Journeys among Women: Feminism in Five Italian Cities (Europe and the International Order)

This is a book about the journey of ideas among Italian women. Based on interviews, participant observation, and the writings produced by women in five different settings, Judith Adler Hellman traces the movement of feminism throughout Italy, from Turin and Milan, the great industrial cities of the North, to Reggio Emilia in the "red belt" of central Italy, to Verona in the deeply religious Northeast, and finally, to Caserta in the South. Following the development of Italian feminism from its origins in the turn-of-the-century Socialist Party into the 1980s, the author has gathered rich, first-hand accounts of participants that indicate the various ways that feminist thinking was received and reformulated by Italian women. In cities both large and small, cosmopolitan and provincial, Catholic and communist or socialist in their traditions, we see the impact of ideas, and the ways in which those ideas transformed and were, in turn, transformed by women acting within the constraints of their particular local social and political conditions. Hellman concludes with a broad analysis of the impact of feminism on the lives of the women she came to know, and on Italian society and politics as a whole.