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Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915-99. By Carol Lynn McKibben, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xii, 159 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-252-03058-3. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-252-07300-2.)
Although recent scholarship is correcting the stereotype of Italian women as passive and subordinate to their men, Carol Lynn McKibben's study of Sicilian "fisher people" in Monterey presents women exercising a remarkable degree of power (p. 2). McKibben claims that, like women in other fishing communities, these women were used to assuming control while husbands were out to sea for extended periods. Moreover, she argues that women were central to the process of ethnicization and community building that led these migrants from three fishing towns in western Sicily to identify themselves specifically as a community of "ethnic fishers" (ibid.).
Indeed,...