“They are bound for the milk station down the way:” Maternal Health, Infant Care, and Italian Women’s Claims to Belonging in 20th-Century Boston
Creators: name: Mathews, Lydia
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2023
Subjects: Gender
Italian women
Maternalism
Social citizenship
Gender studies
Immigration
Public Health

description: This thesis is focused on Italian women’s interactions with reform and charitable medical institutions in Boston at the turn of the 20th century. It is interested in how immigrant women already in the United States negotiated space and accessed power in Boston’s South End as well as how larger national debates regarding a different aspect of immigration—nation-based quotas barring entry to the country, realized in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act—impacted claims to social belonging at the local level. I argue that maternal and infant health was an important point of convergence in the interests of Italian women and reformers, and that attempts to “conserve” infant life in Boston speak to the importance of Italian women, and their role in social reproduction, in shifting notions of whiteness and belonging. As restrictionists gained ground on a national level, reformers and the Italian community turned to Italian mothers to improve the status of the Italian “colony” among the American polity through their adherence to American health standards and hygienic practices. These women were drawn into contemporary conversations which called on white women to (re)produce the future citizens of the nation—the embeddedness of racialized and classed notions of belonging in the U.S. become all the more evident when examining how reformers and Italian immigrants themselves positioned Italian mothers within this framework. Far from passive actors, however, Italian women in the South End engaged with reformers, often setting the terms of these interactions. Although much work has stressed Italian immigrants’ distrust of the medical establishment and resistance to vaccination campaigns, I turn here to a more nuanced narrative which looks for the points at which Italian women could (or could not) access power outside of moments of crisis. That is, I am interested in the political ramifications of Italian women’s daily lives and reproductive labor within the home, avoiding simplistic distinctions between the public and private and elevating what might otherwise be considered the mundane to the forefront of debates over belonging.I begin with an examination of contemporary ideas about citizenship and calls for Italian women to conform to a white, middle-class ideal of femininity in the early 1900s before shifting to Italian women’s participation in infant health reform efforts around 1910. Finally, I analyze the influence which Italian women had on the practices and strategies of charitable medical institutions in the second decade of the 20th century. In looking to these moments, I emphasize the centrality of public health as a rhetorical tool in the continuous construction of American citizenship, incorporating immigrant women into the social body of the nation through an assertion of obligation and communal duty. This thesis thus draws on the works of Michel Foucault and others in addressing the ways in which the management of life constitutes an exercise of power. Additionally, the scholarship of Marisa Fuentes has greatly influenced this thesis and its interest in stretching the limitations of archival sources to hold space for possibilities and contingencies. In this thesis, I highlight the necessity of studying U.S. immigration history through the lens of both gender and health and the continued need to think critically about whiteness and its construction on the East Coast, as well as the West, when discussing immigration restriction.