#mondine

Young women traveled many km by train, most of them from the three regions I mentioned earlier but also from Emilia Romagna. They arrived at the station near their final destination (usually Vercelli, Pavia, or Novara), where a cart waited to carry them to the farmhouse where they’d sleep for the duration of their work, usually on straw. You’d be provided food, but usually it wasn’t abundant nor good, and the pay was low for such demanding work.

Long hours, horrible work conditions, and then going back in the evenings to a disappointing dinner and an itchy bed, all of this far from home… and yet, poverty and the need for money meant that every year many women would show up to do this thankless job. It’s no wonder, then, that they went on strike often or joined workers’ protests asking for better work conditions.

While you can find some women becoming important in socialist and anarchist movements of the time, politics were a men’s world. While rich and bourgeoise women usually didn’t work or did clerical work, women from the lower classes had to work to help feed the family. In cities, some of them joined factories, but it was considered a male occupation so it was much more likely for women to work in service roles or at home. In rural areas women usually helped work the family’s fields, or worked as farm hands or helped herding animals and so on. Add in that women often lacked socialization spaces that were far from their family’s or community's eyes, and it’s easy to see why it was more difficult for a woman to become aware of things like the struggle for workers’ rights: they were “men stuff” and many women lacked the chance to meet others sharing their issues.

Working as a mondina meant being an independent contractor of sorts, spending time in a different world for a while, made of women with whom you shared that hard work, every hour of the day, suffering together in the hope that the money you earned could pay a debt or, like in my grandma’s case, the sewing school that would mean you’d never need to work in the fields again. It was the chance to form bonds and cultivate a kind of rebellious spirit that many women had to suppress outside this specific context.

There’s a lot of folk songs created by mondine that lament their hard work, the unfairness, how the landowner is exploiting their work, how their pay is low, and so on. Women would sing them while working, and they range from sardonic to angry to bitter. They show that they were aware of their situation, and after the creation of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892 mondine often were an essential part of strikes in their work area.

Some mondine had tried to organize strikes before, but they failed because they lacked organization. With the Socialist Party as an ally, they could organize more easily and often worked together with factory workers and farm hands to paralyze whole areas for days or weeks, often being very harsh with strikebreakers.

Often some mondine were arrested, in some strikes there were deaths, and overall they were acknowledged as extremely determined. While strikes and protests weren’t always successful, they managed to get better work conditions: pay raises, getting 1kg of rice for every day of work (which would then be sold back at home, or used for cooking), and even agreements to an 8-hours workday between 1906 and 1912 (different areas adopted it at different times).

Strikes became less frequent but never disappeared: WWI meant adding anti-war songs to their repertoire, and many of them had become more politically conscious during the previous decade. There was a big strike in 1927 when, due to a drop in rice’s price, it was decided to lower mondine’s salary by a staggering 30%. Mondine organized with the help of the (then underground) Italian Communist Party. Strikes began and police intervened, arresting about 100 people, culminating in 10000 mondine and farm hands protesting on 30 June 1927. They were successful and there was no more talk of salary cuts.

Similarly, in the spring of 1944 there were several strikes across almost all rice-producing areas, once again with the support of underground Resistance groups, and in many areas mondine got a better pay, more and better food, and the right to stop working during air raids. Many Socialist and Communist clandestine newspapers praised these strikes and showed great solidarity, recognizing in the mondine as comrades in the fight against oppression.

Mondine were famous for their close bond with each other and their stubborn determination. Being a mondina allowed many women to find a bit of independence ant a time when mainstream culture told them they could be daughters and mothers but not their own person, and showed them that obtaining change was possible.

Mondine were quite common well into the 50s and one may argue that they became even more common as the production of rice increased and spread. Nowadays their memory is kept alive by the cori delle mondine, choirs founded by ex-mondine to keep alive their songs (and usually branching out with other folk songs of their time). Some of them are quite popular and had tours abroad, and while many of the singers are quite old they eagerly take in new, young singers to pass on their memories and traditions. It's a very important part of our local history and I'm happy to know it'll be kept alive for a while longer.

Twelve, fifteen hours each day in knee-high water, bent to harvest and plant rice. This for 40 days, far from home, eating polenta and rice, sleeping on straw in shacks. When we work talking is forbidden, and if one talks we're reprehended and threatened. But at least we can sing. So when we want to communicate, maybe that one of us is ill or that there's going to be a strike, we start to sing.

(Bruna Salerni, an ex-mondina and syndicalist from Lombardy)