In recent years, there has been consistent historiographical interest in the crucial political period of neo-feminisms in Italy, which has assiduously filled the gaps in the reconstruction and interpretation of their complex articulation of practices. Archives and collections, including private ones, have been enhanced or have collected important series of oral sources.

This dense and timely history of the Movimento Liberazione della Donna (MLD, Women's Liberation Movement) by Beatrice Pisa provides another important piece of the mosaic. MLD was born in the context of the Radical Party, which at the beginning of the 1960s was experimenting with anti-patriarchal, anti-bourgeois, anti-system and libertarian positions. This book has a noteworthy documentary richness, which is also systematised in a useful appendix, comprising photographs, documents, considerable ‘grey literature’, oral sources, bulletins, leaflets, diaries, autobiographical writings and letters, the result of patient excavations in public archives and in some private ones. One of these is Liliana Ingargiola's private archive. With Alma Sabatini, Ingargiola was one of the founders of MLD, a pre-eminent figure in its history and in women's political history in republican Italy. While the existing historiography has paid insufficient attention to these women, this book dedicates in particular the second and last chapters to them, taking a kind of circular approach.

The issue of ‘positioning’ and ‘subjectivity’ with respect to narrated and analysed events is also interesting. Beatrice Pisa addresses, as a historian, the birth and evolution of a movement in and of which she was both an activist and a witness. She does not deny this fact, and instead uses this observation point to deconstruct personal and political dynamics and to reveal peculiarities and some specific personalities without ever losing sight of the collective experience. In 1978 MLD included almost 50 groups across the peninsula; Pisa's research tells just one of many possible stories (p. 11). In fact, it focuses on the original Roman experience, starting in April 1970, first in the form of a political working group, out of the meeting of the former ‘Radical Collective for the fight against sexual repression and against psychiatric institutions’ and influenced by the practices of the American Women's Liberation Movement. Following this, the MLD, whose aims were to fight against the economic, psychological and sexual exploitation of women, was federated to the Radical Party, from the turbulent founding Congress of 1971 (pp. 29–31) until 1978, when the relationship of crisis with the party came to an end (Chapter 7). MLD espoused a ‘secular-libertarian’ feminism, with a clear radical matrix. Questions of sexuality (including lesbianism); the decriminalisation of abortion; the establishment of counselling and self-help practices; violence against women; and equal opportunities in the workplaces were all crucial. As we read in Chapter 3, dedicated to the MLD's forms of ‘doing politics’, unlike other feminist experiences, MLD rejected the practice of self-consciousness and, in particular, that of separatism, which MLD women identified as a potential closing-off to other women, and a concrete risk. Other fundamental characteristics of the movement were the will to mediate between liberation and emancipation, and a constant dialogue with institutions. The latter is perhaps one of the points that most differentiates the MLD from other Italian feminist experiences during this historical phase.

The MLD constantly sought a difficult and often contradictory balance between the Radical Party's positions and identification with the feminist movement. This characteristic is something of a gift for a historian in that it allows us to follow the MLD's interactions with many different actors: the long-standing interactions with feminist collectives, those of ‘difference’ to Marxist ones, particularly during the decisive occupation of an ancient Roman palace in Via del Governo Vecchio (Chapter 4); with parties and with other social movements. It gives us a precious magnifying glass with which to examine the multiple forms of women's participation in the political life of republican Italy. What emerges clearly is how the feminism of the MLD helped to determine the irruption of the female sexual body and generated a renewed look at reproductive bodies on the political scene. Pisa locates one of the moments of the greatest distance and liveliest dialectic between the Radical Party and the MLD in the highly significant battle for abortion (Chapters 5 and 8). Many in the MLD accused the party of remaining trapped in male mental frameworks, and of not having commissioned a woman to conduct the analysis, on the basis of the key Italian feminist practice of ‘partire da sé’ (‘starting from oneself’). The battles for the decriminalisation of abortion and against widespread violence against women (through the creation of a dedicated collective and a centre providing legal, psychological and political assistance) especially illuminate the MLD's direct, active and critical attempts to ‘engender’ normative processes (Chapters 9 and 10).

The epilogue focuses on the years 1983 and 1984, the former being the year in which the Justice Commission of the Chamber of Deputies presented in parliament a unified bill on violence, which took the popular initiative law promoted by the MLD as its starting point. Yet these were the sunset years of political feminism in its mass dimension. Pisa notes the triumph of the ‘feminism of difference’, which concentrates on cultural, philosophical and psychoanalytic dimensions. By setting 1983 as the temporal limit of this book, the author is able to identify and illuminate the closing of a political parabola in the early 1980s. From a historiographical point of view, this period remains as yet unresolved.