[Many] were small producers, craftsmen, artisans and agriculturists whose traditional statuses were most affected by modernization and industrialization which rippled through their rural society. By self-ascription, they were the honest and respectable working classes who were distinguished from those above them by earning their livelihoods from their own labors and from those below, the day laborers, by their traditional status derived from the possession of skills, or the ownership of land or other agricultural resources. Class terms carry modern meanings which are not appropriate for the society under consideration…. The proletarian overtones of working class should not be applied to these segments of the society. They were certainly not part of the capitalistic bourgeoisie, a class present only in small numbers in the larger cities of the South. Nor will middle class serve to identify these workers. (1978)

3. Jane and Peter Schneider’s research of the period confirms that “umbrellas, woolen suits, berets, shoes, stockings, and tobacco were predictable items in even the tightest family budget” (Schneider and Schneider 1996, 130).

4. While feminist scholars in Italy have made great strides over the last thirty years in recovering women’s texts and bringing to light the many forgotten contributions of Italian women, there has been no such comparable progress in Sicily. The near total absence of women in the pages of Sicily’s literary and social histories has not only hampered the process of recovery but also discouraged many scholars from undertaking such a daunting task. The recently published Dizionario biografico Siciliane (EMAROM: Siracusa, 2006) is the first comprehensive work to reconstruct the biographies of notable Sicilian females from the Middle Ages to the early nineteen hundreds.

5. Emigration radically affected the practice rather than the fundamental attitude toward women working outside the home, and much the same could be said of women and education. Regarding the former, jobs comparable to those available in Italy’s industrialized North where women worked in factories, telegraph offices, and small businesses, were nonexistent in Sicily’s provincial towns. If Sicilian women worked in greater numbers during intense periods of emigration, this work was primarily family related and not comparable to a broader presence in any kind of organized workforce. As a consequence, strong cultural biases against women working continued to hold sway in the more conservative elements of Sicilian society. As for the latter, Sicilian parents generally remained suspicious of overeducating their children, and especially their daughters whom they eventually hoped would marry and settle into domestic life. See Elvira Mancuso, Vecchia storia … inverosimile (An Unlikely, Old Story [1990]).

6. Margaret Chapman conducted a year of doctoral research in the remote village of Milocca in 1928. While Chapman completed the actual dissertation in 1935, the manuscript was lost over time and resurfaced only some thirty years later. Finally published in 1971, it is now widely regarded as an important early contribution to the field of cultural anthropology.