In the previous chapter, we have seen how married women see domestic work as an essential part of their beauty. In particular, those who work exclusively within the household feel a supplementary need to display their daily effort, but not in a manner that is too obvious. They are like artisans, with the exception that they do not display the work, but rather the products of their work.
For example, Maria Angela has never worked outside the home.
She is sure she ‘would never work [as an employee] if she could’. She wakes up just before 7.00 and, while her two sons use the bathroom, she quickly spreads a few biscotti with marmalade or butter and prepares coffee in her coffee machine for two. Then she rushes to help the children finish getting dressed, sits them at the kitchen table, sometimes gives them a cup of milk directly from the fridge and checks their school bags.
Her husband Antonio works at the Chamber of Agriculture in Lecce, so he drives the children to school. Therefore by 8:25 Maria Angela is already free! She quickly rinses the dishes, cleans up the kitchen table and takes a general look to see if everything is in its place. If it is a Monday, she plugs in the vacuum cleaner and starts to hoover the entire house. She does not vacuum more than two days a week, but on Mondays the house usually looks really messy after the weekend. Maria Angela also fills up a washing machine ready to turn it on later at night when the electricity is cheaper and opens all the windows to air the house. Maria Angela is happiest while putting the house in order and preparing a tasty lunch for her family: ‘I look forward to them leaving [the house] so that I can start doing my own things . . . but then I cannot wait to see them back!’ After ten she goes to buy something for lunch from the nearby shops: food and bread from the corner shop and vegetables from the greengrocer. Then she returns home, turns on the television and starts to prepare lunch.
Sometimes she is moved to tears by news of the waves of North African immigrants landing on Italian shores, or so many desperate families having nothing to put on their table, and her mind runs to her children again; she looks at her watch and estimates when she should go and collect them from school, rushing to finish her work. Even if lunch in Grano can be relatively simple, it takes at least an hour to prepare it for a big family, as in most cases it is cooked fresh and leftovers are only ever kept for dinner. However, on Thursdays, Maria Angela usually orders a whole roasted chicken or fresh sausages from the butcher because she spends the entire morning at the flea market; and on Sundays Antonio likes to prepare their lunch himself.
However, all this daily effort is virtually invisible on Facebook. It is in the afternoon, when the boys are doing homework, watching televi-sion or playing in their room that Maria Angela has some time for herself and checks her Facebook page. She scrolls down the NewsFeed, shares what she finds nice or impresses her, a meme or a news item, and some-times comments on her friends’ postings. Every few days Maria Angela checks the page of her parish and reads attentively the recent postings or comments. When she finds a small prayer, she recites it quietly. However, she rarely feels the need to upload a photo of her own. Stopping while preparing lunch to take a photo and upload it to Facebook would be nonsensical.2 Instead she prefers to post photos of her two sons. In the photos, they usually stand still and look straight into the camera, a little upwards. Maria Angela does not like to photograph them when play-ing or not payplay-ing attention to the camera. She usually uploads the pho-tos when sitting together with her children in the afternoon: now her
older son is almost 12 and he often helps with posting the pictures on Facebook.
Indeed, most personal photographs on Maria Angela’s Facebook profile may look formal, staged and somewhat sombre. She does not see photography as a work- in- progress, but as a finished product that has a very precise meaning: her sons are visiting grandpa or she is on holi-day with Antonio. Her domestic work is not explicit but implicit in her Facebook photographs: it is because of this work that her sons are well- behaved, well- dressed, have their hair combed and her family always looks happy. Family members smiling at the camera are a product of this diligent work and care, and nothing can be left open to interpreta-tion: for example, she would never post photos of the two boys fight-ing even if they do look ‘sweet’. This suggests that domestic work is not seen as complete unless the products of this work are recognised and appraised by the community.
This contrasts with artisans and public figures, whose work is seen rather more as a process and a technique, and has been invested with public visibility, authority and recognition from different political and economic forces coming from higher classes and the state. Artisan, intel-lectual and to some extent entrepreneurial work should be displayed on Facebook repeatedly, in detail, and always stressing any new achieve-ments. It is this permanent endorsing of work and relating it to higher models in society that can demonstrate your work as being valuable.
Instead, women’s domestic work is much less noticeable on Facebook as they do not need permanent validation of their labour: they need time for the products of their work to grow up, have accomplishments and turn into what they were meant to turn into. This particular craft is not public, but more an intimate and often personal mystery.
The sense of contentment and fulfilment felt by housewives that is evident in Grano, and the absence of any plans to work outside the domestic sphere, clearly distance this case from current debates in femi-nist theory and economic anthropology on, for example, the formal rec-ognition of housework carried out by women3 or the gender division of labour in the household economy.4 In Grano the role of the housewife as domestic worker is regarded as critical to the moral and economic output of the family as a whole. As we see in the Introduction, many married women act as true managers of the household and see their sus-tained effort to take care of their families as a responsibility that does not need constant public scrutiny. Therefore women, especially those who work exclusively within their household, see Facebook as an oppor-tunity to display the achievements of their work, and not the work itself.
Facebook helps them to demonstrate their particular role in the commu-nity, which was previously acknowledged only by a much smaller circle of family and friends and limited to sporadic social occasions. They can use Facebook as an unprecedented opportunity for social visibility.
So far we have seen that the work displayed on Facebook corre-sponds to a social ideal and expresses skills and constant practice. Let us now look at how this is related to education, the other critical aspect for people in Grano.