Contemporary Crises, 3 (1979) 1-16 1 © Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam. Printed in the Netherlands.

NOTES FROM WITHIN THE ITALIAN WOMEN'S MOVEMENT: HOW WE TALK OF MARXISM AND FEMINISM

TAMAR PITCH

This will not be a history of the Italian women's movement. I shall try instead to describe it as it is today. This will entail information on how it was born, and its particular nature. I shall mainly try to indicate its present goals, the ongoing discussions, and the emerging points of view. These comments, I think, may prove to be of more general interest and contribute to the present practical and theoretical effort of all women to establish themselves as new historical and political actors in society.

My presentation will not be "object ive" in the accepted sense of the word. I belong to the Italian women's movement, having been part of a women's collective for four years. Within it I have lived and participated in many experiences and struggles. Some of those experiences are peculiar to my collective; others have been shared by most of the women involved in different groups. What I think and how I think ha s been shaped by the particular way in which I came into contact with the movement and by the way I lived and discussed problems and events with my collective.

The Emergence of a Feminist Women's Movement in Italy

What we call the "women 's movement" has no common organization and no fixed membership. Its usual form in Italy is that of small collectives - spontaneous gatherings of women formed on the basis of previous friend-

ship or acquaintance, and now, more frequently, informal gatherings growing out of similar work or school situations or common political activity. Women's collectives are emerging within political parties, trade unions, neighborhood and school councils - wherever this decade has witnessed in- creased political participation. While this is the ongoing process, it is hard to say whether this new sense of organization indicates the creation of a new

University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

synthesis of feminist ideas and practices, or if it is merely a revival of the practices of older collectives. What we do know is that the women involved in the movement now have a different social origin and a different history of emancipation than the so-called "historical" feminists of the late 1960s and '70s who were mostly intellectuals politicized within and through the student movement. We also know that the current themes o f the movement are developing at a time of deep economic and social crisis: a crisis of capitalist development and not within capitalist development as in 1968. As in all crises, the cost o f this crisis is especially high for women at all levels - as workers, as housewives, as clients of social services, and as femin-. ists. This is true in two senses: a) in eroding the personal spaces open for political involvement, and b) in eroding the social space for the existence of an autonomous social movement. According to one feminist however, such a crisis may at the same time offer "a real ground for the unification of women's condit ion" [ 1 ]. Thus, while the urgency of the situation has spread the ideas and practices of the movement amongst women and into situations far more diversified than ever before, the fact that the force behind this interest is a systemic crisis may have profound consequences for the theory and strategy of the whole movement.

Historically, women's collectives in Italy emerged mainly from the student movement and the new left. Women's organizations existed before, such as the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) which was born soon after the war within the Resistance. It was tied to the two historical working class parties, the Socialist and the Communist Party [2] , but much smaller groups were created during the 1960s. They emerged primarily from the area of so-called "radicalism." (In Italy this means groups involved in civil liberties struggles, usually nonviolent, anticlerical, and loosely related to a tradition of "liber- tarian" socialism which never really took root in the Italian situation.) While UDI was active in the '50s and '60s in battles for equality (emancipatory struggles for equal pay, pensions for housewives, protect ion for the working mother, etc.) the groups formed out of "radicalism" started to move in the area of contraception, birth control, etc. When the student movement and the workers' struggles in 1969 gave rise to new organizations on the left of the PC[ (Partito Comunista Italiano), women involved in the struggles at the Universities entered these organizations [3]. At the same time, feminist ideas started to circulate.

The Character of the Italian Women's Movement

While groups exist that seek no relationship with either Marxism, the working class movement, or the class struggle, by and large what we call the women's movement is characterized by a high level of "polit icization" and is

a phenomenon of the left. There are two primary reasons for this fact. One is of a general nature and has to do with the high politicization and "ideologi- zation" of social and cultural issues in Italy, the presence of a militant and socialist-oriented working class movement , and the existence of a vocal and influential Marxist culture. The other is concerned with the personal his- tories of the women who first gave a decisive push to the emerging move- ment. These women were, as I was, involved in the struggles, even if it was only in subordinate positions, at the Universities. They were "emancipated" then, though not necessarily in the sense of being career oriented. Our real emancipation was to be found in politics, in the great dream of emancipation for all. Many of us entered new left organizations where the usually implicit, but of ten explicit, norm was that you were to be totally available, totally involved in the "l ife" of the organization. Politics, in this sense, was the only non-bourgeois way to fight alienation. Some might say that the movement started precisely from the contradictions of the student movement. It was one of the most radical movements to have appeared on the Italian scene in recent years, but it nonetheless persisted in subordinating the women in- volved in it. In 1969 women students were dispatched by the males (or went with them) to distribute leaflets in front of factories. The male students thought women would be bet ter accepted by the workers. Women were, in fact, accepted in many ways, but all strongly felt their difference. The consciousness that the working class is historically a male actor was not theoretically deduced but directly, often unpleasantly, experienced in 1969. Relationships between male and female militant students were aptly described by a 1970 cartoon: a young woman, dishevelled, a phone between ear and shoulder, a broom in hand, a child in arms, and a foot keeping another child away from the washbasin, saying in the phone, "No, my husband is not home; he is out fighting for the oppressed."

Women, as a consequence, began meeting in an effort to analyze their condition. They met separately and autonomously because the analysis of the condition was tied to their effort to create a new autonomous identity. In many cases however, ties with the other left organizations were main- tained. Today, many members of these women's groups are still militants of left organizations as well. The question of the relationship between Marxism and feminism is best posed in the following form: Is the theory, and are the practices and politics, o f historical materialism useful to women's liberation today? If so, what are their implications?

Marxism and Feminism: A Theoretical Question and a Political Problem

I think it is n o t useful to discuss abstractly and theoretically the rela- tionship between "Marxism" and "feminism." Such discussion has been

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pursued to tedium with little result; Marxism and psychoanalysis, Marxism and structuralism, etc.. While I do not think that there is a finite undebatable "set of propositions" called Marxism to which one may refer, I think even less that there is a corpus of theories, concepts, and practices which we unilaterally and homogeneously define as "feminism." They are also political phenomena. This way of posing the problem is often the "theoretical" (in the sense that it skips problems instead of confronting them) counterpart of an equally abstract political stance: that of saying that all oppressions (those of women, homosexuals, blacks, workers, etc.) have the same root, capital- ism, and that the struggle for "socialism" is, without further qualification, the only possible political practice of all these groups. Where socialism and the political practice to achieve it seem to arise spontaneously from the sum of all these different, specific struggles, we find three consequences: 1) Autonomy only at the level of specificity (we may have, then, black women, black homosexual women, white housewives, and black workers, white gays, etc.). This results in lobbyism at best - a mere request for rights; 2) Inter- group relationships based on the overriding notion of "socialism," which imposes a set of definitions of what is the "revolution," and of how revolutionary groups should behave, effectively. This situation tends to (a) curtail the development of autonomous theories and practices, and (b) reduce to the same level and give the same role to movements, social groups, and aggregations formed out of the experience of d i f ferent contradictions; 3) "Socialism" remains an invocation, a theoretical a priori, unrelated to actual social and political practices.

What is most important today in the relationship between Marxism and feminism is the direction which relationships among the women's move- ments, the working class movement, and other anticapitalist movements, should take. Also what is the relationship between the struggle for women's liberation and the class struggle? This involves the problem of the women's movement in the context of neo-capitalist societies (excluding third world women), and the nature and levels of the class struggle. A redefinition of working class is also in order, together with an analysis about its centrality in the anticapitalist movement. Actually to be more concrete, I should discuss and analyze the present state of the class struggle in Italy, the level and meaning of ongoing struggles and emerging movements, what is happening in the sphere of "political mediation," etc. This is not possible here. It is clear, however, that recent feminist analyses, do not come out in isolation or as solutions to abstract theoretical problems. They emerge from a complex milieu of conflicting forces, out of a socially and politically determined environment, intervening in discussions and battles in which all the left is engaged: the nature of autonomous social movements, the meaning of ongoing social struggles, the problem of the " re form" of the state, the

centrality of the working class, the directions of the PCI at tempted "political mediation," the nature of the crisis, etc.

Discussion on these points is going on within the women's movement in Italy in m a n y ways, both implicitly and explicitly, in the practices of the movement, in the women's critiques of leftist organizations and leftist- managed struggles, and in the day-by-day contradictory process of creating and finding a new autonomous identity.

A Personal Summary of the Feminist Response to Contemporary Political Issues

The new feminists have rejected what has been historically and tradi- tionally at the core of women's struggles and movements, i.e. emancipation. They reject emancipation not only as a goal, but for the political practice it entails, the ideology it expounds, and the general social and political projects on which it is implicitly based. Emancipatory struggles have been struggles for equality with men and for economic independence. While emancipation may be a necessary prerequisite, the feminists contend it leaves unchanged the real roots of women's oppression; therefore, it cannot be the final goal, and even struggles to achieve the "tradit ional" goals should be inspired and informed by different aims and a different ideology - that of "liberation" [4]. What is ~'equality," beyond being a mask for inequality? Feminists maintain the real meaning of equality is the right to negate one's own self and become like men. "Equal i ty" in this sense is identified with the goal of outside employment , which is seen as the only means to achieve full societal status. This "equal i ty" offers a status acquired through new economic independence but only through the complete acceptance of the values, models, and standards that rule present reality. It must be asked what is outside work for women? Often it is merely a stressing addition to one's own "real" job within the home. Work in this society is alienated and alienating, both for women a n d men, and cannot therefore be assumed to be inherently good or the primary concern of women's struggles. " . . . work for wages is to sell one's self to a boss; why should women accept it?" [5]. The point, some say, is not to have a better share of this society but to radically change it. Emancipation, at best, means " to have a better share," a t an i n c r e d i b l e

c o s t - the cost of negating ourselves as women, denying the specificity of our oppression, the reality and radicality of our needs, and the general meaning women's needs have for the changing of society.

This is not to say the women's movement does not or should not involve itself with the problem of work for women or of women at work. The question is h o w to avoid being reductionist, how to bring into every problem

the totality and specificity of our oppression. Indeed, what the Italian feminists feel the need of today is a feminist analysis of work. An analysis that starts from the specifity of women's oppression and, while not regarding outside employment as the liberating factor, goes beyond both the wages for housework goal and the social services goal of emancipatory movements. The wages for housework movement, while born in Italy, has not had much following here. Apart from the economic analysis, what is rejected is the movements "vindicationism"(rivendicazionismo). Wages for housework solves the problem of women's oppression by putting a price to suffering, as if money could alleviate the housewife's alienation, her body's exploitation, her pain or her loneliness. Nor are social services by themselves the solution, unless we know why we want them, how and by whom they should be managed, and what should they be for. This entails an analysis that starts from our sexuality, our reproductive role, our notion and definition of motherhood, etc.

Such an analysis of work is not as yet a widespread tool. It is, however, starting within the small groups. What has emerged is still in the form of extended personal experience: "It is impossible for a woman to separate work from self-confirmation. Working to support one's self, where earning, getting money for being exploited, appears almost as a theft . . . . We work to feel we exist, to have a socially recognized role beyond the repro-

d u c t i v e . . . " [6]. Emancipatory struggles involve traditional political practices: campaigns

of information and mobilizing, pressures on the political forces and on the State institutions, etc. Movements for emancipation have accepted two things: 1) the principle of delegation; 2) the existing framework and defini- tion of "politics" with the separate character of its organizational forms and of its language.

The ideology of emancipation can be vindicationist or, at best, as it was in Italy, reformist. Since the Italian women's movement fighting for emancipa- tion was tied to the PCI and PSI, its ideology was inscribed within the struggle for socialism where the specificity of the "women's question" (as it was traditionally called) was acknowledged either in terms of general stra- t e g y - first, the social revolution then we will solve the question of women - or in terms of the general "cultural backwardness" of Italy, where women were to be considered within the question of catholicism and the catholic masses and thus a part of the problem of "modernizat ion."

The contemporary feminists' critique of these two perspectives emerges from a growing awareness of the roots of women's condition, an analysis of their oppression, and from the cultural battles of the "70s (over divorce and abortion). It also emerges, as we shall see, from the feminists' struggles and their practice within the organizations of the left. The theory of women's

issues as the second step in a political strategy has been proved ineffective by the experience of previous socialist revolutions and is based on a reductionist definition of politics and revolution in which a whole sphere of reality - the "private," everyday life and sexuality is left to its apparent "natural- i ty" - never assessed in its historicity, never fully questioned and brought into the political realm even by those who will say that the relationship of "s t ructure" to "superstructure" is "dialectical" and not of a deterministic nature. This theory also leaves out o f any revolutionary project half of the human population. What kind of project is it, how "revolut ionary" an organization can it be, that leaves out, does not stop to consider, is not shaken in its faith, by the fact that half of humankind is not included, does not participate, is only marginally involved because of a separation which was brought about by capitalism itself: the separation between the public and private spheres?

The "women 's question" is not a problem of modernization either. This approach fully appeared in the battle's over the divorce referendum and again, though to a pesser extent, during the abortion debate. Divorce was an embarrassing issue for the left. The Christian Democracy and the right used it to provoke a split within the popular masses along religious lines, and they heavily appealed to women (as the "weak spouse" and as traditionally Catho- lic) to repeal the taw. Indeed they hoped to exploit, as they had until then, an unchallenged Catholic hegemony over the private sphere and women in it. The left then "polit ized" the battle, in the sense of showing its instrumental meaning for a weakening of the popular masses, but without attempting a radical critique of the family. Divorce was a "modernizing," rationalizing element of social life - as abortion was to be later [7]. On this point the left found allies in all the "modernizing" forces of Italy (although some of them may have been uncertain over the extremely politicized tone of the battle). Women joined the struggle for divorce, but while denouncing the exploitation of their subordination by the conservative forces, they also denounced the timidity of the left in not wanting to engage in a more profound analysis of the family. They showed the political necessity to win the referendum - but also the insufficiency of the goal, how it was tackled, and of the political analysis on which it rested.

Divorce and abortion were presented as civil rights issues. Women denied this approach. Their struggle has been widespread and more precise on the abortion issue [8] . Abortion is shown by feminists as being tied to mother- hood and sexuality, more fundamentally to a condition of exploitation of women's bodies. Not a civil right then, not a "modernizing" battle: free abortion, assisted and on demand, is recognized as a defensive aim but a necessary one to start gaining control over our own bodies.

The critique of "modernizat ion" and "rationalization" is at the core of

the refusal of the concept of emancipation. It is, indeed, at the base of the bracketing of the world of labor: "to bracket the universe of labor is at the same time radicalism, a qualitative critique of how the world of labor is organized (therefore a refusal to be flattened down to a modernization), but it is also an attempt at creating a new principle of r e a l i t y . . , transcending the dimension of labor, which traditionally, in the history of the working class movement, was the key element of bracketing labor" [9].

"The subjectively revolutionary characteristic of the new feminism emerged from the evident insufficiency, nay from the bankruptcy of the politics of emancipation; it emerges as a political critique of the institutions within which women's oppression expresses itself: the family, domestic labor, marginal labor; but also as a critique of the institution of delegated democracy, whose partiality emerged not only with a sign of class but with a sign of sex (the newspaper is male, the party is male, the school is male, and so are culture, the State, politics)" [101.

The Personal Is Political

The women's movement was born then on a new materialistic critique of the family, as the place of origin and reproduction of women's oppression public inequality (that being dealt with by parties, trade union, s, etc.) being only the visible consequence of it. This materialistic critique emerges from an analysis and reconstruction of the ways of individual, personal oppress- ion, starting from the alienation and exploitation of one's own body. This analysis is conducted within small groups, where every woman starts from herself, her own individual experience, her own way of living and looking at things. This is a polit ical practice in two ways. First, in the sense that for the first time women find and create their own groups. For many it will be the first time they break away from their isolation without a man as mentor and sponsor. Also the practice of consciousness-raising (I suspect this term may have, by now, a different meaning in Italy from its original one: we talk, more precisely, of a process of self-analysis), the practice of starting from oneself, questions the bourgeois separation between the public and the private, questions the traditional ways of doing politics, shows the original m a n - w o m a n contradiction in all facets of social life, of interpersonal rela- tionships, and of political organizations. The phrase "politicity of the 'personal'" (il personale e pol i t ico) is not only the immediate expression of the refusal of our private oppression, but also an instrument in the struggle for a project of recomposition of total reality. Hence, starting from ourselves is not only a way to find the elements of our oppression but a total political practice. The discovery of subjectivity, of affectivity, has the meaning of the

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proposal of an analysis of reality which may integrate what the bourgeois dominat ion has divided.

The Politics of the Young and the Politics of Women

The importance of "subjectivity," of sexuality, of affectivity, of the critique of the family, even the critique of everyday life is not new either in revolutionary theory or in actual struggles. It was precisely the student movement in different countries that resurrected these themes, rereading the Frankfurt School on the family, Reich on sex, attempting new forms of communal living, introducing a critique of personal relationships, denouncing authoritarianism and leaderism, proclaiming imagination au povoir. The women's movement comes later, but as one feminist says, "It 's a coming later to go beyond" [1 1], starting from the denunciation of the incompleteness of a project of radical social revolution that considers un- modifiable the way in which the m a n - w o m e n relationship is socially or- ganized. It is a going beyond which is possible precisely because of what makes women new historical actors. The students' critique of the family was based on the abstract discovery of the family as an oppressive institution. The students discovered in the family (following Frankfurtian vulgarizations) the principle of authority. The family thus appeared - without roles being distinguished within it - as the abstract cage for the political and existential development of the young. Women, however, cannot exorcise the family in this way. The family is present implicitly, even where it is not there in fact, in the heads and bodies of women socialized to subordination. Liberation cannot be achieved by an act of will, forgetting, or attempting to deny this presence. The students had criticized the separation between politics and society, one's own social behavior and one's own political militance - i n a word, the professionalization of politics. Women go beyond this critique, denouncing the conflict between private and sociopolitical spheres. Students practiced their critique of the separation of politics by occupying their universities, interrupting their classes, introducing countercourses. The small groups, the social meetings amongst women are the feminist way to fight the separation of the "private." Both students and women use an inductive method for their political growth to directly experience the contra- dictions [12]. The students have the advantage of already living in immediate confrontat ion with a social institution, the school. What they have to discover are the links between this institution and the others: the State, the police, the factory. For the women " the move from the particular to the general is essentially a move from one woman to all women: from the idea of herself as impotent because of destiny to the discovery of herself and

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the others as oppressed" [13]. This discovery may, and does, happen with-. out an immediate confrontation with society. The students, however, have leapt to the search for more universal links, a step in which they risk losing their identity, their autonomy and their specificity. This is also one of the reasons they have rapidly forgotten the previously attempted critique of the "private" - only one of the reasons, however, and not the fundamental one. The critique of the "private" can, today, be brought about in a materialistic way as a contribution to the revolution only by those actors whose oppres- sion, whose life, is defined within this sphere. This critique is different from the critique of ideology and of culture: it starts from, and takes the point of view of praxis. It is inextricably tied to the practice of a historical political subject: women and the women's movement. Here may lie the real connec- tion of women with the class struggle and its theory.

The Critique of Everyday Life

The analysis of everyday life is inextricably tied to the analysis of women's historical subordination. With the separation between public and private brought about by capitalism, the private sphere and everyday life are first of all defined by the family, by its processes, by the way relationships within it are shaped and reproduced. Within this separation the family appears to have assumed the function of reproducing values and behavior models consistent and coextensive with the factory-dominated world, but hidden from consciousness insofar as they do not appear external to the individual but internal, "natural," and therefore invisible. This is widely known, although rarely remembered by the political practice of the left. Analyses have been attempted to break up the veil of the "natu(al," the obvious, the taken-for-granted: all of them, however, with partial or very ambiguous results. The cause is that none of these analyses considered central the fundamental relationship of domination/subordination which is the core of the relationship between men and women and which historically has its privileged place of expression within the private sphere. Everyday life shall never be penetrated if this relationship is not understood and investi- gated. It cannot, furthermore, be investigated in any other way but by starting from the consciousness that women have, or are developing, of it. If the obscurity of everyday life is born in the home from the invisibility and "naturality" of what happens in the home, then women, who historically guard and preside over the home, are the protagonists of the "revealing" process. This is the 1968 project, redefined and enriched by being founded not in the abstract consciousness of young people but in the material contradictions of women's lives (and history).

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In this sense women's historical diversity, that diversity defined by their subordination, becomes a potential source of critique and struggle: precisely because this marginalization came about within the social body through the segregation not only of an actor but of an entire sphere of existence over which that actor was delegated to preside. Here lies the absolute necessity for the women's movement not to skip the fact of their historical diversity. To do so would mean to accept an emancipation which would leave domina- tion hidden and would have women (at best) participating in a "publ ic" sphere distorted by this domination.

Historically, women managed everyday life so that it remained hidden to men. In capitalism where typically labor is concealed, labor is made visible in two ways: through salary and through the organization of labor. But in the home neither o f the two conditions is present: women's labor is invisible to man; it is something which women do, not because they have had a specific learning but, because of their biology. It is not defined as work: it is simply the natural expression of a biologically determined task. Women have colla- borated in this hiding: for them too their work is somehow natural - but, no matter how unconsciously, it is not invisible to them. Everyday it poses problems, asks for choices to be made: women have a practical and concrete knowledge of the "private." One of the reasons why this sphere is inaccess- ible to men may be that women have so skillfully managed and dealt with it. (The other fundamental reason is that the dominat ion-subord ina t ion rela- tion which defines the private starts with the expropriation and exploitation of women's bodies and sexuality.)

Of course, if all women practically know everyday life's problematics and deal technically with its difficulties, this does not mean they are also conscious of its not being natural, of its being historical and social as much as men's work. This consciousness is hidden by education, by isolation, etc. When it emerges, and it can emerge and grow only collectively within a (political) pro/ect, it is made up of the previous practical knowledge, analyzed, and brought to consciousness. In this process the whole of "every- day" life is made historical and social life can be made whole again. This integration will not be a sum: both the "publ ic" and the "private" will end up profoundly changed. What this will entail for the entire political project of change remains to be seen.

Consciousness raising is the primary means by which we penetrate the "natural i ty" of everyday life [ 14]. It is interesting to note how this method of analysis develops out of a type of communication and relationship typical of t h e subordinated condition - out o f immediacy, out of a logic heavily tied to the concrete nature and predictability of everyday tasks. Conscious- ness raising shows how a method of communication typical of subordina- tion, when it is criticized and consciously redefined, may become the best

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method by which to analyze one's own oppression, the best practice by which to fight it.

The Women's Movement and the Organizations of the Left

What was, is, must be, then the relationship between feminists and leftist organizations?

The movement from the start proclaimed its separateness and its autonomy. Separateness meant to start meeting and organizing as w o m e n and only among women - therefore not as workers, housewives, typists, etc.. Meeting as women was, o f course, a scandal: an unheard of mixing of the social classes. What has Mrs. Agnelli (wife of the Fiat magnate) in common with a southern peasant? Class differences inevitably arise as contradictions within collectives and also within different parts of the movement; but up to now, they are reckoned with as they emerge in shaping each individual woman's experiences. They have not - a n d need not necessarily, block the process toward a unitary project of liberation. "Where for the students, the problem of the 'relationship with workers' became immediately a polit ical problem, for the women it remains a social relationship, the relationship with proletarian women. Women tend to discover the working class with in their movement - while finding the party o u t s i d e . . . " [ 15 ].

Autonomy meant not only to organize ourselves but to be able to determine our goals and our struggles by ourselves. It meant we did not want to recognize outside engagements; we did not want to engage ourselves in struggles not decided by ourselves. This proved contradictory and, although theoretically correct, difficult to do. Contradictory because engagements to which women, if not the movement, responded were inevitable, e.g., elec- tions and referendums. As long as the movement organized itself .wholly upon its specificity, a curious phenomenon was possible: women would not engage themselves as feminists but instead engaged themselves as militants of other organizations. This occurred, for example, during the last elections. We call this phenomena "double militancy" and it continues to be a rather extensive practice. It involves, especially, women of the extraparliamentary left organizations, but also women of the PGI and PSI. The first phase was the one I described, rather similar to the relationship between trade union and party. But because the women's movement was not vindicationist, friction existed because the women wanted their party organization to fully recognize their militancy in the movement as their proper political work, while the organizations insisted on seeing it as only partial, secondary, and valid only as long as that work was functional and coincident with the ends of the organizations themselves. As the critique of traditional politics grew

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and deepened in the movement , however, women tried to bring it to the attention of political organizations: this phase is known as the a t tempt at "feministizing the party." It was a very painful and shocking process. Lot ta Continua did not survive its Rimini conference where LC women confronted the organization frontally on all issues, on all behaviors, forcing contradic- tions to be faced (the m a n - w o m e n one first o f all) in all the discussions, in all the analyses. Women started to abandon PDUP (Partito di Unitg Proletaria) and AO (Avanguardia Operaia) (LC, PDUP, AO are the main groups at the

left of the PCI), many silently, many publicly and collectively stating their reasons [16]. It was a process that involved much suffering. It meant going to the roots of one's own most cherished beliefs, one's own most significant and passionate choices:

For all of us, the trigger was the refusal o f being made to feel guilty for our scarce involvement in the 'par ty. ' All of us wanted, as a pure formali ty, the par ty to recognize our mil i tancy in the feminist movement as a par ty militancy. A militancy, o f course, upon the t imes and issues of the movement , not those imposed by the party. Many of us c r i t i c i z e . . , leninism [17] .

The revolutionary left has discovered the personal as a terrain of contradict ions relevant at the level of political l i n e . . . Then women are requested to make to others unders tand, to invest energies and hopes in teaching m e n the myster ious science o f ' the personal ' o f which women are the repositories" [18] .

The problem, however, remains bo th in our personal lives and at the general level: how can the feminist struggle be extended to all aspects of society? How to use those same critical instruments of consciousness raising to change not only ourselves but also the "outs ide" world, the world of labor, of culture, etc. How in other words not to be subordinated in fact to programs, projects, goals, devised by others? This happens as long as we still refer (or are obliged to refer) to others (parties, organizations) as the totalizing forces; as long as we do not confront the social sphere in toto, and in so doing our relationship with politics. The contradiction here is evident: the contradiction between the engagements and contents of au tonomy and specificity and the engagements and contents of the "general." "Politics, the 'general,' have been so far an element of division, not so much because they were outside our experience, but because they were presented in terms that reproduced our s u b o r d i n a t i o n . . . The clearest example was the (last) elec- tion. A good part of the movement accepted and lived parties as the only mediators of politics in its t o t a l i t y . . . " [19]. We should, instead, have discussed the problem of our point of view on institutions, the government, power. A point of view growing out of our being part of all social contra- dictions. Understanding the "personal," indeed, does not mean staying and confirming ourselves within our specificity. It means, on the contrary, to start from it to investigate all reality. It means to use the method of starting from

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ourselves to confront all questions. This is the problem now open and being discussed within the Italian feminist movement. Positions diverge. But I agree with those who say, "Behind the refusal to confront this kind of problem we find both a continuing notion of autonomy as a defense from the outside and a more or less conscious feeling of inadequacy towards politics as the general and the t o t a l . . . Also, the fear that politics may divide us along lines external to our being women" [20].

This project poses different kinds of problems, as to the relationship with the working class movement and its parties, than before. It poses, for example, the problem of communication over the homogeneity or compat- ibility of different political projects. This communication is possible if the existence of different social movements, organizing upon their contradic- tions (and from those developing a totalizing point of view on society) is accepted. This means " p l u r a l i s m " - a pluralism different from the anglo- saxon kind, but also, perhaps, different from the pluralism the PCI is talking about today in I t a l y - a pluralism of forces that converge on a project, socialism we may still call it, but a socialism continually redefined and enriched by the different contributions. A pluralism, also, where the hegemony of a force upon others may be recognized for different questions at different times. The hegemony of the women's movement over the contradictions o f everyday life, relationships between human beings, sexuality, must be acknowledged because only the women can today say something, only the women have spoken (and can speak) of the "personal." "Only in relation to the production of struggles for liberation, and only within liberation struggles, is it legitimate to speak of hegemony: otherwise we risk having actors bend down to the violence of imposed, but not necessarily liberating, hegemonic contents" [21]. On the other hand, it is necessary also that the forces of the working class assume the contradiction m a n - w o m a n as a fundamental one. How? Consciousness for the working class seemed to easily arise from the factory situation. This mechanism is today, however, inadequate. "In the factories workers may develop a class consciousness; they may also . . . start developing a consciousness of them- selves as individuals, but it is only one side of the development of proletarian individuali ty. . . The other side, where they are at the same time exploited and exploiters, alienated and subtractors of power, is not discussed" [22].

For them too the process of starting from themselves and their own contradictions is necessary. This will not be a "male consciousness raising," because men live only in the public sphere; but it will be an analysis of their power relationships. Without this, communication may be very difficult. Without this, no revolutionary project is really possible.

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Epilogue: June 1978

This article was written in the summer of 1977. Many things have happened in the meantime, which have changed the general political scene. Among them: 1) the entry of the PCI in the majority supporting the government; 2) the rise of (apparently left wing) terrorism and the re- pressive response of the State which has resulted in a reduction of political action for grassroots social movements and, in general, in a segregation and management of "politics" within the very top of the traditional political parties; and 3) the near-disappearance of organizations at the left of the PCI. For the women's movement: the split between the so-called "historical feminists" and a growing area of very young women often influenced by the rhetoric of "armed struggle" of the "Workers' Autonomy" movement, showed the limits of the feminist refusal of any kind of organization and the frailty of the political culture we thought we had built. The women's movement also suffers from the general political atmosphere, like other movements, though more so. The "confiscation" of politics by (the secreta- ries of) the parties (plus the economic crisis) has resulted on the one hand in widespread frustration and indifference, and on the other hand, in a "going back to the 'private'," which consolidates the "private" as the traditional refuge from the disappointing "outside." Yet, the movement's ideas and practices are, less visibly than before, continuing to spread, in situations and ways often unknown to the "historical" feminists. It is possible that, in better times, the women's movement will show itself to be even stronger and more rooted in Italian society than before: it surely is already the only still-existing pervasive social movement, outside of the organized working class, on the left in Italy.

The abortion bill was approved this May. The political parties (PCI and PSI included) found a common agreement by introducing two reactionary corrections to the original bill: 1) the "possibility" for the father of the fetus to be present with the woman at her interview with the doctor; 2) girls under 18 years of age must obtain their parents' permission to get an abortion. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church is launching a campaign directed at doctors, threatening them with excommunication if they do not choose the conscientious objection clause in the bill.

Notes

1 Menapace, L. (1977). "Le cause strutturali del nuovo femminismo,"Problemi del Socialismo, 4:175. 2 For a history o f UDI see Ascoli, G. (1976). "L 'UDI tra emancipazione e liberazione," Problemi del

Socialismo , 4:109:159 .

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3 Contrary to the experience of other countries the early themes of the student movement - anti- authoritarianism, ant i - ins t i tut ional ism- were never (or not for long) the key points o f the analyses and elaborations of the Italian new left. Even before 1967 the new left was involved in problems relating to the organization of labor, the reinterpretation of the nature and role of the factory in neocapitalist society, the analysis o f the concept "mass-worker," etc.

4 This is, first o f all, a painful personal process. Many of us are "emancipated" women. We know the costs; they have been so high that it is psychologically hard to renounce those values and models, even if they have proved an illusion, a failure, for us.

5 AA.VV. (1972). La coscienza di sfruttata, Milano: Mazzotta, p. 74. 6 Usai, A. (1977). In AA.VV., Bisogni, crisi della militanza, organizzazione proletaria, Roma: Savelli,

p. 175. 7 The abortion question is far from being solved. In fact, it was reopened after an agreement

appeared to have been reached on a bill at the Senate. With a numerical majority of Senators apparently in favor, a Christian Democratic resolution stopping all discussion on this bill, and preventing the possibility of its being presented again before six months, was surprisingly approved. It probably was a political maneuvre not having much to do with the abortion issue itself. But it was a lesson for the women's movement, showing the contradictions and risks of delegating one's own struggles to somebody else's dealing.

8 See for a wider discussion Falteri, P., Michela, R., Papa, C., Pitch, T. (1976). The Recent Italian Legislation on Women and the Family, papbr presented at the 4th Conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, Vienna.

9 Gramaglia, M. (1976). "1968: I1 venir dopo e l 'andar oltre del movimento femminista," Problemi del Socialismo, 4:187.

10 Menapace, L. op. cit., p. 173. 11 Gramaglia, M. op. cit. 12 "Students" is intended as a self-identifying category as it was used in 1868. 13 Gramaglia, M. op. cit., p. 180. 14 Sociologists have, especially recently, tried various ways to penetrate the obscurity of everyday

life. But the methods of analysis they have devised are as partial and ambiguous as their theories. Here the subject is so "near" that it is impossible not to take up again the old, always badly solved, problem of the relationship subject/object o f research. While participatory observation (and the old Weberian Verstehen) tried to approach it through emphatic identification (an identification, however, "neutral ," and contradictory insofar as it assumes both the observer's detachment, necessary for science, and his/her abdication to his/her cultural models), here the subjects' assuming directly the analysis o f themselves, when the analysis is conscious and controlled (and in the case of consciousness raising it is, because it is done collectively), guarantees an exploration far beyond the mere description of everyday life. Everyday life stands naked in front of our eyes, in its concreteness and in detail, in its historicity, in its being based upon a domination and a subordination. Ethnomethodologists have gone farther than most in elaborating" a theory and method of analysis of everyday life. They too, however, in isolating the research situation make it available to description; but the situation itself remains uncomprehensible. They repeat the anthropologists ' error of pretending to explain culture with culture. The hidden norms of common sense are made visible, but their origin and function remain unexplained. The obvious, the taken for granted, is in fact confirmed again as the only possible reality even if it is a "non-natural," social reality. For a wider discussion see Pitch, T. (1977) Sociologia Alternativa e Nuova Sinistra negli Stati Uniti d'America, Firenze: La Nuova Italia.

15 Gramaglia, M., op. cit., p. 195. 16 "Lettera delle femministe di Bologna," I1 Manifesto, 11/23/76. 17 Usai, A., op. cit., p. 180. 18 Bravo, A., Del Boca, D., Scaraffia, L. (1977). "Gli angeli del personale," Quaderni Piacentini,

62-63 :80 . 19 Ibid. 20 Bravo, A., Del, D., Scaraffia, L., op. cit., p. 81. 21 Usai, A., op. cir., p. 182. 22 Usau, A., op. cit., p. 177.