Crítica de la política e historia política de las mujeres en Italia: un balance problemático

Abstract

This essay aims to contribute to the process of rethinking thirty years of Italian history. These long thirty years began with the 1968 student movement and the workers’ movement in the factories of Northern Italy in the “hot autumn” of 1969, then saw the cross-fertilization of the feminist movement and the battles for civil rights (divorce and abortion), and ended with terrorism and its repression, leading to an estrangement between politics and civil society and, in particular, to women’s drastic disaffection from politics. In considering these themes Italian historiography has recently been seeking to try to understand the “anomalies” of the Italian case and of the country’s contradictory transition towards modernity, but has frequently underestimated the contribution made over these 30 years by the women’s movement and by the feminist debate. In fact, both of them have helped to update historiographical paradigms, even though they have not delivered a history of feminism that bequeathed a shared memory of it. The important contribution of Italian women historians to historical research has occurred on one hand in relation to the development of French and Anglo-American social history and, on the other, through the assimilation of the category of gender. The use of gender has been more influential in research in early modern history, rather than in modern history. The motives are complex and will be examined in this essay.