THEthe courage to be shy (latest book by psychoanalyst Massimo Ammaniti). The courage to change your lifelong seller by Umberto Longoni. And the courage to say “MeToo” (the hashtag born in 2017). We always talk about the “courage to”: speak up, rebel, vote, love, fight, be yourself. But what is it absolutely? Paolo Borzacchielloan expert in linguistic intelligence, states with a hint of provocation that “courage does not exist, not as an entity in itself at least, but as the result of actions, training and sacrifice”. Unfortunately, there is no school, no course, no master’s degree. AND the word “courage” is a shell that can fill with different meanings depending on the times and generations.
What is women’s courage?
Let’s think of a story like that of Bianca Milesi, artist, patriot, friend of Alessandro Manzoni, brought to light in the novel The white heroine by Carla Milesi (they are not relatives, he is keen to say). «Born in 1790 to a bourgeois family, Bianca discovered politics, frequented the Carbonari, met Andrea Appiani, Lord Byron, Vincenzo Monti and Stendhal. Arrested and released, on the run for years across half of Europe, she never ceases to be liberal. This was the most courage an intelligent, restless woman could express in the 1800s, but has anything really changed? It’s always a question of deciding which side to take».
Stories of female courage, from the post-war period to ’68
It was like this during Fascism, the Second World War, the Resistance. But who knows why courage has always been considered masculine, whereas female history is full of little-told gestures. Giorgio van Straten did it with The rebel. Extraordinary life of Nada Parri (Laterza), ua woman who abandons everything and climbs the mountains to reach the partisans together with her love, the German deserter Hermann Wilkens. Walter Veltroni did it with Iris Versari (Iris, freedomRizzoli), also a partisan, killed at the age of twenty in August 1944.
After the war there was the courage to create a more just society with democracy. In ’68 there was the aim of protesting, bringing imagination to power, asking for the impossible.
The feminist wave of the 70s
AND in the 70s? For the writer Lidia Ravera it was about breaking the mold: «We gave a push to what was our inevitable destiny: to go from a father to a husband, get married, have children. There were centuries of stereotypes. We dismantled relationships between couples that weren’t working, deconstructed the conversation about love by attacking boyfriends, boyfriends and husbands head-on. We are the first generation that asked for respect. At 18-20 years old it took courage to carry out a reckless program like this. I tried the open couple, a right idea, because possession was bourgeois. I tried with three companions and it didn’t work, but it was a courageous theory of relationship renewal, and it cost us tears and blood, like all changes. It took the courage of solitude…».
The courage of women to leave their comfort zone
The powerful feminist wave then fragmented into a thousand streams. Momentum translated into careers, in the (tiring) entry into professions considered more masculine: judiciary, police, finance, newspapers. He says Laura Silvia Battaglia, journalist and documentary maker, reporter from crisis areas (Yemen, Iran, Syria) since 2007 and author of an essay that is causing discussion, The partisans of Allah (Mondadori): «I consider it an achievement to have seen firsthand and to be able to talk about what happens outside our comfort zone. Did it take courage to do it? Certain. Did I risk it? Often. In 2017 I also received death threats. But the greatest and most necessary courage is to go beyond appearances to understand what is happening.”
For others, courage lies in rewriting your life. Vicky Tsai, born in 1978which created Tatcha, a skincare brand sold in 2019 to Unilever for 500 million dollars, owes its astonishing results to the decision to leave a well-paying job at the World Financial Center in New York: «I was in burnout (chronic stress syndrome, ed.). I traveled a long time and stopped in Japan where I learned balance from the monks and the power of ritual from the geisha. To finance my project I sold the engagement ring…I founded the philanthropic initiative Beautiful Faces, Beautiful Futures and I support literacy campaigns. Extraordinary girls who, without education, could have become victims of forced labor, child marriage, or prostitution are now becoming educated women.”
“The Crushes” of Generation X, between work, teenage children, elderly parents
But, no matter how many victories we try to recount, we live in a world where it is complicated to stay as a couple, to be mothers and fathers (there has never been so much manuals and so much disorientation). Laura Turuani, psychologist at the Minotauro Institute in Milanphotographer the situation of Generation X in their fifties (1965-1980): teenage children, had after 30 and up to 40, work, parents in their fourth age with health problems and loneliness. He called them “The Schiacciate”. They have (and must have) great courage.
But Millennials and the “older” part of Gen Z, girls immersed in fluid relationships, also need a lot of it. It takes courage to be a feminist in an era that is emptying the word itself of meaning, as they tell in the choral essay Hands off feminism (Rizzoli) Rosi Braidotti, Giorgia Serughetti and Jennifer Guerra.
The myth of the powerful woman is shattered
Jennifer herself, thirty years old, admits with great realism: «Our courage is to move forward day by day, it is to survive. We grew up with a triumphalistic narrative: “if you want, you can”. But that’s not the case. We have starvation wages, we can’t buy a house, have children, we just can’t do it. None of us in our thirties, or even in our twenties, have the myth of the powerful woman. The fact that someone becomes CEO has no effect on our lives. We delude ourselves into preaching feminism, we consume it on social media and then we struggle to arrive at a concrete political transition. Courage is thinking with our head in a society obsessed with security. It is accepting that you have no control over your life, over your desires. I also talk about relationships. The new words that define them are evidence of constant analysis. I’m not talking about jumping in without a parachute, but about getting rid of the need to control everything.”
The risk of falling back on the private sector
There is a risk of falling back on the private sector. The feminist newsletter The Period also sees it in the song To my country by Serena Brancale, Levante, Delia. It’s a postcard: the slow life of the South, the relatives, “the ladies on the chairs”, the lights always on, the squares, the saints, the “return home”.
What to do? Don’t give up invites Ilaria Capua, a very famous scientist, with the title of her latest book (Rizzoli). It’s a slogan and a piece of advice. Tstay strong through a bouquet of virtues that she calls “resistosphere”: perseverance, determination, resourcefulness, resilience, curiosity, discernment, self-esteem and tolerance. In a word, courage.
