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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is 47 years old, a genuine Roman, ambitious and instinctive; she has humble and suburban origins, a daughter she had at the age of 40 by a man with whom she cohabits without being married -even though she firmly maintains that the traditional family is the best- and a Catholic faith that she defines as the foundation of her political identity rooted in the social right. Given these premises, it is easy to imagine that feminism gets on her nerves: among her first symbolic acts as soon as she took office as head of the new government, she announced that she would call herself primo ministro, the masculine declension for ‘prime minister’.
A hard blow, although a predictable one, after decades-long struggles to introduce the female declension for political offices. Some acute political analysts have pointed out that, for ministries (except for one, which I will discuss later) Meloni chose men far less bright and intelligent than herself so as not to be overshadowed. About 6 months into her time in government, she is undoubtedly unrivalled on the media scene.
The new secretary of the largest left-wing party is Elly Schlein; 10 years younger than Meloni, she has a US and Swiss passport, comes from a family of Jewish origin and has breathed an international atmosphere since childhood. Learned, energetic, feminist and leftist, although she is not yet 40 years old, she has already been a member of the European Parliament and administrator of Emilia Romagna, a region with a historical communist tradition and among the richest in Italy.
Like Meloni, Schlein too has succeeded in a historical feat, as she is the first secretary of the Pd (Democratic Party) which comes from the ashes of the Communist Party, the largest in Europe until the 1980s: despite having named the first female speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in the post-war period, the left had never brought a woman to the top. Schlein defeated a candidate that seemed invincible, and established herself on the media scene by publicly declaring that she was living with a young woman.
It would be dishonest to hide the fact that this is not a felicitous phase in the relations between the different souls of the Italian feminist movement
So, in this scenario, how is feminism in Italy and how is the feminist press, at least what is left of it?
Once the happy season of the magazines of the 1970 — such as Effe, DWF, Lapis, Grattacielo, Il Paese delle donne, Dwpress which contributed a lot to the dissemination of feminism — ended, the internet has saved much of this legacy, contributing to the diffusion, along with the immense historical material, of a myriad of blogs, websites, social network pages of groups and individual feminist activists and journalists, attracting the younger generations. Even the historic monthly magazine Noidonne, launched clandestinely during the World War II by UDI, the Union of Italian Women and later became the first magazine to bring together the institutional and non-institutional women’s movement, is now only online.
It would be dishonest to hide the fact that this is not a felicitous phase in the relations between the different souls of the Italian feminist movement, which is struggling to initiate a debate without falling into brawls, on important and stinging issues such as prostitution, veil, surrogacy, adoption, and abortion.
The debate on these issues, particularly on maternity and abortion, has been ignited recently by the declarations of the Minister for Family, Natality and Equal Opportunities Eugenia Roccella (who does not disdain the feminine declension of her post), the only notable female name in the government’s ranks.
Eugenia Roccella calls herself a feminist, but she is part of a right-wing government that proposes a very traditionalist view of women. On the other hand, other women of value in the past had also chosen the right, partly due to the rigidity and poor listening skills of some parts of the left and feminism: the lawyer Tina Lagostena Bassi, remembered by all for her famous harangue in Processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape), a program aired by RAI in 1979 in which the cameras followed a trial for gang rape where she took on the defense of the victim, was elected as a member of parliament with Forza Italia, the party founded and chaired by Silvio Berlusconi; the Noidonne journalist Roberta Tatafiore, former editor of La lucciola, the newspaper of the Committee for the “Civil Rights of Prostitutes”, who in the last years of her life wrote for right-wing newspapers such as Libero, Il Foglio, Il Giornale and Il Secolo d’Italia.
Eugenia Roccella calls herself a feminist, but she is part of a right-wing government that proposes a very traditionalist view of women
Roccella comes from a solid radical feminist foundation and from the example of artistic activism set by her mother Wanda Raheli, a painter and animator of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, and of her father Francesco Roccella, founder of the Radical Party, to which Italy owes the development of a secular culture of civil rights. A very weak culture in the country due to the influence of the Vatican and the lack of proactivity in the secular world.
In the generalist press as well as in the feminist one and on social networks, two statements by Roccella in particular sparked discussion: her reply “Unfortunately yes’” to the question: “Is abortion one of women’s freedoms?’’, and her consideration that “Abortion is the dark side of motherhood. I did not consider abortion a good thing even when I was fighting for women to be able to do it. The 194 is a good law, but women are not happy to have abortions.”
Roccella has also declared her opposition to gestational surrogacy, defining it a racist practice, among other things, because it is overwhelmingly rich, white couples who use the wombs of poor women. So far, no request for a debate with her has been made by the women’s movement, while the news is that 100 feminists of different ages and backgrounds have written to Elly Schlein for a meeting on this issue. We shall see what happens.
