I wanted to share this touching tribute with all my Italian American family and friends. It is an excerpt from the chapter “Italian-American Women: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow”, which appears in the book Italians in America—A Celebration, edited by Gay Talese and published for the National Italian American Foundation. The book’s primary author is Cataldo Leon.:

QUOTE
The daughters these women [the first generation of Italian women] raised were Italian-American women of a new generation. Unlike their mothers, they spoke fluent English and had high-school educations. After they graduated they found office jobs, and when they married they had fewer children. But with motherhood their lives became more traditional. Often they would quit their jobs to devote themselves to their families. They were “tutta casa e chiesa”—all home and church, the traditional and idealized Italian (and Italian-American) wife and mother.

Isn’t it strange, then, that they did not raise their daughters to follow in their footsteps? They sent their girls to college instead of into the kitchen. Secretly, however, they packed their daughters’ spiritual suitcases with the family heirlooms handed down from generation to generation of Italian-American women: the strength and courage that helped them cross an ocean and live in a strange new world; the loyalty and devotion to the family that helped them weather life’s storms; and the fierce protective love for children that enabled them to sacrifice their own dreams to help their sons and daughters realize theirs.

Now these women are juggling the responsibilities of careers, marriage, and family. And they, too, have daughters—the fourth generation of Italian-American women—whose turn it is to carry the suitcase of family heirlooms into a new century. Sometimes that suitcase will seem very heavy, but there is nothing in it that most Italian-American women would choose to discard. And they, like their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, will find the strength to lift it.
END QUOTE

Now, tell me if you didn’t choke up!