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In
Italy, the peasants live mainly in the open air. Their houses
had large rooms with stone floors which required no scrubbing.
The washing of the clothes was done at nearby streams.... There
were no stoves which required care. When the peasants immigrated
here, they naturally settled near their friends and relatives
who lived for the most part in already crowded areas. These sunshine-loving
people were forced to live more or less in dark rooms; small ill-smelling
tubs repalced their outdoor creeks; pulley lines their fresh green
grass; wooden floors which require scrubbing, their hard stone
floors. Housekeeping here required the use of tools of which they
had no knowledge. The writer has come into contact with many immigrant
women who had never seen a scrubbing brush. When to these new
experineces is added the strangeness of the new country, strange
langauge, and the evils which necessarily accompany congestion,
and poverty and the upbringing of American-born children, the
wonder is that they adjust at all.
Source:
Marie Concistre (1943) quoted in Francesto Corasco and Eugene
Bucchioni, The Italians (Clifton, N.J., 1974), 237
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