Documents the rich history of Italian American working women in Connecticut, including the crucial role they played in union organizing. Often treated as background figures throughout their history, Italian women of the lower and working classes have always struggled and toiled alongside men, and this did not change following emigration to America. Through numerous oral history narratives, Farms, Factories, and Families documents the rich history of Italian American working women in Connecticut. As farming women, they could keep up with any man. As entrepreneurs, they started successful businesses. They joined men on production lines in Connecticut’s factories and sweatshops, and through the strength of the neighborhood networks they created, they played a crucial role in union organizing. Empowered as foreladies, union officials, and shop stewards, they saved money for future generations of Italian American women to attend college and achieve dreams they themselves could never realize. The book opens with the voices of elderly Italian American women, who reconstruct daily life in Italy’s southern regions at the turn of the twentieth century. Raised to be caretakers and nurturers of families, these women lived by the culturally claustrophobic dictates of a patriarchal society that offered them few choices. The storytellers of Farms, Factories, and Families reveal the trajectories of immigrant women who arrived in Connecticut with more than dowries in their steam trunks: the ability to face adversity with quiet inner strength, the stamina to work tirelessly from dawn to dusk, the skill to manage the family economy, and adherence to moral principles rooted in the southern Italian code of behavior. Second- and third-generation Italian American women who attended college and achieved professional careers on the wings of their Italian-born mothers and grandmothers have not forgotten their legacy, and though Italian American immigrant women lived by a script they did not write, Farms, Factories, and Families gives them the opportunity to tell their own stories, in their own words. “Anthony Riccio’s collection of women’s oral histories is an extremely valuable addition to the growing literature regarding Italian American women’s lives. The detail in which these women speak about their work lives as charcoal burners, clay kneaders, cheese makers, union organizers—one had her ribs broken—adds a much needed dimension to an understanding of Italian American women. This volume is filled with thoughtful reflections ranging from Mussolini to issues of social justice. Riccio has unleashed from these women dramatic and sometimes harrowing stories never before heard, or perhaps even imagined.” — Carol Bonomo Albright, Executive Editor of Italian Americana and coeditor of American Woman, Italian Style: Italian-Americana’s Best Writings on Women “What comes more naturally to the elderly but to reminisce? Riccio helps us eavesdrop on the first-person oral narratives of some of our earliest immigrants. We are grateful to him.” — Luisa Del Giudice, editor of Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans “I have long awaited a book like this: a history of Italian American women, in which they themselves are the narrators of their own lives. We hear from women without formal education; women who were workers, migrants, and mothers; women whose stories were often not valued enough to enter into the historical record, much less the archives. This beautifully conceived history is both a testament and a tribute to all working-class and im/migrant families and communities.” — Jennifer Guglielmo, author of Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945

During the early part of the 20th century farming in America was transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. This book explores the modernization of the 1920s, which saw farmers adopt not just new technology, but also the financial cultural & ideological apparatus of industrialism.

Examine the shift of primary industries in the US in the mid-1800s. The early settlers were farmers but when factories and different industries mushroomed, the people’s lives changed dramatically. You will read about the big change in this book for fifth graders. Go ahead and grab a copy today.

Dramatizing the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture, this text starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and goes on to examine the experience of ethnic groups that have provided labour for California's agricultural industry.

Putting the Barn Before the House features the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. As she did in her previous book, Bonds of Community, for an earlier period in history, Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor and highlights the strategies of mutuality that women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. Indeed, the culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for their labor. Osterud recounts this story through the words of the women and men who lived it and carefully explores their views about gender, labor, and power, which offered an alternative to the ideas that prevailed in American society. Most women saw "putting the barn before the house"—investing capital and labor in productive operations rather than spending money on consumer goods or devoting time to mere housework—as a necessary and rational course for families who were determined to make a living on the land and, if possible, to pass on viable farms to the next generation. Some women preferred working outdoors to what seemed to them the thankless tasks of urban housewives, while others worked off the farm to support the family. Husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, debated what was best and negotiated over how to allocate their limited labor and capital and plan for an uncertain future. Osterud tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age with care and skill.

Children need to learn about the past in order to better appreciate the present. In this social studies book, your fifth grade will learn to identify and even understand the role of industry and factories in the economic development of the Northeast. Let your child trace similarities and differences between then and now. Begin with this book today.