Rhiannon Giddens on Instagram: "So, as I live in Ireland, I have gotten used to the origins of some of the foods I eat coming from different places on this side of the pond. I noticed, after a conversation with a friend, that all of the 'Japanese' rice sold here is actually grown in Italy. It turns out that Italy is Europe's largest rice grower and has been for some time. For a long time, the vast rice fields were weeded by hand, a necessary but back breaking labour that was done mostly by women, called mondine. These fields became a hotbed of resistance, as the mondine sang protest songs about their padroni and held strikes and other actions that eventually won them some concessions. Many of them were connected to left wing political action and were part of the resistance during World War II. The famous song "Bella Ciao", which has been sung since the war as a resistance song but most people think wasn't actually sung during the war, most likely has its origins in the protest songs of the mondine in the early part of the 20th century. From the @theconversationdotcom article in my bio: "As one Italian senator put it in 1953, the labour of rice weeders deserved its own circle of hell in Dante’s inferno. Apart from eight-hour days under the beating sun, rice weeders were tormented by malaria-carrying mosquitoes and malnourishment, and suffered much higher miscarriage rates than other women workers. When the actress Silvana Mangano was shown how to imitate the rice weeders’ labour for her role in cult left-wing film Bitter Rice in 1949, she reportedly said: “Like this, for eight hours? I wouldn’t do this work even for a million a day!” A number of the women in the interviews I’m studying met with Mangano in 1948 as extras on the set of the movie. Knee-deep in protest It is perhaps because of these exploitative conditions that collective and political activism thrived in the rice fields. From the 1900s, rice weeders joined up in their droves to left-wing organisations such as the Italian communist and socialist parties, but also to the Unione donne italiane (the Italian Women’s Union) and working class institutions such as the Case del popolo (People’s Houses) and cooperatives.""

897 likes, 16 comments - rhiannongiddens on April 3, 2025: "So, as I live in Ireland, I have gotten used to the origins of some of the foods I eat coming from different places on this side of the pond. I noticed, after a conversation with a friend, that all of the 'Japanese' rice sold here is actually grown in Italy. It turns out that Italy is Europe's largest rice grower and has been for some time. For a long time, the vast rice fields were weeded by hand, a necessary but back breaking labour that was done mostly by women, called mondine. These fields became a hotbed of resistance, as the mondine sang protest songs about their padroni and held strikes and other actions that eventually won them some concessions. Many of them were connected to left wing political action and were part of the resistance during World War II. The famous song "Bella Ciao", which has been sung since the war as a resistance song but most people think wasn't actually sung during the war, most likely has its origins in the protest songs of the mondine in the early part of the 20th century. From the @theconversationdotcom article in my bio: "As one Italian senator put it in 1953, the labour of rice weeders deserved its own circle of hell in Dante’s inferno. Apart from eight-hour days under the beating sun, rice weeders were tormented by malaria-carrying mosquitoes and malnourishment, and suffered much higher miscarriage rates than other women workers. When the actress Silvana Mangano was shown how to imitate the rice weeders’ labour for her role in cult left-wing film Bitter Rice in 1949, she reportedly said: “Like this, for eight hours? I wouldn’t do this work even for a million a day!” A number of the women in the interviews I’m studying met with Mangano in 1948 as extras on the set of the movie. Knee-deep in protest It is perhaps because of these exploitative conditions that collective and political activism thrived in the rice fields. From the 1900s, rice weeders joined up in their droves to left-wing organisations such as the Italian communist and socialist parties, but also to the Unione donne italiane (the Italian Women’s Union) and working class institutions such as the Case del popolo (People’s Houses) and cooperatives."".