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Nuova DWF. Donna Woman Femme
Quaderni di studi internazionali sulla donna
Roma, Coines Edizioni, then Editrice coop. UTOPIA, 1976-1985
Feminism's routes and women's history - Proceedings of the Modena congress, April 2-4 1982, 1982, n. 22, Supplement
PONZONI Iella - POLLICELLI Cinzia
[a salutation], p. 5
CAVALLO Sandra
Introduction, pp. 9-12
ACCATI Luisa
From witches to madwomen, pp. 13-19
POMATA Gianna
The body's messages, pp. 20-26
MAHER Vanessa
Solidarities, pp. 27-36
Debate, pp. 37-46
BUTTAFUOCO Annarita
The sentiment of politics, pp. 49-60
BONACCHI Gabriella
Long time, short time, ageless time. Considerations on women's
political history, pp. 61-66
DE GIORGIO Michela
Dissatisfied female souls, pp. 67-73
MERELLI Maria
Collective identity and personal identity: the model of
emancipation in Modena between the fifties and the eighties, pp. 74-82
ROSSI DORIA Anna
Maternity, a political knot, pp. 83-90
Debate, pp. 91-100
CERUTTI Simona
Introduction, pp. 103-107
GROPPI Angela, PELAJA Margherita
Crimes and their report. Criminal sources, pp. 108-118
NAVA Paola
Narrating and speaking of self. Oral sources, pp.
119-127
CAVALLO Sandra
Introduction, p. 131
ZANCAN Marina
The literary text as source for a history of figures of women,
pp. 132-138
CACCIARI Cristina
Self-representation and relational conflict:
the diaries of Sofija and Lev Toltstoi, pp. 139-146
CAVALLO Sandra
Life stories and the "biographical method", pp.
147-152
CALVI Giulia
The self and the model: the autobiography of two women workers
in the United States, pp. 153-161
Debate, pp. 162-169
PONZONI Iella - POLLICELLI Cinzia, [a salutation], p. 5
On behalf of the conference's promoters, Modena's City Council and its Culture Department, the authors introduce these proceedings, which are the result of a research focussing upon the relationship between the routes of the women's movement and the research fields and issues most favoured by scholars.
CAVALLO Sandra, Introduction, pp. 9-12
The author introduces this section of the seminar entitled "Analysed objects, a necessary choice? Witches, bodies, solidarity". She points out how the excessively strong relationship between political-existential commitment and scientific commitment has been exactly what caused the strongest criticisms and self-criticisms within women's historiography. The analysis therefore re-examines some female figures - the working woman, the housewife, the witch - which until now have seemed almost mandatory objects for whoever dealt with women's history.
ACCATI Luisa, From witches to madwomen, pp. 13-19
The author conjectures the existence of a typical female deviate for each context and of a social group responsible for the deviation's control. In this sense a comparison is possible between the double figure of witch and inquisitor and the equally double one of madwoman and doctor. These examples give rise to interesting questions on women's power, men's fears and the complexity of social mechanisms.
POMATA Gianna, The body's messages, pp. 20-26
Western culture seeks to explain the body's mechanisms and the way it works, whereas for women's movement the scientific object on which to focus is the body experienced as a source of power. The ways of implementing control over women through their bodies are to present them either as dangerous female bodies or as female bodies in danger.
The author illustrates her thesis with significant examples from historical and anthropological data, concluding that the body's denial operated by biological sciences contrasts with its relevance to social sciences: the complex symbolic meaning it acquires in each context is central to the understanding of social dynamics in general and not just those of male-female relationships.
MAHER Vanessa, Solidarities, pp. 27-36
The author, who is an anthropologist, sets the concept of solidarity, a value and constant reference for women's movement, against the different kinds of relationship between women as they emerged in European societies in the past twenty years.
After analysing non-European cultures as well as our everyday practices, she concludes that both sexual segregation and non-segregation as such are not enough to ensure women's stronger social presence or their increased power in negotiations. In this sense women's aims and the nature of their mutual relations are undeniably more important.
The three introductions are followed by a debate whose participants, beside the speakers, are Sandra Cavallo, an unidentified woman, Lucia Ferrante, Simona Cerutti, Iella Ponzoni.
BUTTAFUOCO Annarita, The sentiment of politics, pp. 49-60
The author opens the section entitled "Thinking over political history". In the first part she illustrates the general and specific reasons for the almost complete absence of a strictly political history directly or indirectly related to the women's movement.
The aim of the author's current research is to verify if concepts such as 'democracy', 'socialism', 'politics' can be thought over and modified, and also if they can be changed when seen through the lens of the women's movement. She is also interested in investigating the socio-political, cultural and general problems women from the past faced in the course of their struggles, the instruments, alliances, and relationships they practised, as well as the conflicts they were able to govern.
In the second part she corroborates her reasoning with the presentation of the research she is carrying out while sorting through the private archives of Ersilia Majno, founder of the Unione Femminile (Feminine Union).
BONACCHI Gabriella, Long time, short time, ageless time. Considerations on
women's political history, pp. 61-66
The author tries to isolate different criteria with which to interpret women's political movements by resorting to the opposition between the timeless rhythm of everyday survival and the time of event, change, history.
"There are dimensions of women's identity, time and experience which are ignored or compressed by the political project". The history/story/time of the novel seems more suited to represent increasingly interiorized and harder to grasp oppressions, no longer resulting "out of the existence of a binding female destiny and character. Rather, its exact opposite".
DE GIORGIO Michela, Dissatisfied female souls, pp. 67-73
The author questions the presence and disappearance of the women's movement, as it recurs through history, by analysing frequently used words (such as 'destiny', 'soul', 'dissatisfaction', 'uneasiness') which open the way to new research fields and a different identification of historical periods.
MERELLI Maria, Collective identity and personal identity: the model of emancipation
in Modena between the fifties and the eighties, pp. 74-82
The author describes a sociological research carried out by a group of female students in Economics at Modena University on the identity of present day Modena women. Historically legitimized and recognized by an emancipation strategy stretching over the 1950s, this collective identity rules out subjectivity and its contradictions. The same contradictions emerge when the research centers on present times and analyses values, roles, behaviours as revisions and alterations of the collective social identity of emancipated women.
ROSSI DORIA Anna, Maternity, a political knot, pp. 83-90
The author recognizes the difficulty of expressing the ambivalence of female specific traits, particularly those of maternity, a dimension anyway present in women, as univocal and precise goals, for both equality and difference. She illustrates this position with an analysis of the claim for free abortion as well as the somewhat similar example of the debate on protection of female workers taking place in the first years of the century.
Polda Fortunati, Laura Mariani, Antonella Picchio, Annarita Buttafuoco, Michela De Giorgio take part in the debate on this section.
CERUTTI Simona, Introduction, pp. 103-107
On opening the section "Rediscovering sources and instruments", the author points out that the focus should not be on sources but on the way in which "we may now question the present time and approach records from the past". She gives some examples of the way in which criminal sources or oral sources have been considered prominent, and the problems derivating from their use, and concludes that "the introduction of the sexual variable in the reconstruction of any social fact has implications which must be developed, with no intervention of prominent sources".
GROPPI Angela - PELAJA Margherita, Crimes and their report. Criminal sources,
pp. 108-118
The authors' research on female criminality in Rome at the end of the 19th century provoked several queries on method, and particularly on the way judicial archives may be used as a source of women's experience, in order to comprehend their contextualized subjectivity. By contextualized subjectivity the authors mean the perception women have of themselves and the universes they refer to, as they emerge through a web of witnesses and documents relating women to different scenes and interlocutors at the same time.
NAVA Paola, Narrating and speaking of self. Oral sources, pp. 119-127
The author illustrates the political and professional itinerary guiding her research on women workers of the Modena Tobacco Manufactory from the end of the 19th century to the second world war, during which the use of "warm sources", that is to say interviews and life stories, was prominent. The methodological problems this procedure entails are here highlighted: the researcher must demand of herself to take the double stance of great participation on one side and critical distance on the other.
CAVALLO Sandra, Introduction, p. 131
The author introduces the section "History and stories: biography, autobiography, diary". She announces the issues to be discussed: self-representation, reference, and the subjective message, not seen as the representations of an autarkical self, but also as informant on relationships and context.
ZANCAN Marina, The literary text as source for a history of figures of women,
pp. 132-138
After preliminary considerations on the literary system, the author points out that female writing is mostly repetitive of models and presents rare and often subtly encoded elements of deviation from established rules.
What value do these texts, of little literary worth, have as a source for a history of women's social itineraries? How much do they say and through which disassembling and reading mechanisms can they be made to speak?
A current research by a research group the author is coordinating at Padua University investigates the literary context on one hand, and the historical sexual identity of the writing subject on the other, particularly when dealing with the female figure in sixteenth century Italy.
CACCIARI Cristina, Self-representation and relational conflict: the diaries
of Sofija and Lev Toltstoi, pp. 139-146
The results of a research conducted in a non psychoanalitical key on Sofija and Lev Tolstoi's considerable autobiographical production are here reported. The research's aim was to trace the structure of their relationship, and the conflict taking place throughout it.
The underlying dynamics are theoretically examined and the couple is identified as a relational system whose characteristic logics is circularity of behaviour, where relational rules establish also internal positions of power. From this point of view, rather than that of a true/false logics, these diaries are a valuable document.
CAVALLO Sandra, Life stories and the "biographical method",
pp. 147-152
The author gives an account of working with a group of women with whom, through trial and error, she applied the biographical method. To use this method is to have the possibility of understanding a choice or a particular behaviour within an entire biography, in other words to question what it has represented from an individual's point of view. Adopting the biographical perspective allows the researcher to trace the difference between possibilities the environment offers and subjective perception of these possibilities.
CALVI Giulia, The self and the model: the autobiography of two women workers
in the United States, pp. 153-161
The author reports on a current research into the relationship between women - mostly young and unmarried - and industrial work in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The research is centered on New York and its productive structure, split up in small and medium sized factories.
Using sociological and statistical sources, some surveys on small circumscribed groups and the autobiographies of two women workers, the author analyses "forms of writing converging in a process of collective introspection, thus putting to test ways of analysing reality which are not yet acknowledged".
Emma Scaramuzza, Anna Rossi Doria, Lucia Ferrante, Cristina Cacciari, Marina Zancan take part in the debate on this section.