Italians were the largest group of immigrants to the United States
at the turn of the twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands led
and participated in some of the period's most volatile labor
strikes. Jennifer Guglielmo brings to life the Italian
working-class women of New York and New Jersey who helped shape the
vibrant radical political culture that expanded into the emerging
industrial union movement. Tracing two generations of women who
worked in the needle and textile trades, she explores the ways
immigrant women and their American-born daughters drew on Italian
traditions of protest to form new urban female networks of everyday
resistance and political activism. She also shows how their
commitment to revolutionary and transnational social movements
diminished as they became white working-class Americans.