But women held domain over the food life of the family, perhaps its most vital and expressive dimension. For families living at subsistence levels, food was one of the most basic and necessary aspects of daily life, and women's work in preparing it was essential and respected. The Italian community judged families by the quality of their food, making women key contributors to the status of their families. In feeding their families, women nurtured the physical and emotional life of the central institution in Italian life. In the process, they helped to sustain family bonds and cement the connections between food, family, and affection.

While boys were raised to rule the family, girls were raised to assume the role of housewife and mother. Terese DeFalco recalled, "being a girl, you weren't allowed to really play. ... Your job was to come home and help your mother. ... You didn't fight it because you knew you were helping your mother. And that's what you were brought up to do." The ideal wife was subservient to her husband and the ideal daughter, subservient to her father and brothers.

Male heads of household expected and sometimes required family life to revolve around their needs and comfort. Rose Tellerino recalls having to kneel before her father at bedtime to ask for his blessing. Her mother was "not allowed" to go to bed before her husband came home at night. Male dominance did not include the inactivity or pampering of women. Graham Taylor, head resident of Chicago Commons Settlement house observed Italian women on a visit to Italy in 1911:

They bear the heaviest burdens which the struggle for existence imposes upon life. Rising before dawn to feed the family and to leave the house and children in safety, the Italian peasant woman goes with the men to work in the distant field, in yard or garden. She drives the donkey, loads and unloads the heavy packs or carts. She very often is met on the hot highways staggering under the weight of the heavily laden carts, which she pulls and pushes, or bent double by water jars, wine casks, immense bundles of grain and grass, or saplings used in the vineyards. Returning home late in the evening from her full "man's job," this house mother prepares the evening meal, puts to bed the children she has born and ends her eighteen hour day by doing the family washing.

In Chicago, women continued to contribute to the physical functioning of the Italian family. Now, however, the productive activities of women took place primarily in the kitchen, where women toiled long hours doing piecework for the garment industry and back-breaking housework. Within the kitchen women did laundry by hand, hanging it to dry on lines strung across the room in cold weather.

They watched over children and mended the family clothing. And several times every day, they cooked and served family meals.

Meal preparation was a time consuming process that lasted throughout the day. Women rose at first light to prepare coffee for family members setting off to outside jobs. They shopped for fresh ingredients and processed them from their raw state. Stoves needed constant tending and water had to be carried in and out of many flats. Their duties were multiplied as families took in boarders to help with expenses or ease a relation's adjustment to the city. One of the key benefits for boarders was the effort of the family's women, who were expected to cook, clean, and do laundry for their lodgers.

In Italy, housework was primarily carried on outdoors in the gregarious and sociable company of other women. In the tenements of Chicago, women found themselves increasingly trapped within the four walls of their kitchens. Yet in America some old world practices, such as the baking of bread, continued as part of women's public lives. Ann Castaldo Iandolo remembers the Italian bakeries on every block, where women would bring their bread dough to bake in the ovens. Her mother Mary worked in the family business in addition to managing the household with her five daughters. Rising early to prepare the bread dough, she would then enlist the help of her children to carry it to the bakery on their way to school. At the bread ovens would be the women of the neighborhood, all shaping dough into loaves, each one marking her bread with a distinctive symbol fashioned from a thin strip of dough. Ann recalls her mother's mark was an "S," and that for she and her brothers and sisters it was the most coveted part of the loaf.

An Italian tradition of male protectiveness was often cited as an explanation for the seclusion and isolation of women within the Italian community. The community sanctioned male jealousy towards one's wife and daughters, regarding this behavior as a sign of a good husband and father. A Hull-House settlement worker, however, explained women's isolation as a product of the physical aspects of tenement life. "All of the Italian women are kept most rigorously secluded," she wrote. "They go nowhere and see no one but their own families. In fact, with the babies coming thick and fast, and the work of their own little homes, they have little time for outside interests. You would find many in this district who had never been beyond the corner nearest to their own homes."

Yet in the Sicilian colony on the Near North Side, Marie Leavitt found more than mere drudgery:

The position of women in the Sicilian homes in this district is hard to define. The general impression is that women are slaves to their husbands, but this is far from true except in the cases of very ignorant and primitive types. The head of the family takes the responsibility of protecting the women and girls very seriously, and for this reason women have little life outside their homes [36] ....Within the home, however, the wife directs the household and it is not unusual for her to take the lead in family affairs, such as the expenditure of money, plans for the children, or the choice of friends.

Considering the low incomes of most Italian households, managing the family economy was no small task. Women became expert bargainers and judges of quality and value. With storage a continual problem, Julia Lathrop, resident of Hull-House, found that thirty-three out of eighty-one immigrant housewives surveyed shopped daily, one shopped twice a day, and one made purchases for every meal. Women established credit at neighborhood stores and were responsible for the weekly payments towards "the book" that ensured their credit would continue. Since extra food in the house was inevitably consumed, they needed to be careful not to overbuy.

Italian families added meat to their diets as soon as they could afford to do so. Rose Tellerino recalls that small quantities of meat, as little as ten or fifteen cents worth, did not faze Italian butchers, and that neck bones, livers, hearts, and soup bones were free. "The butchers were Italian people and they knew the circumstances," she explains. Rose LoDolce Glowacki, however, recalled a different experience. Her family's Italian butcher was the only shopkeeper to demand cash payment. "Maybe that's why we ate so little meat," she suggests. Italian-owned butcher shops were initially relatively uncommon. Sophonisba Breckinridge found four to five green grocers for every butcher in Italian neighborhoods. A scarcity of meat in the home country and a consequent lack of familiarity with the business end of butchering meat may have accounted for the low numbers of Italian butchers. However, by 1927-28, Lisi Cipriani counted 172 meat markets in Chicago owned by Italians.

To extend the family food dollars, Italian women developed recipes where small amounts of meat could be stretched to make an entire meal. Ann Castaldo Iandolo's mother used a meaty soup bone to make the invariable Monday night soup, thick with vegetables and pasta. She also remembers how her mother would brown neck bones, then simmer them in tomato sauce, adding Italian greens and potatoes. "We were expert neck bone cleaners," she laughs.

One of the primary ways for Italian women to economize was to buy in quantity and can or preserve what they could. Sixty-nine percent of Italian women in Chicago baked their own bread as a way to expend labor instead of precious dollars. Homemade macaroni avoided expensive imports. Leonard Giuliano's grandmother waited till the price of pork was down in January to make Italian sausage, which she made in ten-gallon crocks and preserved with lard. She also put up a year's supply of tomatoes for tomato sauce and bought up hundred pound bags of fruit for canning in order to get the lowest price. Home rendered lard, made one hundred pounds at a time, avoided olive oil, which in 1925 cost an extravagant $2.90 a gallon. All of this was done in addition to caring for children, cooking meals, cleaning house, and in many cases doing paid piecework for the garment industry. It is small wonder, than, that Joseph Provenzano who grew up on the Near West Side, recalled that his mother had the greater say in family decisions, since it was she who stretched the family dollar to make ends meet.

Italian women initially shunned the canned and processed foods which were beginning to be sold after the turn of the century, believing that processing robbed foods of their "goodness." Joseph Provenzano's mother simply "didn't believe" in using canned foods. Women refused to buy meats that had already been slaughtered or processed and even within Chicago managed to raise rabbits and poultry for family consumption. According to Phyllis Williams, Italian women were such fussy shoppers that American storekeepers had been forced to put up signs reading, "Please do not pinch the peaches" to protect their goods. But by the 1920s, many families began to enjoy the convenience of canned tomatoes. For the Castaldo children, this was reason to rejoice, sparing them arduous hours in the kitchen helping their mother to can. "Our fingers would hurt from rubbing the tomatoes against the sieve," remembered Jim Castaldo. "We were so happy when our mother began to buy canned tomatoes." Yet in 1935, the Times reported many women continued to bake bread, make homemade wine, and produce sausages, dried peppers and mushrooms, pickled vegetables, and tomato paste at home.

The simple but fresh ingredients women purchased became not only the daily fare of the family but also the treats that made life seem a little less spartan for poorer families and created a feeling of warmth and abundance. Sfingi, bread dough fried and coated with sugar, was a common treat. All ten of the LoDolce children lined up to receive their share when Cecilia LoDolce cooked and her daughter Rose remembers, "I guess she used a lot of flour and sugar and made us think we were having something. ... We thought we had the best of everything." For Easter, the beds, dressers, and tables in the LoDolce house were covered with clean flour sacks on which rested a profusion of small cakes, shaped to resemble baskets and purses and nestling a hard boiled egg within their centers. It was enough to convince the children that they must be rich. Gifts of food were both practical and an expression of caring and affection and most children received candy, nuts or fruit in their Christmas stockings or for birthdays. These rare treats helped to make holidays special.

Children, especially daughters, remember the care and skill of their mother's efforts. Rose Clementi praised her mother's ability to roll out her pasta dough in a perfect circle and cut each piece to the exact same size. Louis Panico recalled his mother could tell the quality of grapes for wine by merely squeezing them in her hand. Florence Scala, who as an adult ran a successful restaurant, believes she never learned to cook a roast as well as her mother. As a teen, she recalls, going out to eat "was a disservice to your mom. If you ate out, you never said that something you had eaten out was better than what she had at home. You never said, 'Why can't you make that?' Not only because of your mother's feelings but because nothing was that great..." Cecilia LoDolce's pizza was a half inch of bread dough in which the youngest child (with the smallest thumb) made indentations for sardines, anchovies, fresh tomatoes, and grated cheese. Her daughter recalls, "The first time I saw a pizza--the kind they make now--I felt terrible. I was on a date and I didn't want to eat that pizza and I was so embarrassed because it was just oozing with grease and with melted cheese...." By comparison, her mother's pizza was "so nice and neat looking." There were few restaurants within Italian neighborhoods in the pre-war years and they were seldom patronized by families. "Strangers will never feed you better than you can eat at home," was the adage of Fred Gardaphe's grandmother.

Food was central to the emotional life of the family. It brought family members together, it reinforced the history of the family through meal patterns and holiday traditions, and it helped to delineate roles and power within the family. Holding primary responsibility for the provision of food, women were important contributors to the continuation of the family. As Vaneeta-marie D'Andrea has suggested, Italian society judged the family, not by the occupation of the father, but by its well-being, and here the work of women was crucial. She noted that La Serieta, the qualities that defined the ideal Italian woman, gave women a positive self-image and were parallel to those seen as desirable for Anglo-American men: "to be assertive, competitive and seriously committed to one's work." In their activities within the home, women displayed these qualities. Despite its strict boundaries, their role within the family was a deep and powerful one.