Reviews
The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women by Barbie Latza Nadeau
taylorcali's review
2.0
The mafia fascinates me but they're so secretive. So the fact that this author could interview so many in the Italian mafia is no small feat. But I didn't like the way this was done. Too...journalistic?
Acid baths.
No regard for human life.
Quite the wild world in Italy.
Acid baths.
No regard for human life.
Quite the wild world in Italy.
souvalli's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.0
Overly opinionated and somewhat all over the place but interesting people and topics to hear about. Unfortunately, just not executed well.
siria's review
4.0
An engrossing look at the lives of women who are involved in the Italian Mafia and other similar criminal groups such as the Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta. As Barbie Latza Nadeau makes clear, these women—whether wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters of mafiosi—are neither so passive nor so oppressed as popular conceptions would have them be. Look at what these women are actually doing, Nadeau argues, rather than making assumptions based on what is said about them.
True, these women generally live lives shaped by deeply patriarchal and heteronormative understandings of relationships, marriage, and motherhood, and often face extreme levels of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence.
However, many of them are as much a part of these criminal groups as are their male partners and family members. They choose to remain, they often place family honour and power above the lives and safety of even their own children, and they revel in the wealth and status that comes with all of this. Many of them have reputations for cruelty and sadism that far surpass their male peers. These women increasingly take advantage of the condescending sexism of the Italian legal system to take on ever more important roles in the organized crime system right under the noses of the cops. Nadeau argues that, for instance, the comparatively greater freedom of movement for women during the stringent pandemic lockdowns in Italy—“traditionally female roles meant women still needed to leave their homes for groceries and other essentials"—has allowed women to climb even higher on these organizations' hierarchical ladders.
Nadeau writes about these women with a continual attention to the wider social contexts within which they live—Italy as a western European country which has largely been passed by by feminism; the grinding poverty of much of southern Italy—and with frequent flashes of dark humour. Recommended if you're interested in true crime, but even more so in the social structures that facilitates organized crime networks in the first place.
True, these women generally live lives shaped by deeply patriarchal and heteronormative understandings of relationships, marriage, and motherhood, and often face extreme levels of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence.
However, many of them are as much a part of these criminal groups as are their male partners and family members. They choose to remain, they often place family honour and power above the lives and safety of even their own children, and they revel in the wealth and status that comes with all of this. Many of them have reputations for cruelty and sadism that far surpass their male peers. These women increasingly take advantage of the condescending sexism of the Italian legal system to take on ever more important roles in the organized crime system right under the noses of the cops. Nadeau argues that, for instance, the comparatively greater freedom of movement for women during the stringent pandemic lockdowns in Italy—“traditionally female roles meant women still needed to leave their homes for groceries and other essentials"—has allowed women to climb even higher on these organizations' hierarchical ladders.
Nadeau writes about these women with a continual attention to the wider social contexts within which they live—Italy as a western European country which has largely been passed by by feminism; the grinding poverty of much of southern Italy—and with frequent flashes of dark humour. Recommended if you're interested in true crime, but even more so in the social structures that facilitates organized crime networks in the first place.