country, Easter is centered on Jesus and his having resurrection. In Italy, if you go to Easter Mysteries, it’s all centered on the mother. The mother be­gins things and she ends the things. Women in black follow her. It’s the mother who is central in the Easter mysteries.