Hardworking Women Indeed

In March 2010, Multicultural Canada launched a new learning module Hardworking Women Indeed (www.multiculturalcanada.ca/ItalianImmigrationtoCanada), which looks at the contribution of Italian immigrant women to Canada.

When I was asked by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) (http://www.mhso.ca/) to work on this project, I had no reservations saying yes.  MHSO had a number of interview tapes of Italian women who were born at the turn of the 20th century, which they wanted to include in the national Multicultural Canada project.

Before long, I was honing my calabrese, napolitano, veneto, romano dialect skills in order to synthesize and capture in writing the womens' lives in Canada.  It was nostalgic and humbling to put these hardworking womens' experiences on paper, and then on the internet.  Each story, joke, fable brought me back to my childhood memories of growing up Italian-Canadian.  Each anecdote convinced me that these women had more fortitude in their soul than I will ever muster up in a lifetime.

Words on paper, or on the world wide web, can rarely do justice to the depth of life experiences, but Multicultural Canada and MHSO have tried to do just that with Hardworking Women Indeed.  If you read the module and learn something you didn't already know, I would love to hear from you.