This history becomes visible only when we expand our understanding of early twentieth-century feminism to include diasporic, working-class activisms that were not produced in English. Such a lens is necessary for southern Italians, most of whom were mobile laborers who traveled to Argentina and Brazil with almost as much frequency as the United States. Most also returned to Italy and few naturalized as U.S. citizens. While women did not repatriate with as much frequency as men, their lives, families, identities, communities, and social movements reflected these patterns of labor migration. As a result, Italian immigrant women’s activism differed markedly from traditional models of “first wave” feminism, including many documented forms of labor feminism. For one, they generally did not seek inclusion or authority within the modern nation-state. Moreover, unlike Jewish working women, they did not immediately rely on the established trade-union movement or cross-class alliances with middle-class women to assert working women’s power, especially before the Great Depression. Rather, they turned most often to strategies of mutual aid, collective direct action, and to the multiethnic, radical subculture that took shape within their urban working-class communities. This political world was deeply transnational or, even more accurately, diasporic. It was rooted in the lived experiences of labor migration, political exile, and high rates of repatriation and thus reflected the intimate, enduring connections between homelands and communities abroad. It was also opposed to the oppressive power of the nation- state and refuted nationalism. Rather, it encouraged participants to imagine themselves as lavoratori nel mondo (workers of the world) and actively traversed national and other boundaries. Some of the women in this movement used the word femminismo to describe their work, but most preferred emancipazione, because it distinguished their activism from bourgeois feminisms while capturing the all- encompassing nature of the freedoms they desired.
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