A tour on the history of women in Venice is quite a challenge. There are so many interesting figures in the past history of Venice and so different. Courtesans and poetesses, painters and journalists, scholars and adventurers, even a queen. You will also find extensive guidebooks on the subject and while reading you will move from one corner of Venice to the other, hardly leaving some districts uncovered.
Venice and its industrial revolution
But how about working women? Venice is a city which fully experienced the industrial revolution and women played a major role. It all began with important changes in infrastructures in the middle of the 1800s. The creation of the train station and the railway bridge, the new port at San Basilio by the Zattere and the connection between these two brand new hubs attracted investments.
In the peripheral areas of Venice —on the island of Giudecca, in the area of Santa Marta, in Cannaregio, Castello and Murano— new factories, also technically advanced, started producing flour, working cotton, making cigarettes and cigars, matches, printing textiles, making seed glass beads, watches and alarm clocks.
Cotton Factory in Venice, now seat of IUAV, 1883
Women working in Venetian factories
With the exception of the Stucky Mill, where mainly men worked, the other factories instead employed thousands of women, even in their early teens. Some say because women had a specific “touch”. Maybe. But they also cost less: their salary was sometimes half the salary of a male worker.
Can you imagine then in Venice, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the early morning thousands and thousands of women reaching their place at work, dragging their children along…? And was it unusual for women to work as employees in a factory? How did it feel to leave a domestic life?
Historical evidence of working women in Venice in the past centuries
Historically in Venice women had not always been constrained in a domestic setting. In her beautiful research Working Women of Early Modern Venice (2001) Monica Chojnacka well explains that in the 16th century women in Venice would be socially involved. You can still today see, for instance, the different institutions where women of different social classes and status were offered a source of employment. In Cannaregio, you can see the Institute of the Penitenti, then in Giudecca that of the Zitelle, in Dorsoduro you can pass by the Institute of Santa Maria del Soccorso. Not to mention the Scuola Grande dei Carmini.
Santa Maria del Soccorso, founded by Veronica Franco in 1577, Venice
However, in the late 1800s when a tobacco factory, a cotton factory and the Junghans watch factory got larger and the factories were rebuilt in that gothic, northern European style, many women chose to work in those factories and it must have felt different from anything there was before.
The tobacco factory and the “tabacchine” tobacco female workers
The tobacco factory was huge. Around 50K square meters. A gate with two brick pillars and large balls in stone on top. The director of the factory living in a beautiful palace next door. Nearly 850 working women, locked in, strictly controlled. Large rooms with no fresh air as there was a risk the tobacco leaves would get too dry. Stuffy heat, stagnant fumes easily making women faint. Women breathing the finest tobacco powder floating in the humid air and nicotine passing to their kids when they fed them.
In the factory there was also an aerial passage, crossing a canal. No surprise it was called their “bridge of sighs”!
The “Bridge of Sighs” in the Tobacco Factory, Venice
Sitting next to each other, though, turned them into a strong unionized community. These women managed to get a place for their children to stay while they were working, a place where they could nurse them. They arranged the first strike already in 1884, thus showing courage, solidarity to each other. They developed a political awareness while their economic independence was growing.
A new sensuality: shawls and lipstick
After WW1, working women at the tobacco factory started dressing in a way that scandalized the Venetian society. Short skirts, shoes with high heels, silk stockings, red lipstick and the ever present black shawls with long fringes. If this attire showed their femininity, immediately on the other side rumors started accusing them of being frivolous, if not morally weak.
Guido Cadorin, The tobacconists, oil on canvas, 1920, Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome
In the following vignette, you see a strike arranged by the tobacco working women in Venice. The author, Achille Beltrame, portrayed women wrestling, pulling the hair and fighting. In fact, this is just a sign of the artist’s typically male phantasy. Women would instead scream, shout, whistle and —of course what else in Venice?— push you into the canal.
Achille Beltrame, The strike of the tobacco working women, a fight between the ones striking and the ones who did not strike, Illustration for La Domenica del Corriere, 31 January 1904.
The bead stringers “impiraresse”
Women were not just working in factories. You would see hundreds of impiraresse working along the “fondamente” (sidewalks) or in the “calle” (streets) of Venice, or by some “campo” (squares). The impiraresse were stringing the so-called “conterie”, the fine, colorful seed beads produced in Murano. The bundles of beads they prepared were then exported and used in different ways all over the world. With these beads, you could embroider or create objects like flowers, add a fancy decoration to a dress, for instance.
Bead stringers in Fondamenta Quintavalle, near San Pietro di Castello, Venice, Filippi Archive, IRE
The impiraresse occupied public space and turned several districts of Venice, especially Cannaregio and Castello, into “their space”. Just behind the ancient Jewish ghettos, you can find the street called “calle delle conterie” or the bridge called “ponte delle conterie”.
In several photos and paintings portraying popular life in Venice, you can see the “impiraresse” holding the “sessola”, the tray where these working women would fish in with long needles to string as many beads as they could, as fast as they could, surrounded by the ever present children they would nurse or watch.
Bead stringers in Campo San Pietro di Castello, Venice, Filippi Archive, IRE
Their appropriation of the space was also vocal. Their conversations and their songs have been heard in Venice till recently. You can enjoy listening to the interpretation given by Luisa Ronchini with her beautiful voice in YouTube to “Siamo tutte impiraresse”.
In the song they describe themselves as “living machines”, working all day for little money that hardly gives them food to survive. But it also says that if they stay silent, they will be mistreated, if they protest, they will be taken to prison…
What kind of heritage is it left?
Today these factories have all been reconverted. The cotton factory has become the seat of the university of architecture, the tobacco factory is now the main ordinary courthouse, the Junghans factory was turned into apartment units, a theatre and more.
The impression is that there is little memory you can perceive while walking around.
With a major exception. The art of glass beads has been officially inscribed in 2020 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/the-art-of-glass-beads-01591). An amazing work involving French and Italian craftswomen, promoting the process and human ability evoked by an object so tiny as a glass bead. So tiny and yet so powerful, something to wear with pride.
Riccardo Selvatico, a poet and mayor of Venice (1910) once described working women in Venice’s tobacco factory with these words in Venetian:
Come un susio, che a distanza
Da principio xe confuso,
Ma che ingrossa, che vien suso
Co’ na furia de uragan(As a rustle, in the distance
At first confused
But getting stronger, reaching you
With the fury of a hurricane)
by Luisella Romeo
registered tourist guide in Venice, Italy
www.seevenice.it
As always, a fascinating post about Venice’s remarkable past. The working lives and stories of these 19th and 20th century women need telling just as much as the lives of the great society ladies whose portraits hang on the walls of their noble palazzi and art galleries. What a fascinating tour indeed, to add to all your others. ☺️☘️
Thank you, dear Jill! We can learn a lot from these Venetian women
Luisella, this is a wonderful tribute to the working women of the past. Thank you! I will visit those former factories with new insights when I return in March.
Dear Elaine, yes, it is worth while passing by. Also at the Giudecca there is still a lot one can see, as you know
What a wonderful article! These women were brave, strong, resourceful and creative. Such an amazing piece of history, thank you for capturing and sharing. This was super special and important to read their importance in the sewing and Morano g industry and its growth.
Tutto bene!
Absolutely, dear Wendy! It is indeed an important chapter of our history!