The history of Italian women in the post-war period is not new to the English-speaking public. I need only mention Perry Willson’s Women in Twentieth-Century Italy (Reference Willson2010), which has already provided a particularly effective portrayal of the political and social situation for an extremely varied female world. The intention of this book by Molly Tambor is to focus on the period between 1945 and 1963, providing a summary of much of the most important recent work in this area. Her central argument, in brief, emphasises involvement in the Resistance as a key point in women’s discovery of a new protagonism, against the backdrop of their introduction to democratic participation in political life as ‘mothers of the nation’; in Tambor’s view this encouraged the re-emergence of a ‘feminist’ tradition’ within which she sees the women activists, with their varying political allegiances, as a ‘lost wave’.
Tambor first provides an outline of the debate in the Constituent Assembly, especially in relation to Article 37 (on equality in employment) and Article 29 (on equality within the family), and then proceeds to illustrate her thesis by a detailed analysis of the biographies of three leading lights of that political period, women who put forward legislation that Tambor considers emblematic. The spotlight thus falls on Teresa Noce, who in 1950 together with Di Vittorio composed the bill that was commonly described as being for ‘working mothers’; Lina Merlin, whose ten-year battle in the Senate came to its conclusion in 1958 with the law that abolished ‘state prostitution’; and Maria Cocco, leader of the fight for women’s admission to the magistracy, which was finally approved in 1963. An important theme that underlies and drives the narration is the hypothesis that there was a fundamental complicity and solidarity between these Italian women politicians, which characterized and united them in their shared struggle for female emancipation, and which transcended the divisions between their specific political allegiances. This is an interesting theory, although it could be argued that it flies in the face of much of the evidence.
The Italy of that time was marked by a clear-cut party-based opposition between women in the Catholic sphere and, on the other hand, women within the force of left. If we leave aside the Communist publicity that followed Togliatti’s instructions to create an organization that was formally non-political and had the potential to take in all Italian women, the sources demonstrate that there was head-on competition right from the beginning between the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) and the Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF), which was only ever relaxed for one brief period at the time of the debate in the Constituent Assembly. In addition, it was the women protagonists of that political period themselves who acknowledged the function of the organizations that were established alongside the parties: they were essentially instruments for building support. As Camilla Ravera stated in an interview (Scroppo Reference Scroppo1979), there was an initial phase immediately after Liberation characterized by a strong drive for equality, but these organizations then saw the efforts of women activists concentrated on mobilizing the votes of Italian women, putting aside any demands relating to equality. There is a mass of evidence that supports this, and I need only mention here, retaining the focus on statements made by women who were active at the time, PCI parliamentary deputy Nadia Spano’s observations about the appeals addressed to women voting for the first time, which, if not quite couched in terms of the battle between Good and Evil, were related to the welfare of their children. Spano added that there had never been ‘a leaflet or poster that said “Women, vote for yourself, vote for your rights!”’ (Reference Spano2005, 255).
On the same theme, women’s organizations continued to perform what Luciana Viviani neatly described as ‘a politics of daily life’: a series of welfare-related initiatives, in complete continuity with the past, that focused on meeting the most pressing needs of Italian families. For these families the demands were for peace and work: for their husbands this time, rather than their children, but never for the women themselves. The period after the Second World War was ‘the golden age of the housewife’ in Italy, with rates of economic inactivity that had never previously been as high, although this picture often proved an illusion when shown to be just a way of concealing various types of undeclared employment. It was in fact in relation to work that the most glaring contradictions of the Communist front emerged. The law on ‘working mothers’ provides emblematic evidence of this, and an analysis would have been enlightening. In relation to the legislation of 1934, which in reality it simply broadens, the new element in Teresa Noce’s proposal was the extension of the requirement for protection to housewives (regarded as ‘workers’ in the same way as other women). There is no consideration of the fact that this equalization of work within and outside the home was fundamental to the great struggle for pensions for housewives (the most popular campaign of the 1950s, which came to fruition in 1963), which this volume does not examine. The degree to which this seems to be in complete contrast to an insistence on the emancipatory value of extra-domestic work, the historic heritage of the tradition of Marxist thinking, is obvious.
The use of the word ‘feminism’ in relation to the generation of women deputies and party activists in that period is thus problematic, and particularly so if applied to a series of initiatives carried forward by the UDI which had objectives that were purely promotional. The campaign backed by the Socialist senator Lina Merlin for the closure of licensed brothels was something entirely different. This law certainly did have a truly egalitarian flavour, but was also a law for which Merlin fought completely on her own; it only gained support from the women’s organizations after it had been approved, in 1958, as the culmination of ten years of debate, and never had the support of Italians (including Italian women).
This interesting volume challenges accepted interpretations of women’s political activism in the post-war period, but leaves many points for reflection and debate unresolved, some of which I have discussed above. There are also occasional inaccuracies that could perhaps have been avoided: the death of Togliatti, for example, is placed in 1956, the Republican Party’s acronym (PRI) is assigned to the Radicals, and support by the women’s organizations for abortion appears to be brought back to the 1950s, a time when the very word was unmentionable.
