Two Italian Women Who Lost Faith

This shot is taken from Pietro Germi's classic: Seduced and Abandoned 

In the first case, here is the sixties' musical goddess Mina, warning her faithless lover that the woman he is chasing after does not really love him:

And here is a Neapolitan maid from the eighties film "Cosi Parlo' Bellavista", whose had it up to here with her washing machine:

Are their postures that different? Mina is of course much more poised and self-assured. But both of them are confronting directly the person/object that is letting them down. Mina's graceful controlled gestures suggest a much more volcanic emotion bubbling up beneath, which the maid makes explicit by directly "man"- handling the offending machine. All of this adds content to Anthropologist Jill Dubisch's claim that there is a poetics of womanhood in the Mediterranean, that complements her colleague Michael Herzfeld's Poetics of Manhood. Dubisch writes:

"My landlady’s litany of complaint illustrates one way that a woman might perform “being good at being a woman,” in this case by showing the suffering she undergoes in fulfilling all her duties. Women are responsible for the physical and spiritual well-being of their families, and the women who crawl on their knees up to the church with infants on their backs dramatically illustrate the suffering they are willing to undergo to fulfill these obligations, in this case offering prayers and vows for the well-being of a child, vows that they have now come to fulfill. Such obligations don’t necessarily entail suffering, of course, but they may be expressed in other public ways. On more than one occasion, for example, I have seen Greek women pursue young offspring with food. In one case, I saw a mother at the beach follow her child into the water in order to feed him his lunch. Here is another example of maternal-ness performed in a public context."