Italian fascism initially offered women a place within the party with the organization of the Fasci Femminili (“Female Groups”) in 1919. Other Italian parties did not include women’s sections at that point. When he came to power as dictator in 1922, Mussolini promised women the right to vote and granted it in municipal elections in 1925, but three years later abolished free elections altogether. In the mid-1920s the Fasci Femminili were deprived of influence in the party, and the group was primarily used as a tool to propagandize fascism’s view that women’s primary role was to act as supportive wives and mothers. Women would only gain the right to vote in 1945 after the fall of Italian fascism and the birth of the Italian Republic.

Women gained some rights in the late 1940s and 1950s under the leadership of the left-wing L’Unione Donne in Italia (UDI) and the Catholic Centro Italiano Femminile (CIF), but they also competed with backlash and a general conservatism. When Italy’s constitution was ratified in 1947, it guaranteed equality for all citizens, regardless of sex; declared that spouses were legally and ethically equal; and mandated equal work opportunities for women and men. However, these vague principles were not put into practice. The protests of 1968 (Movimento del Sessantotto in Italian), which took place all over the world, exploded across Italian universities, and gave birth to a new era of women’s activism that lasted until the early 1980s. This university-based activism was mostly rooted in worker’s rights movements that had been operating in Italy before 1968. In the years that followed, the rise in left-wing activity from the 1968 protests led to new experimentation in left-wing politics through smaller groups unaffiliated with parties, universities, and the larger women’s organizations. Much like women’s movements in the US and other parts of Europe, the feminist activists of the 1970s began to create their own, identity-centered movements. These movements focused on the rights of women as a social group and departed from the ideology of the worker’s movements of earlier times. Most of these groups did not address differences among women by race and sexual orientation through intersectionality. Additionally, different from the US women’s liberation movement, which quickly created national organizations, much of the feminist organizing in Italy was centered in local bookstores and libraries, places where feminist collectives could meet.

The women of this era sought to advance women’s liberation by questioning discrimination related to sexuality, reproductive rights, paid work, and self-expression. In Rome, feminist activists organized around the issue of bodily autonomy, contraception, and abortion rights, while in the north, the traditional center of organized labor in Italy, women in Bologna and Turin began to advocate for remunerating housework as labor. In Milan, women separatist philosophers questioned the necessity of the male norm and the equality inherent in Marxist pursuits by looking to naturally unequal relationships among women such as mothers and daughters. They theorized and practiced the experiential and knowledge exchange found in these relationships, which they called affidamento (entrusting), as allowing one woman to entrust her skills and desires to another in order to open up new avenues of thought to them both. In the south, Italy’s more conservative region, women sought a specifically feminine creativity in artistic and literary collectives. This era of women’s organizing in Italy, sometimes referred to as Italy’s Second Wave, ended in the early 1980s as the activism and political violence of the era petered out, a cultural backlash against women’s achievements began, and the country embraced right-wing populism.

The interviews conducted by the GFP in Rome and Bologna were intended to get a picture of women activists’ efforts across their lifespans in order to understand how they connect those activities to their personal and communal pasts. In the first wave, Lauren Duncan interviewed five feminist activists currently living in Rome in July 2018. All interviews were conducted at the American Academy in Rome except for the interview with Lia Migale, which was conducted at the Casa Internazionale delle Donne. Activists were selected by asking contacts if they knew any local feminists who might be interested and eligible to participate. The only eligibility criterion was that the participant was a feminist activist. All interviews, except for the one with Giulia Blasi, were conducted in Italian, video-recorded, transcribed by native Italian speakers, and then translated by Duncan with the help of her native Italian language teacher based in Rome, Alessandro di Mauro.

In the second wave, Lauren Duncan and Bruno Grazioli, a native Italian speaker, conducted interviews with eleven LGBTQ+ feminist activists at the Dickinson College Study Abroad Center in Bologna. Grazioli had contacts with the Cassero, a local LGBTQ+ resource center, and they were able to recruit participants through the center. Again, all interviews were conducted in Italian, video-recorded, transcribed by native Italian speakers, and then translated by Duncan with the help of di Mauro.

In these interviews, the activists give us insight into the kinds of issues they have elected to pursue through their activism and the inspiration they take from their backgrounds. Two of the Roman interviewees cut their teeth as activists during the 1968 protests, whereas others grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. The Bologna interviewees, all members of the Cassero, an LGBTQ center, shared the experience of organizing and participating in anti-homophobia efforts and all identified as feminists.

For two of the Roman interviewees, the 1968 protests served as their initiation into activism. Lia Migale recalls that those protests completely changed her outlook on life: She grew up with a conservative Christian Democrat family, but once thrown into the crucible of university life in 1968, she began reading Marx, joining feminist groups, and pursuing some of the then feminist ideals of autonomy and independence. Bianca Pomeranzi’s first protest action was the student occupation of the University of Florence in 1969. That experience eventually led her to Pompeo Magno, a Roman feminist organization, and its lesbian section, where she read the international works of second-wave feminism. Two of the other Rome-based feminists, Michela Murgia and Maddalena Vianello, had mothers who were activists in the 1970s and passed down that radicalism to their children.

Antonia Peressoni, Samanta Picciaiola, Camilla Ranauro, and Valeria Roberti got their starts through anti-homophobic activism in the 2010s. Roberti began her career in 2010 pursuing these campaigns with Cassero. Peressoni helped organize Indie Pride, an anti-homophobia music festival, in 2012 in response to the Italian Parliament’s failure to pass an anti-homophobia bill that same year. Ranauro founded an anti-homophobic LGBTQ collective in her provincial hometown of Benevento the following year and later participated in anti-homophobia actions at University of Milan. Picciaiola, a public school teacher, has pursued childhood education in sexuality and sexual identity through theater.

Interestingly, Pomeranzi, Peressoni, and Murgia come to their activism by way of their Catholic upbringing. Pomeranzi points to her parents’ left-wing Catholicism as the source of thevalue she finds in humanity and piety, while Peressoni notes she was influenced by a priest who admitted to her that he doubted the existence of God. Nevertheless, he continued in the Church because he believed the Gospel taught love and self-sacrifice, two values that Peressoni embraced even as she left the faith. Murgia similarly emerged from the Church an atheist but attributes her activist origins to her participation in Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action), which she describes as the only democratic body of the Church. As a theological student, she pursued feminist interpretations of scripture, which resulted in her first book, published in 2011, Ave Mary. E la Chiesa inventò la donna (Ave Mary. And the Church Invented the Woman). In this book published for a lay audience, she argues that the clergy interpreted scripture for millennia through a male chauvinist lens and that other more feminist interpretations are possible.

Like their foremothers, the interviewees attempt to work across political parties without tying themselves down to any single party. L’Unione Donne in Italia was always associated with the Communist and Socialist Parties as was Centro Italiano Femminile with the Christian Democrats. Some women’s activists of these groups had been members of the corresponding party, but leadership of the two groups made sure to keep their organizations and goals separate from the parties. The two groups often worked with each other. Beginning in the 1970s, women created smaller groups, often regional, separate from larger organizations and certainly from the political parties, to pursue their activist goals. In contrast to the United States, women activists did not infiltrate academia to a large extent; only in the 2000s did an Italian university, the University of Bologna, first create a women’s history professorship. Catena notes that, despite her PCI activist parents, she has never pursued any activism within a political party. Vianello, one of our Roman activists, relates the history behind why, in her opinion, Italian feminists avoid closely working with the parties: “It seems to me that there are very few women who do politics within the parties, and inside of institutions, that bring the cultural baggage of feminism. It seems to me that those who carry it have little courage, and they also have little ability to network among themselves. The big feminist battles in this country were won by breaking party boundaries: It was that way for the divorce law, it was that way for the abortion law.” Notably, Italian activism now centers around small groups of activists, so much so that Giulia Blasi, an activist from a rural town, describes the skepticism with which other activists regard her when she speaks of her affiliationless background: “I was abandoned by the feminists of my generation who tell me, ‘Well you didn’t seek us out.’ Like, ‘I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know that you existed.’ They lived in their own tiny circles within universities within the collectives and there was no collective where I was living so they didn’t reach out to me.”

Despite the considerable continuity with the activism of the 1970s, the women of GFP’s interviews in Italy are taking steps to challenge the universal notion of womanhood found in Italian second-wave feminism. These women have begun to look at the differences among women to find common cause between women in the north and south of Italy, among Sardinians, Neapolitans, and the Italian majority, between Italian natives and the women of immigration, between heterosexual and homosexual women (and men), and between cis and trans women.

Many of our interviewees from Bologna were concerned about bridging the divide between the heterosexual Italian majority, and the feminists therein, and the homosexual minority, all while still standing up for their values. Beginning in 2015 with a European Court of Human Rights decision, feminist groups began to clash with gay rights activists over the question of surrogacy, that is, having a third-party woman carry a pregnancy for a person or couple. Around the world, heterosexual parents most commonly use surrogacy. In Italy, the debate over surrogacy became one over whether gay couples could be parents as legislation authorizing same-sex unions was then under consideration. Many of Italy’s feminist groups, influenced by the second-wave politics of sexual difference, called for a total ban on surrogacy, deeming surrogacy exploitative of poor and third-world women. Gay rights activists primarily focused on the discriminatory effect of permitting heterosexual surrogacy while banning it for homosexuals; ultimately, the 2016 law on same-sex civil unions banned any kind of legally recognized parentage for homosexual partners. Elisa Coco notes that Arcilesbia, a national organization of lesbian feminists, has come out harshly against surrogacy, which has led to a number of its subnational organizations, including Bologna’s Cassero, dissociating from the group. Both Coco and Elisa Dal Molin emphasize that, while the issue is complicated, it predominantly affects heterosexuals as the main consumers of surrogacy and that the issue was used by Italy’s conservatives to limit the parental rights to be permitted by the 2016 civil union law. Bianca Pomeranzi encourages the two sides to go beyond the language of the issue and instead address the basic inevitabilities of the situation: 1) technology will advance and men will try to write women out of the reproductive process with it, and 2) exploitation, left unchecked, will continue. The solution, she says, is to develop a politics that educates about the potential exploitation of third-world women and how to fight it rather than ban a technology.

Elisa Manici, Valentina Coletta, and Carla Catena likewise allude to the divide in contemporary Italian politics at large and in the feminist and LGBT communities over transgender people’s membership in their communities. As Coletta, a trans woman, puts the latter in ironically empowering fashion: “We are the ugly stepsisters of the gay movement.” Catena details her journey from lesbian separatist activist, in which she worked only with other trans-exclusionary lesbians, to a more inclusive activism through her work with Bologna’s Cassero Center.

Regional divides are another chasm that these women desire to bridge. Regional divides are, of course, not unique to Italy’s present moment. Much of those feminists’ activities were pioneered by regionally based groups in Turin, Bologna, Milan, Rome, and Naples. Likewise, though our interviewees were located in Rome and Bologna at present, they saw their regional identities as contributing to their activism and dictating their focus. Alice Biagi notes, when asked about the political situation in Italy at large, that she would be much more comfortable talking about Bologna because all her activism is focused on that region. Coletta holds dear her identity as Neapolitan (person from Naples) and seems to connect her regional identity to her trans identity, noting the thousand-year history of the femminiello (a gender non-conforming AMAB) in Naples. Michela Murgia, based in Rome, is a self-described Sardinian patriot and advocate for independence. She finds inspiration in some of her mother’s activities as a radical; her mother founded the movement Mamme No-Basi [Mothers No Bases] against the military bases that occupy 66% of Sardinia’s land.

Several interviewees’ work has attempted to connect women’s centers and their resources with immigrant women and LGBTQ individuals. The disinterest in non-Italian women was a major omission of 1970s women activists. While 1970s women read the works of Angela Davis and Malcolm X, they understood their message differently. They took the idea of race denoting a separate entity with its own unique existence and transferred it to the notion of women, but at the same time, they did not consider women of other ethnicities. The recent influx of immigrant women to Italy and the right-wing politics surrounding their entry have made finding alliances with immigrant women especially important. Coletta, Camilla Ranauro, and Anita Lombardi all speak to the recent attempts by LGBT activists in Bologna to reach out to LGBT migrants. Lombardi details the then most recent Bologna Pride which featured the stories of LGBT migrants and the subsequent right-wing backlash against the effort.

Much has happened in Italy since the GFP’s 2018 and 2019 interviews. The global rise in right-wing populism has touched Italy with the 2022 election of the first far-right government since Mussolini’s. Even before 2022, the parties that make up the current government began targeting LGBTQ and women as part of their legislative action. In 2021, current Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy opposed and defeated the so-called Zan bill, a bill creating protections for LGBTQ people. Meloni’s party has since increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and come out against abortion, an Italian right since 1978. They have also taken steps, through tax incentives and loopholes, to encourage women to stay home and focus on raising families. Additionally, in 2023, Meloni directed local councils to remove the names of non-biological parents of children of lesbian couples from birth certificates. Until that point, some local councils had been secretly recording the non-birth parents of such relationships in contravention of the 2016 law.

To many of the women in our interviews, this sort of discrimination is familiar territory, and they no doubt are resolved to continue the fight. Michela Murgia likely provides one of the best guiding principles through dark times: “Every time a woman has the courage to point out a patriarchal mechanism in the moment and say ‘look at that this thing that threatens us all, that ruins us all,’ we [must support them], not smiling, not saying, ‘all right, it’s not serious.’ It is very serious, don’t abandon them. Whoever has the courage to raise their hand and say ‘this thing that is happening is disgusting’ must not be abandoned.” Women will speak out in support of their or others’ rights, and for a movement to build and change to be made, others must defend them, not dismiss them.