Feminism, the State, and the centrality of reproduction: abortion struggles in 1970s Italy

This article analyses an episode of intense socio-political conflict over the question of abortion in 1970s Italy. Considering the shifting positions of feminist groups and other pro-legalization actors on the one hand, and institutions, political parties and the Church on the other, it offers a new analysis of social mobilization, leading to parliamentary debate and legal change. It presents an original approach to an understanding of feminist challenges to patriarchal cultures and institutions, and of the latter’s immediate responses. Focusing on Italy but referring to developments in other industrialized countries, the article inscribes the history of the battle for reproductive rights in 1970s Italy within a framework centred on the Foucauldian notion of biopolitical power. It is argued that the legal settling of the issue came to be seen by state actors as central to the wider socio-political stabilization of the country. For feminists, the question of abortion was less straightforward than is often assumed. Italian feminist debate, while visibly impacting on wider society, was marked by dilemmas around the private and the public, the relationship to the state, and concerns around centring the feminist agenda on reproduction

Women’s rights, family planning, and population control: the emergence of reproductive rights in the United Nations (1960s–70s)

The article traces the emergence of reproductive rights principles in the UN during the 1960s–70s. Family planning programmes were the key discursive terrain on which conflicts over fertility, global population, and women's roles in ‘third world development’ were interlinked. The UN’s Commission on the Status of Women was a key actor: in the late 1960s it defined family planning in relation to a broadened definition of human rights, and repositioned it as a women’s rights issue. This shift resulted from competing but in some respects converging concepts of women’s rights among Western-based, communist-aligned and Global South-based women’s organisations at the Commission. While subsequent UN conferences, specifically Bucharest 1974 and Mexico City 1975, revealed enduring global conflicts over ‘population management’ and ‘third world development’, the UN reframed family planning in relation to human rights principles. It hereby responsibilised women in their social roles, potentially enhancing their reproductive autonomy – but failing to fully abandon the population control agenda, against the calls of feminist movements in the Global South. The article contributes to histories of the UN and of the emergence of globally connected feminist movements, and is based on archives and publications of women’s rights NGOs, UN agencies, and family planning organisations

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.PostprintPeer reviewe

Una rivoluzione incompiuta: la sfida del femminismo negli anni Settanta e Ottanta

No abstract available

Our bodies, ourselves: the transnational connections of 1970s Italian and Roman feminism

This article presents an approach to studying processes of transnational exchange and reception between social movements. It does so by focusing on a locally situated case study: the movement for women’s reproductive and sexual health and rights in 1970s Rome. A focal point in ‘second-wave’ Italian feminism, these groups were profoundly shaped by feminist debates and practices in, notably, the USA and France. The analysis highlights the centrality of local actors in translating, appropriating and re-(and de-)contextualizing transnational sources, thus transforming their meanings. Questioning the often automatic status ascribed to the nation-state as analytical framework, the article illustrates that re-contextualization equally takes place on the local (as distinct from national) level, and that these layered transfer processes are central to understanding the complexity and effectiveness of postwar social movements such as feminism

Family planning, the pill, and reproductive agency in Italy, 1945-1971: from 'conscious procreation' to 'a new fundamental right'?

The article analyses post-war family planning campaigning in Italy and the legalization of the Pill (1971), in order to illustrate wider processes of change in sexual norms and practices, the feminization of contraception, and the emergence of notions of individual rights in procreation. Situating the Italian family planning movement as part of a transnational network and a global agenda, it problematizes understandings of family planning as a site of individual liberation only, highlighting the hierarchization of reproductive bodies that underpinned the campaigns of many family planning activists. Drawing on archives, publications and memoirs by family planners in Italy and the US, this is the first scholarly analysis of the Italian family planning movement’s role in the (illegal) distribution of contraception and sexual information, as well as its key contribution to the legalization of the Pill. The article aims to offer an original contribution to the socio-political negotiation of reproductive agency in the post-war period, set against the backdrop of the globalization of demographic debate, secularization, changing gender roles and new medical technologies

Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983)

This is the first in-depth study of the feminist movement that swept Italy during the "long 1970s" (1968-1983), and one of the first to use a combination of oral history interviews and newly-released archive sources to analyze the origins, themes, practices and impacts of "second-wave" feminism. While detailing the local and national contexts in which the movement operated, it sees this movement as transnationally connected. Emerging in a society that was both characterized by traditional gender roles, and a microcosm of radical political projects in the wake of 1968, the feminist movement was able to transform the lives of thousands of women, shape gender identities and roles, and provoke political and legislative change. More strongly mass-based and socially diverse than its counterparts in other Western countries at the time, its agenda encompassed questions of work, unpaid care-work, sexuality, health, reproductive rights, sexual violence, social justice, and self-expression. The case studies detailing feminist politics in three cities (Turin, Naples, and Rome) are framed in a wider analysis of the movement’s emergence, its transnational links and local specificities, and its practices and discourses. The book concludes on a series of hypotheses regarding the movement’s longer-term impacts and trajectories, taking it up to the Berlusconi era and the present day

La nuova politica delle donne: Il femminismo in Italia (1968-1983)

Il femminismo, più di ogni altro movimento degli anni Settanta, colse le preoccupazioni immediate dei cittadini ordinari, delle donne, ma non solo di esse. Fu in grado di trasformarne la vita, di indurre cambiamenti nelle identità e nei ruoli di genere, nella politica, nella legislazione. Attraversando le esperienze di tre città fondamentali – Roma, Torino, Napoli –La Nuova politica delle donne propone la prima sintesi complessiva del movimento femminista, senza perderne di vista la differenziazione interna né la prospettiva transnazionale. Uno studio approfondito, che incrocia documenti d’archivio con testimonianze orali, di un fenomeno tra i più importanti della nostra storia recente, visto nella sua carica rivoluzionaria, ma anche nelle sue incertezze e aporie. Una foto di gruppo in cui riconoscere i singoli volti, le diverse passioni, le molte traiettorie che hanno condotto al nostro presente

"Women’s 1968 Is Not Yet Over”: the capture of speech and the gendering of 1968 in Europe

No abstract available