Harriet Luthrop Dunham and Carolina de Viti de Marco: Emancipation Through Lacemaking

Abstract

This chapter by Elena Laurenzi, starts with the reconstruction of the political and social project of two sisters-in-law: Harriet Lathrop Dunham (alias Etta de Viti de Marco) who we have already met, and Carolina de Viti de Marco (1863–1965). The partial portrait of the former, outlined in the second chapter of the book, is now completed with the analysis of her activism in the struggle for women’s emancipation. The author shows that her most outstanding and original contribution to feminism was in the field of political philanthropy, thanks to her innovative vision of social assistance, and her active participation in the Italian Female Industries. Together with her sister-in-law, Carolina de Viti de Marco, in 1901 she set up a pioneering enterprise, the Casamassella School of lacemaking, where the techniques of the old embroidery were taught. Their project intended to fight poverty and to foster the autonomy of the local women. Their enterprise grew during the first decade of the twentieth century and became so internationally known and renowned that their products twice received a gold medal in exhibitions (in 1906 and 1910). Carolina de Viti de Marco was also asked to run the female section of an Art School Applied to Industry, in a period in which women’s technical and professional training was very scarce in Italy, particularly in the south of the country. The hostility of the local aristocracy and the effect of the Great War put an end to their lacework production.

1 Introduction

This chapter is based almost exclusively on primary sources. It reconstructs the history of a political and social project created by two sisters-in-law belonging to the enlightened, progressive aristocracy and united by the philanthropic vision of early twentieth-century feminism: Harriet Lathrop Dunham and Carolina de Viti de Marco. In 1901, they set up a lacemaking school affiliated to the Italian Female Industries (IFI) in Casamassella, a small town in the Italian deep south. Its objective was to promote women’s economic emancipation and political citizenship through the practice and development of traditional crafts.

2 The Political Philanthropy of Etta de Viti de Marco

The Marchioness Etta de Viti de Marco, in addition to being known for her economic and political writings and her joint work with her husband Antonio de Viti de Marco (see Chapter 2), was also a noted activist in the early twentieth-century Italian women’s movement. She was one of the first signatories of the petition for women’s suffrage presented to the Italian Parliament in 1906; even though this was rejected, it provoked widespread debate in both the political institutions and in civil society. She was also among the founders of the National Council of Italian Women (CNDI), an important body affiliated to the International Council of Women (Greetings 2000; Gubin et al. 2005), which brought together the main national feminist associations (Taricone 1996; Buttafuoco 1997). In this context, she mainly devoted herself to philanthropic initiatives aimed at improving women’s economic, social and cultural conditions. Her most outstanding and original contribution to feminism was in the field of political philanthropy, which she helped expand both through her practical projects and her theoretical contributions. This link between feminism and pro-women economic initiatives was the common feature of a wide circle of American and English wives of Italian aristocrats, among whom we find such memorable figures as Romeyne Robert del Sorbello, Alice Hallgarten Franchetti (see Chapter 3) and Cora Slocomb di Brazzà (see Chapter 4). In fact, this group was largely responsible for shifting Catholic charity and female compassionate work models still prevailing in Italy towards the modern welfare state and benefits policies aimed at developing the potential of aid recipients (Fossati 2010). Etta de Viti de Marco was thus a key figure, not only because her initiatives transcended the private sphere to become institutional or semi-institutional (as in the office for coordinating aid projects in Rome, discussed below), but also because her keen intelligence led her to research and take an in-depth look at the theoretical and political foundations of the social security system.

In 1904, she set up the Information Office and Guide to Charity, which she saw as a sort of modern ‘help desk’, that is, as ‘the centre for provision of support and the fulcrum firstly for orientation and then for coordination of all the various forms of charity’ (Anonymous 1907a: 291).¹ The aims of the Office were clearly stated: for the benefactors, it was to inform and orient, suggesting the most suitable form of help, and if necessary, to offer mediation for a more effective and secure allocation of donations; for the beneficiaries, in addition to distributing the sums and goods collected, the Office was to direct the needy towards the appropriate institutions, implementing the processes necessary to satisfy appeals and requests for financial support, work, etc. (280). To complete the task, Etta saw to the compiling of a ‘Guida romana della beneficienza, assistenza, istruzione, previdenza, mutualità’ (Guide to charity, support, education, social security, and mutuality in Rome), which was published in the Bulletin of the National Council of Italian Women as ‘a first, firm step towards the rational coordination of the thousand charity works proliferating in our city’ (293). Once the early scepticism was overcome, her initiative found wholehearted support² and even international resonance, with the New York Times of July 24, 1910, devoting an article to it, highlighting the activity that today we call microcredit (Anonymous 1910a); it was also reported in the Oakland Tribune (Anonymous 1910b) and Le Figaro (Anonymous 1912).

She explained her ideas in the report she presented to the first congress of the National Council of Italian Women in Rome in 1908, where she was President of the Assistance and Prevention section (Frattini 2008). Speaking to an audience of feminist activists and interested male politicians, she had the opportunity to put forward her innovative vision of social assistance, distancing herself from both the Christian charity model and state paternalism (De Viti de Marco 1908). Her approach, in contrast, was derived from the Anglo-Saxon notion of self-help, while at the same time she stripped the ‘hard’ American version of its individualism, pursuit of the myth of success and faith in indefinite growth: individual freedom was an essential and non-negotiable part of her thinking. She was not prepared to sacrifice or downplay this principle, as was partially the case in some contemporary social assistance bodies (for example, those of the powerful Italian Women’s Union), always on the verge of becoming apparati for social discipline (Pieroni Bortolotti 1975; Buttafuoco 1986, 1988; Imprenti 2012). This faith in individual liberty and the uniqueness of every person inclined her towards forms of self-organisation of society that were rooted in individual effort and the cultivation of personal relationships, running counter to the depersonalisation of bureaucratic state intervention. In her presentation, Etta de Viti de Marco distinguished between the ‘real poor’ who were unable to earn enough to improve their position and those only temporarily in need. In the former case, she argued that private initiative should not be sacrificed to the state’s interventions, since individual endeavour, sustained by feeling, was for her ‘the specific condition ensuring that the functions of social assistance attributed to the state do not become fossilised in the formalities of an indifferent bureaucracy’ (1908: 630). She also contended that the social assistance system degenerated when it was not kept in the public eye, either because employers tended to reduce wages to recover what they had paid in taxes, or because ‘it is difficult to find a method of aiding the poor which in some way or to some extent does not have the effect of preserving their poverty’ (631). She was aware of the rising unemployment in the context of the rapid economic and industrial development of the times and insisted on the need for initiatives promoting autonomy and reemployment, particularly advocating more craft and trade schools providing ‘a general toolkit of manual skills and intellectual knowledge that […] would ease the transition from one trade to another’ (626). As far as minors and the elderly were concerned, she rejected refuges that imposed ‘painful limitations on liberty’ and recommended social prevention since, in contrast to assistance, it would ensure the maintenance of ‘individuality’ and ‘personal independence’ among the elderly (629).

3 The Italian Female Industries

Etta de Viti de Marco was an expert collector of lace and worked with the Italian Female Industries (IFI) in various areas: researching old techniques and patterns, training workers and commercialising the finished products. Her contribution was essential to the internationalisation of the enterprise since, thanks to her, the Italian experience spread to America and, as we will see in the next chapter, to South Africa. She worked particularly hard to promote IFI products in her native USA where she still enjoyed an extensive network of contacts. To this end, she collaborated actively with another important figure in the history of Italian political philanthropy, Carolina Amari (1866–1942). Daughter of the Sicilian historian and patriot Michele Amari, public education minister in Italy after unification, Carolina Amari was particularly skilled in technical design and lacework and she was also a bold organiser and entrepreneur. She also initiated the renovation and reorganisation of the Ginori Conti Professional School in Florence,³ and set up her own lacemaking school in the rural hamlet of Trespiano, in Tuscany (see Palomba 2009). In 1906, with the support of De Viti de Marco and Florence Colgate, daughter of the founder of the Colgate Company, she opened a lacemaking school in New York for young Italian women immigrants with the aim of helping them free themselves from the underpaid and humiliating jobs they were normally destined for. Etta worked with her in studying and selecting patterns and promoting and selling the products.

Etta de Viti de Marco’s commitment to philanthropic lacemaking projects had in fact both preceded and inspired the founding of the IFI. At the beginning of the century she had already been involved in recovering and promoting lacemaking in disadvantaged areas of Italy. Working with another American woman, Minnie Luck, who would also later become an IFI patroness, she studied and subsequently relaunched on the market the traditional lacework of Pescocostanzo, a small village in the Abruzzo, a remote and underdeveloped region in Southern central Italy. Her ‘inspiring work’ was praised in an article by Romualdo Pantini for Emporium, one of the most prominent magazines in the sector. Pantini (1905) highlighted the economic, social and cultural value of Etta de Viti de Marco’s endeavours to rescue once prestigious and profitable craft techniques from oblivion. He wrote:

The lace industry is traditional in Abruzzo. There was a time, also in that happy period, the 15^th century, when L’Aquila⁴ lace rivalled that of Venice and Genoa. Now, it is once again being honoured by all thanks to the inspiring work of the Marchioness Etta de Viti de Marco, and the support and encouragement of our queens has crowned their achievement with recognition. (Pantini 1905: 391)

The article went on to explain that the lacemaking tradition was currently being preserved by women working at home, left on their own ‘to maintain the work of both the hoe and the needle’ as a consequence of the emigration of their menfolk. In this context, techniques were often passed on orally: ‘Some women create lace without designs or guides, simply from memory, and for this reason this lace is called loose lace’ (392).

Etta de Viti de Marco and Minnie Luck recorded and fixed the patterns and techniques used, ensuring their authenticity and facilitating their transmission. But their work also tended to bring the symbolic and cultural value of embroidery to the fore and to enhance its value. Etta de Viti de Marco’s social skills and anthropological curiosity enabled her to obtain an in-depth understanding of the many facets and potentials of this ancient feminine art, especially through her personal contact with the lacemakers themselves, observing and studying their intimate relationship with their craft. Patini wrote:

One countrywoman told the Marchioness de Viti, in her rough dialect, that a piece of lace or weaving was useless without the affection woven into it, and whoever has the vaguest memory of Ruskin’s healthy ideas on the beauty of manual work cannot but be surprised by this amazing coincidence of thought at such a great distance. (400)

In an article published in the Giornale d’Italia, Etta de Viti de Marco herself spoke of her work, describing the poor peasant houses she visited to learn techniques and organise production. In the following passage she shows her keen understanding of the complexity of lacemaking in which the craftswomen invested a quality of care that surpassed mere mechanical execution, bringing together dreams, imagination, religious feeling and reverence for their forebears.

Inside these houses where the cold of the long winter lends life the feeling of a sort of confinement, which it does not lose even in the short summer, we still find industrious, humble women who, rarely going out, live in a world apart, composed entirely of their work and its technical problems. They study these to try out new stitches, they work out how to retrace, from scraps of paper stored in some old chest, designs drawn by hands many years dead, where often an idea is scarcely signalled, and to fathom it, they need a deep affinity with the artistic feeling with which the figures were first created. For these women, wrapped in a medieval silence, lacemaking provides almost the sole outlet for their imagination and religious feeling. How many dreams are recorded in these pieces of embroidery! Here they study truth and beauty, and in their work for the church, they fashion the adored symbols with devoted hearts, they study them, they enter into them, bringing them to life with a mystical passion. (de Viti de Marco, cited in Patini 1905: 401)

4 Carolina de Viti de Marco: Freedom Gained

The philanthropic work of Etta de Viti de Marco was steadfastly supported by her sister-in-law Carolina. Carolina de Viti de Marco was the youngest of the four children of Raffaele de Viti de Marco and Lucia Troysi. Both her parents belonged to important families of the haute bourgeoisie and southern aristocracy. Raffaele de Viti de Marco (1832–1885) was the son of the unhappy marriage of Carolina Carluccio and Antonio de Viti Anguissola; his mother was a religious, straitlaced member of a rich landowning family, while his father was a man of revolutionary spirit and enlightened, liberal ideas, active among the Freemasons and Carbonari, and always in flight from persecution by the Bourbon monarchs, who governed the South before Italy was unified under the House of Savoy. From his earliest childhood, Raffaele’s father had entrusted him to the care of his lover the Marchioness Costanza Palmieri de Marco di Lecce, who legally adopted him when he came of age, naming him heir to her titles and fortune. As part of this inheritance, Raffaele acquired the family seat in Casamassella, a small town near the sea at Otranto, where he set up a house after his marriage in 1854. His wife, Lucia Troysi (1832–1875), came from a family of prominent jurists. Her father, also named Antonio, had held important political posts, while her mother, Caroline Sutton of Molesey, was English, the daughter of an admiral. Lucia was of delicate health and died prematurely at the age of 43; yet, despite her physical fragility, she had a strong, energetic personality which left a deep mark on the family. A lover of books, reserved and not at all inclined towards the social world of the elite, she was, instead, ‘open to all that was new and innately sensitive towards social issues’, and gifted with a ‘lively sensitivity towards the needs of her time and a deep interest in the sufferings of the people’ (Chirilli 2010: 58). She was also a republican, an admirer of Mazzini and Garibaldi. She took on herself the education of her children, choosing their readings and bringing them up according to her own ideals. The letters written to her from school by the adolescent Antonio de Viti de Marco show to what extent she had influenced the political development of the future economist and parliamentary deputy. He shared every book he read with her, vented his innate rebelliousness against privilege and authority, commented vividly on the political fortunes and misfortunes of the day, and discussed with her the principles that later informed his mature work.

Caroline, for her part, received the typical education reserved for the daughters of well-off families (Soldani 1989: xi). Unlike their brothers, neither she nor her elder sister Costanza attended high school or university but were taught by private tutors. Their education was just as rigorous as that of their male counterparts. Apart from music and French, core subjects in the education of upper-class girls, Lucia wished her daughters to learn English, her mother tongue, and ensured that their cultural education was broad and rich. During the long periods that her illness forced her to spend away from home, she sent them musical scores and books of literature, poetry and history (Chirilli 2016). The sisters took piano lessons and classes in calligraphy and read the classics in their original languages. After their mother’s death, they were entrusted to the care of the Countess Amalia Gubiani Gallo, a noblewoman director of a Music School for young women.

Carolina de Viti de Marco had a lively, curious mind and was a voracious reader throughout her life. Among the documents preserved in her archive⁵ there are diaries and notebooks where she took notes on her reading and copied verses, aphorisms and maxims, transcribing long passages and sharing them with her family and friends, with whom she kept up an intense correspondence. Among her letters, also kept in the family archive, there are particularly interesting exchanges with Adele Rossi, wife of the philosopher Benedetto Croce,⁶ with whom Carolina shared a deep and lasting friendship built around books and intimate confessions. Another important correspondence was with her nephew Girolamo Comi, a poet and thinker, promoter of ambitious cultural enterprises such as the journal L’Albero and a publishing house, which marked the intellectual life of his region in the first half of the twentieth century, opening it up to a wider international landscape (Giannone et al. 2019). The poet found a willing listener in his ‘Aunt Pitty’ (the family nickname for Carolina), fascinated by history and full of curiosity for the cultural and literary scene. He regularly sent her news of his poetic and publishing activities and faithfully carried out the research in libraries and archives that she requested to satisfy her insatiable thirst for knowledge. Her friend Emilia Chirilli, in her memoirs, evokes the ‘research into family history that Carolina (Pitty) pursued, requesting information from the relevant authorities and effective offices of cousins and friends’, and describes her ‘breathless wait for replies’ even ‘in her extremely lucid old age’ (Chirilli 2010: 11). Carolina also wrote poetry, and with her solid background in the classics, her verses were neither ingenuous nor naive. Her versatile, pragmatic temperament also expressed itself in less intellectual pursuits; for example, she loved growing flowers, planning new plantings, importing rare species and experimenting with her plants. Emilia Chirilli called her ‘a Georgic soul. She would plant trees everywhere […]. She used to say that someone who had planted at least one tree has not lived in vain’ (Chirilli 2016:16). Her influence is still evident in the estates that belonged to her where she made many structural reforms, sinking wells, laying paths to stop the land from slipping into the sea, and planting olive and fruit trees in groves laid out with an aesthetic sense that prefigured modern-day landscape design (see Chapter 6).

Although she had shown this vivacious and curious personality from childhood, not conforming to the prevailing nineteenth-century Italian model of feminine docility (De Giorgio 1988), after her mother’s early death, Carolina de Viti de Marco also experienced the exactions of women’s servitude, subjecting herself to it through her sense of responsibility but without conviction and with private bitterness. She remembered, for example, her services to her brothers when they were on holiday in Casamassella, when she was ‘completely monopolised by their occupations and needs’ (Carolina de Viti de Marco, Annales); she took care of her ageing father until he died and immediately after, cared for her elder sister, a hypochondriac; and with even greater affliction, she remembered consenting, against her wishes, to marry. The husband chosen for her by her brother Antonio, in his role as paterfamilias, was Francesco Starace, a doctor from a powerful shipowning family that exported low-grade olive oil to the USA, and who was politically active in the same party as the de Viti de Marco family. It was not a happy marriage and, as we learn from Caroline’s diaries, her husband’s bad temper sometimes led to violence. Carolina finally freed herself from this subjection to the patriarchal order at the age of sixty, when she secured a divorce, took back her own surname and returned to the castle of Casamassella with her daughter Giulia, administering her property and that of her brother Antonio with foresight and skill for the rest of her long life. She died, still in full command of her faculties, at the age of one hundred and two.

Carolina de Viti de Marco was a shy and independent person, and although she was much less in the public eye than her brother and sister-in-law, she nonetheless shared their ideals. While, unlike Etta de Viti de Marco, she was not active in the women’s movement, her commitment to feminism was implicit in her firm belief in women’s values and in a style of female freedom that was private but contagious, which guided her life, both in her personal choices and in the extraordinary network of female relationships that she wove across the dividing lines of class and age. Her house was a magnet for women of diverse social origins and ages, all drawn by her personality and example, and often even taken in by her in times of difficulty. In her diary she writes that one of her favourite laceworkers, five months after her marriage, ‘seeing that things were not going well, came to live with us […] and stayed for two years’ (Carolina de Viti de Marco, Annales). Other co-workers from the school that she had set up (which we discuss below) became faithful companions, sharing their lives with her, accompanying her on her travels and participating in her research and social life. With her daughter Giulia, she created an extended family that included local peasant women, distant relations who had been orphaned at an early age, and young townswomen searching for an alternative model. Among these was the future Latinist Emilia Chirilli who, fascinated by Carolina’s broad culture, spent her adolescence and much of her life in the palace at Casamassella, recording her experiences in her Memoirs and her biography of the young Antonio de Viti de Marco (Chirilli 2010, 2016).

At the age of eighty, Carolina wrote for her daughters and her niece what she called her Annales or memories of her personal and family life,⁷ which clearly represent her non-ideological but embodied feminism. In these pages, she lays down her own story and the traces of her personality, shedding light on the events that led to the key decisions of her life and portraying her most independent and authoritative forebears in a powerful female genealogy. The dedication to her daughters Lucia and Giulia and her niece Costanza clearly illustrates her purpose of transmitting to her heirs the meaning and strength of the female presence in the history of the family and in history in general.

Carolina’s sensitivity to social issues and her strong inclination towards solidarity were drawn from the De Viti de Marco family culture. Her mother Lucia had passed on to her the republican values of equality, liberty and fraternity, and her father Raffaele, also republican and anti-Bourbon, would often offer his services as a lawyer free of charge. Emilia Chirilli recalls that in the family ‘there was the fixed principle [of] reaching out to people, helping them to find themselves’ to cultivate their own potential (Chirilli 2016: 23–24).

This family tradition of commitment to others did not take the form of aristocratic beneficence but was inspired by a vision of social development and assistance as the promotion of the autonomy and betterment of less advantaged people. This ideal of autonomy also informed their political and entrepreneurial advocacy of the South of Italy. During his time in Parliament, Antonio de Viti de Marco contested the social assistance policies put in place for the underdeveloped areas of the South, arguing instead for financial and fiscal measures that would spur economic development. In addition to being a politician and financial theorist, Antonio de Viti de Marco was also an enlightened entrepreneur, ‘one of those aristocrats who work’, in the words of Cora Slocomb di Brazzà (Pucci 2016). On his estates, he planted silk, tobacco and vines, new crops challenging both the latifundists’ cereal monoculture and the state’s protectionism, which favoured large-scale landed property. On one domain, ‘Li Veli’ at Cellino San Marco near Brindisi (Apulia, Italy), he created a cutting-edge winery where he experimented with innovative methods, immunising his vines from phylloxera by grafting them with American implants, introducing modern agricultural machinery and inventing new ways of cooling the must. He reinvested the entirety of this flagship winery’s profits in modernisation, at the same time putting into practice the theories reflected in many of his political speeches: that the solution to the problems of the South was not to be found in state largesse but lay in its own hands.⁸ This same outlook inspired Carolina and Etta de Viti de Marco’s pioneering enterprise.

5 The Casamassella School: A Groundbreaking Project

In 1901, Etta and Carolina de Viti de Marco opened a lacemaking school where the ‘old embroidery’ techniques were taught. Located in the palace at Casamassella, the school had its origins in Carolina’s volunteer work among the young women of the village, helping them to weave fabrics and lace for their dowries. On one visit to her sister-in-law, Etta was so shocked by the poverty of the local families that she decided to turn the charity asked of her (as a rich American who struck people’s imagination) into a project aimed at fostering the economic and social autonomy of the local population, particularly the women. This initiative represented a decisive turn towards the ‘industrial’ development of lacemaking which, from being a wholly domestic and traditional activity, and tending to be unpaid and repetitive, became instead a source of profits, artistic experimentation and social transformation.

In Apulia at that time, needlework for commercial purposes was practised widely and intensively in foundations for poor young women (run mainly by nuns) and in the private houses of the agricultural population. As a result of the development of the market for needle lace, there was also an increase in activity in woven and bobbin lace, which was traditionally destined for family clothing and dowries, through commissions and the peasant women contributed to the family economy with the meagre earnings from their craft. However, as Lena Mauro Airoldi, another member of the IFI, wrote in 1906, needlework was not ‘industrially organised’. The commercial rationalisation and planning of production were lacking, and the workers had no contractual rights:

the girls, coming straight from school, individually take on private orders, for which the remuneration is relatively poor. There is no cooperative association, no hourly wage, to protect their class interests and to aid the intelligent, industrious and skilful worker. (Airoldi, cited in AA.VV. 1906: 228)

Etta and Carolina de Viti de Marco’s project aimed to counter the isolation and vulnerability of the women workers by training them, organising production and promoting the products. Thanks to the IFI’s powerful contacts, the Casamassella School grew exponentially throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Figures for that year show 500 students training there: a remarkable number bearing in mind the school’s remoteness (AA.VV. 1906: 232). In the same period, it became internationally known and its products were shown all over Europe, and it was awarded the gold medal at the Universal Exhibitions of Milan in 1906 and Brussels in 1910. In the IFI catalogue featuring photographs of the pieces chosen for the Milan Exhibition (all destroyed by a catastrophic fire⁹), published in 1908, there was a whole section devoted to the Casamassella School. The presentation is anonymous but in all likelihood it was the work of Etta and Carolina de Viti de Marco. When outlining the organisation of the school and listing its features and qualities, they stress the cross-class nature of the students. They write:

The School does not make any distinctions in social class or provenance. [...] We take on students from families of landowners, factory workers, agricultural workers, and also a fourth class of people, those who can look back on a happier past but have fallen victim to the crisis of unemployment and want, and often suffer from hunger without complaining. [...] The School pays the entire price of the work completed, providing thread, fabric and all the necessary raw materials. All its expenses are borne by the founders. (AA.VV. 1906: 237)

The school had its legal head office in the Orsini Palace in Rome, Etta and Antonio’s home. Carolina spent long periods there, leaving her family (and thus irritating her husband) in order to study and plan new projects with Etta. Together, they carried out research in museums and private collections, acquiring samples from antique dealers and exchanging lacecraft techniques with other experts and collectors. They created their own sampler, printed vouchers in the name of the school, and invented a motto, ‘singing and loving’, which became their letterhead. These trips also enabled Carolina to meet and develop friendships and collaborations with some of the most brilliant feminist activists and philanthropists of the time, all regular visitors to the de Viti household. Among these were Elisa Ricci (1858–1945), a highly cultured collector of lacework and the author of studies that were crucial to cataloguing and publicising it (Ricci 1911; Bellomo 2002); the aforementioned Carolina Amari (1866–1942), founder of the previously mentioned Trespiano and New York Schools (Lovett 1906; Palomba 2009); Lina Bianconcini Cavazza (1861–1942), president of Aemilia Ars Crafts and Lace in Bologna, a pioneering enterprise due to the quality and experimental nature of its products (Bernardini et al. 2001); and Maria Ponti Pasolini (1856–1938), a prominent intellectual who wrote for the Giornale degli Economisti, author of historical study catalogues designed specifically for women, and founder of the di Coccolia School near Ravenna (Baruzzi 1996; Casalena 2003; Gori 2003).

6 A Modern Approach to Women’s Professional Training

In the wake of the success of the Casamassella School, Carolina de Viti de Marco was also asked to run the feminine section of the Art School Applied to Industry at Maglie, Apulia, Southern Italy (Alessandri 1974). This school for craft workers was founded in 1881 by an art teacher, Egidio Lanoce (Caroli 2013). In his own way, Lanoce was also a pioneer: the Apulia region was completely lacking in initiatives of this type as there were only elementary schools and elite secondary schools there, but no professional schools. Accordingly, for a long time, the Maglie school was the only such training institute in the area (Panarese 1974, 1995). Lanoce’s academy was also avant-garde when compared to government educational policies following the unification of Italy. The new Italian state had set out to organise the national education system of compulsory and secondary schooling; professional training, however, was long regarded as apprenticeship or general preparation for work, and seen as being completely alien to true education, and thus left in the hands of beneficent bodies who provided it in the form of charity. It was only with the Giolitti government that a change came about¹⁰: from 1907 to 1908, and from 1912 to 1913, the entire commercial and industrial branch of education was reformed and rationalised: financial stability was brought to a range of schools with the assurance of government funding, and the instruction offered was standardised wherever possible. The reform embraced industrial schools, academies of applied arts and commercial and professional institutes for women. Thus, education in craft skills was reoriented towards the needs of industry.

At the Maglie school, aspiring craft workers were provided with the tools they needed to carry out their work autonomously, creatively and with the necessary technical mastery. They took classes in geometry, geometrical design, ornamental design, architectural design, projection and perspective, art and woodcarving. The first courses were in the crafts that the area was known for: carpentry, stonemasonry and wrought ironwork. Later, courses were set up for bricklayers, jewellery makers, copper workers, painters and decorators and sculptors (Caroli 2013). Until 1905, however, no courses were designed for women.

The launch of the lacemaking course bears witness to the increasing recognition of the technical and educational skills and groundbreaking vision of Etta and Carolina de Viti de Marco. To fully understand the innovative impact of their project, we should recall that in Italy at that time, women’s technical and professional training was even scarcer than men’s. An article by Clelia Fano (1907) reported on the 1903–1904 statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Trade, listing only 23 state-funded women’s schools, while 75 were financed by other bodies or directly set up by the religious Congregations of Charity and Works, organisations over which the government had no control. Fano (1907) noted that many provinces of Italy completely lacked professional training schools for young women, and highlighted the enormous gender gap in government investment, as in contrast there were already 249 schools for young males funded by the Ministry. In addition, the few women’s institutes were concentrated in the large industrial cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa, while there were virtually none in the rest of the country, as Ernestina Dal Co Viganò, director of the Normal School and an activist on the Italian National Women’s Council, also protested in a memo to the minister:

Female education and training have been severely neglected up to now: apart from the Normal Schools,¹¹ which have a highly specialised professional focus, apart from a few royal colleges where instruction is given only for the daughters of rich and aristocratic families, and in recent years, a few technical schools, the government does not provide any other type of school for women; however, the needs of our society open up a wide field of activity for women. (cited in Franchini and Puzzuoli 2005: 510)

Apart from the country’s industrial underdevelopment, this negligence also stemmed from a reactionary, misogynist mentality. It was taken for granted that women’s work did not require professional development, as the most they needed was ‘an early and precise training for the hands, to learn gestures that will later be repeated ad infinitum’ (Soldani 1989: xi).

In Apulia, and throughout the South of Italy, the situation was even worse. Lena Mauro Airoldi, in her essay from the IFI catalogue cited above, noted that in many southern provinces the government had not even succeeded in setting up elementary schools for girls. And in fact, after the unification of Italy in 1861, the establishment of girls’ elementary education met marked hostility in the regions, ‘since illiteracy was seen as a shield protecting women from social vices, and education as a distraction from the main task they were assigned in the family: taking care of the domestic economy’ (quoted in AA.VV. 1906: 226). Airoldi, however, contested the prevailing opinion that blamed the educational deficiencies of the South of Italy on the lasting backwardness of women’s mentalities, pointing out that once established, the girls’ schools and normal schools (which trained teachers for elementary education) were full of female pupils.

The female section of the Maglie industrial school, created by Carolina de Viti de Marco, followed the model of professionalism and modernity laid down by its founder, Lanoce. The course lasted five years and, apart from practising their craft in the workshops, students also took classes in geometrical and ornamental design. The initiative enjoyed immediate success and rapid growth, taking on 28 students in its trial year and enrolling an average of 40 per year from 1907 to 1914 (Panarese 1995: 211). Archive documents bear witness to its recognition by local government and the Ministry, with the female section picked out as a flagship project. A letter from director Egidio Lanoce to the Provincial Council requesting continuation of the school’s funding, for example, points to its dynamism and productivity, highlighting Carolina de Viti de Marco’s course as the prime example¹²; and in 1909, a ministerial report to the President also mentions the excellent results of the female section, with the Minister recognising its value. Numbers of female enrolments increased and began to rival those of males: by 1912–1913 there were 44 women and 57 men. A letter from the sub-prefect dated 6th March 1910 informs the prefect that ‘the lacework manufactured in the school features in the permanent exhibition of the Women’s Crafts Cooperative in Rome and in other permanent exhibitions in Paris and London’.¹³ These brilliant results were not matched, however, by proper facilities. As extraordinary ministerial commissioner Raffaele Garzia noted on 28 January, 1907, due to constant growth in enrolments and the competing needs of the wrought-iron workshop, the women’s section was housed in ‘rather poor and inappropriate’ areas: a basement, an entrance and a small room. It was the female students themselves who organised a festival to raise the sums needed to restructure the premises.

Despite all this and although the adventure had aroused such widespread enthusiasm, the end of the story was not a happy one. This was due to a series of factors in which public, private, political, economic and social history were intertwined. Carolina de Viti de Marco was unpopular with the Maglie aristocracy, which opposed both her brother Antonio, a member of the Radical Party, and her husband Francesco Paolo Starace, elector for the party in the area. Apart from these political reasons, the women of the local ruling-class families were also hostile to the school because its courses and competition were eroding a wide market system based on the ignorance and over-exploitation of women workers, and in which it was the women of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie who managed orders, distributed raw materials, set prices and wages and controlled the commercial outlets.

It was these women, then, who launched a campaign of defamation against the director of the lacemaking course, first reporting her to the government for tax evasion and then claiming that she was enriching herself from the labour of the school’s craftswomen. Letters from Caroline to Etta de Viti de Marco in March–April 1911 described this ‘obstinate, treacherous war’ against her, the climate of slander, and even real intimidation.¹⁴ The issue spread to the national political stage when word of the supposed regime of over-exploitation suffered by the Maglie workers reached the socialist deputy Anna Kuliscioff, partner of politician Filippo Turati. Advised by the economist Maffeo Pantaleoni, Kuliscioff declared herself willing to head an enquiry to shed light on the issue. To date there is no evidence, however, that the enquiry ever took place, and nothing is known about subsequent events. Finally, within a few years the Great War brought an abrupt end to the lacework market. Despite this, Etta and Carolina de Viti de Marco’s work would find an unforeseen sequel in that of their daughters, as we shall see in the next chapter.