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Nuova DWF. Donna Woman Femme
Quaderni di studi internazionali sulla donna
Roma, Coines Edizioni, poi Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1976-1985
Woman and Scientific Research, 1976, n. 1
Debate [Who, for whom, how. Scientific research carried out by women], pp. 3-22
RUBIN Gayle
The Traffic in Women. Notes on the "Political Economy
of Sex", pp. 23-65
SCARCIA AMORETTI Biancamaria
The Political Acceptance of the Private Role: Palestinian
Woman, pp. 66-76
MIZZAU Marina
The enigma. Communication as power, pp. 77-93
PANCINO Claudia - SCHNABL Elena - SARACENO Chiara
Daughters Women Students and Comrades…, from personal
experience to sociological Theory, pp. 94-125
SECCI Lia
Von Hippel's Essays on the Emancipation of Women, pp.
127-140
Debate [Who, for whom, how. Scientific research carried out by women],
pp. 3-22
The subject under discussion was scientific research as carried out by women. The participants were the Editorial board of "nuova dwf", Annarita Buttafuoco, Tilde Capomazza, Maria Teresa Morreale, Maria Grazia Paolini, Biancamaria Scarcia, Dora Stiefelmeier, Flo Westoby, and Luciana Di Lello, an Italian feminist engaged in research, was also present.
Leaving aside epistemological consideration, discussion concentrated on the political importance of scientific work - differences arose immediately on the definition of "scientific" - carried out by women; the fact that they are a socially oppressed group working within a set of disciplines almost exclusively elaborated by men, with all the distortions which this involves; on the consequent need to critically examine and often call into question not only the methodologies but even the basic concepts. Underlying the various disciplines. As the participants are all working in the social sciences, the special problems of women working in the "hard" sciences were not discussed.
There was special emphasis on the categorical necessity for a continuing check on sociological researches on women or on the supposed condition of women, both on the aims and on the subjects of these researches. Each speaker described her own special work problems, and spoke of her personal experiences, either in the university or in her field of research. The second part of the discussion was given over to the aims and problems of the journal, to political strategy, to the type of readership, to the appropriate forms and language.
Tilde Capomazza, communications expert, summed up, indicating the links between the journal and the feminist movement, and the journal and all those women who, aware of their oppression, are ready to unite and to struggle.
RUBIN Gayle, The Traffic in Women. Notes on the "Political Economy of
Sex", pp. 23-65
An exegetical reading of the works of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud, according to Gayle Rubin, provides elements which are helpful in tracing the origin of sex oppression. Marxist feminists, who have thrown much new light on the role of women under capitalism, have frequently overlooked the fact that sex oppression predates capitalism.
Engels rightly saw that sex oppression was part of Capitalism's heritage from prior social forms. He also recognised that what counts as sex is culturally determined and obtained. But Engel's insights were limited by the then undeveloped state of anthropology. Levi-Strauss brought order into the confusion of kinship diversity by postulating, as the fundamental principle of kinship, the exchange women. Implicitly, this is a theory of the subordination of women.
Gender - the socially imposed division of the sexes - is a product of the social relations of sexuality. However, anthropology, and descriptions of kinship systems, do not explain the mechanisms by which children are engraved with the conventions of sex and gender.
Here psychoanalysis can help, and the authoress draws upon rival notions Freud's followers and interpreters, notably Lacan. She concludes that recent advances in anthropology and psychoanalysis have prepared the ground for someone to write a new version of The Origin Family, Private Property, and the State.
SCARCIA AMORETTI Biancamaria, The Political Acceptance of the Private Role:
Palestinian Woman, pp. 66-76
The article falls into two parts. The first part concerns the historio-graphical and critical material on the role of women in wars of liberation. It emphasises the one-sidedness and the rigidity of the model chosen in order to express women's emancipation within the revolutionary process. The second part discusses the use for which the documents concerning the women's role in the revolutionary struggle are destined within the revolutionary movements themselves.
The author has chosen Palestine as her example, given the urgency of the problem there. A brief overview of the Palestinian feminist movement furnishes the factual background, but the argument is concerned rather with problems. The declared aim of the article is to attempt to formulate the function and the political role of women within the revolutionary process, as for example in people's wars.
MIZZAU Marina, The enigma. Communication as power, pp. 77-93
The article submits the interpersonal relationships in a tale from Dostoyevski "Letters from the underworld" to a critical analysis. The interpretation given found support at a seminar on the same subject in the Psychology department in the School of Humanities at Bologna University in 1975-76.
The analysis concentrates on the methods of communication and of non-communication, the use made by the characters - a man and a woman who in the end commits suicide - of the spoken word and of silence, to achieve power or in self-defence. The text is examined at many levels and from various angles, as was indeed Dostoyevski's own intention. Indeed Dostoyevski's work lends itself particularly well to the most modern methods of psychological analysis because each of his characters is portrayed as a complex of relationships.
Marina Mizzau attempts to demonstrate, using Dostoyevski's novel for her examples, that an individual's use of communication or silence is not accidental but is conditioned in large measure by his or her sex, or by what society has made of that sex. So, according to the author this text has to be read in terms of domination and subordination. Between this man and woman communication is impossible because power has deformed and falsified their relationship.
PANCINO Claudia - SCHNABL Elena - SARACENO Chiara, Daughters Women Students
and Comrades…, from personal experience to sociological Theory, pp.
94-125
The school of Sociology at Trento ran a course
in 1975-76 on the relationship between the family and present day capitalist
industrialist society, and at the same time a seminar on the condition of women
was organised. These two articles by Claudia Pancino and Elena Schnabl are an
account of the seminar. As the thirty young women inscribed for the course planned
an analysis of their situations as women and as students, the seminar was limited
to women. A parallel seminar for men had been started but had quickly come to
nothing.
The work fell into two phases. First the students spoke of their experiences under the headings: family background, love life, work, participation in politics, the "future". There followed theoretical discussion on these personal analyses with the aim of drawing the facts together and restoring to each student her personal experience as a part of collective knowledge. A second aim of the seminar was to draw up a questionnaire for a piece of systematic sociological research into women students in sociology.
There is an introduction to the two articles
by Chiara Saraceno who holds the Chair of Sociology at Trento. She explains
the reasons for this somewhat unorthodox approach and methodology, and the risks
involved.
SECCI Lia, Von Hippel's Essays on the Emancipation of Women, pp. 127-140
This article, meant as a contribution to the history of feminism, retraces and evaluates the life and works of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel. Von Hippel, German writer of the eighteenth century, friend of Kant, to be recognised as one of the forerunners of German and European feminism in that he anticipates most of the present day themes.
He preceded and is to be compared with John Stuart Mill, sharing his ideas, even sometimes surpassing them, as for example in his theories on the division of roles within the couple. He considered all behaviour, all attitudes to be socially determined, and anticipating modern cultural anthropology on this point. Von Hippel demonstrates how artificial is the division of the sexes. Greatly influenced by the French Revolution and the Encyclopedists he insists on absolute equality between the sexes. His most important work, "On The Civic Advancement of Women" was one of the pamphlets of the German feminist movement at the beginning of this century.