Victoria A. Goddard - Gender, Family and Work in Naples

GENERAL EDITOR: Jackie Waldren, Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University; Research Associate CCCRW, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford; and Field Co-ordinator, Deya Archaeological Museum and Research Centre, Spain.

This is a new series which will feature ethnographic monographs and collected works on theoretical approaches to aspects of life and culture in the areas bordering the Mediterranean. Rather than presenting a unified concept of 'the Mediterranean', the aim of the series is to reveal the background and differences in the cultural constructions of social space and its part in patterning social relations among the peoples of this fascinating geographical area.

First published 1996 by Berg Publishers

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V.A. Goddard 1996

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ISBN 13: 978-1-859-73034-8 (hbk)

Many people have shown an interest in my research and have shaped and encouraged my work over the years, and I remember them all with gratitude. However, there are a number of people whom I wish to single out. In particular, my gratitude goes to Nunzia Casale for her invaluable help and her equally invaluable friendship. I also wish to thank Enrico Bercioux, Michele Gargiullo, Domenico Liccardo, Domenico Baiano, Lia Santacroce, Franco Capasso, Mario De Rosa, Maria Giuliano, Anna Maria D'Angelo, and all other colleagues and friends at the Naples FILTEA, the Federbracciante and the FLM. I am very grateful to Mr and Mrs Casale, their children and grand-children, to Mr and Mrs Bercioux and family, and to my neighbours in Pianura and Rione Traiano, for their warmth and hospitality. I am also indebted to all those men and women in Naples who were so generous with their time. In Rome, Giuseppina Vittone and Nella Marcellino helped me on my way to Naples. I would also like to thank staff and students of the University of Naples, and at the Centro di Ricerche e Specializzazione per il Mezzogiorno, and the staff at the ISTAT office in Naples.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Sally Humphries and Rosemary Harris for their invaluable guidance, and to Nigel Colclough and Sandra Wallman for their comments and suggestions as to how I might convert my thesis into a book, Pat Caplan and Luciano Li Causi read extensive sections of the manuscript and made useful criticisms and comments many of which I have, unfortunately, been unable to address in the final text. Saundra Satterlee made helpful suggestions regarding the introduction. I am also grateful to Jackie Waldren fdr her contagious enthusiasm and to David Phelps for his patience and his interesting and erudite comments. My friends and colleagues at Goldsmiths College have been unfaltering in their support, and students have been a constant source of inspiration. I would mention, especially, Josep Llobera, Olivia Harris, Brian Morris, Stephen Nugent, Nici Nelson, Cris Shore, Sophie Day and Jean Besson. Jenny Gault, Marilyn Stead and Tabitha Springhall provided invaluable support. I am grateful to the Social Science Research Council, the University of London and Goldsmiths College for financing different stages of this work. Finally, my thanks go to Joaquin, Guillem and Ignasi for their considerable patience during the final stages of preparation of this text.

Having grown up in Argentina, a peripheral country which had placed its hopes for development on attracting migrants from the impoverished regions of Europe, I found my childhood environment dotted with landmarks which spoke of distant places. None seemed closer than Naples. References to Capri, to Vesuvius, to Napoli were an integral part of the urban landscape. Images of these places filtered through the neighbourhood, the music and the food of daily life. Naples was also the place from which so many people had come or from where their grandparents had set sail to build a new life in the then prosperous Americas.

Much later, I was impressed by M.T. Macciocch i's account of her impr essions of Naples (1973). I was particularly interested in her description of the women who for generations had worked from their homes, linked to the world ma rket yet never leaving their own neighbourhood. I had been thinking about the relationship between gender, family and work for some time, and was looking for a way to explore the relationships between these, and it was Macciocchi's account which made me settle for outwork as the focus of my doctoral research.

On reaching Italy in the mid-1970s I discovered that outwork and subcontracting were at the centre of debates involving many academics, politicians and trade unionists. Several research projects had attempted to quantify the extent of the phenomenon of subcontracting (Frey 1973) and more localized studies had described the mechanisms through which subcontracting operated (Brusco 1975; Botta et al., n.d.; Crespi et al. 1975; Cutrufeili 1975; De Marco and Talamo 1976). These works confirmed my initial hypothesis that subcontracting and outwork responded to contemporary conditions of both local and global markets as well as systems of production, rather than being survivals from earlier stages of development. They also indicated that family and gender were important dimensions here, in that they contributed to the creation of specific pockets of workers.

In Rome I was warmly welcomed and encouraged by members of the trade union to pursue my research on outwork. I accepted their invitation to visit Naples which included a tour of the old city, where indeed, just as Macciocchi had described, women sat at their sewing machines, occasionally looking out on to the narrow streets from their doorways and this convinced me that Naples should be my first port of call. My original intention had been to look into two different localities and so compare the organization and impact of subcontracting in two different contexts. However, as time passed, I found it difficult to leave Naples. Personal commitments persuaded me to stay for longer than I had intended, and to postpone indefinitely any plans to research another city.

Part of the original attraction of Naples was that, in spite of its unfamiliar setting, it was still quite familiar because the Neapolitan diaspora had shaped the environment in which I grew up in Latin America. A more practical consideration was that Naples appeared to be an accessible environment. In particular the outworkers, whom I had expected to be relatively invisible, were here almost literally on the streets. This seemed to be an initial advantage of considerable importance. I was not mistaken. I found Neapolitans to be extremely welcoming and friendly, willing to talk and put their views forward on almost any subject that might be broached. Furthermore, those outworkers who lived in the