AND‘ July 1970 and suddenly Posters appear on the streets of Rome and Milan. A set of scathing thoughts burst onto the walls, opened by a quote from Olympe de Gouges, author in 1791, during the French Revolution, of Declaration of the rights of women and citizens: «Will women always be divided from each other? Will they never form a single body?». The question of the French writer, guillotined in 1793 for her precursory ideas, opens what constitutes the debut writing of Rivolta Femminile, one of the first Italian all-female feminist groups of the Seventies.
«Woman should not be defined in relation to man. Both our struggle and our freedom are based on this conscience”, is only the first of almost 60 lapidary statements that advance one after the other, speaking of necessary liberations and oppressions that are no longer tolerable, of virginity, chastity and infidelity as repressive constraints, of abortion and marriage, of motherhood, sexuality and work. Everything must be called into question by women so that they can rethink their lives with a new meaning. It is the message of the text closed by the peremptory: «We only communicate with women».
That explosive manifesto marks one of the most important moments in the history of the feminist movement in Italy. It certainly didn’t come out of nowhere. An entire spring thinking, freely expressing in synthetic sentences the reactions to the discovery “that we had the right to talk about ourselves and that inferiority was oppression”: this is how Carla Lonzi will describe that experience marked by feminism. It is she, together with the artist Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, writer and journalist, who constitutes the founding nucleus of the group. And if the manifesto is the result of an elaboration and a relationship between several women, it was mainly Lonzi who took care of its drafting, she was the creator of the form of that programmatic declaration that wanted to upset and change everything.
Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), was an art critic. Then, the awareness of feminism, which she defined as “my party”. (Photo: Courtesy Battista Lena – Carla Lonzi Fund)
«Perhaps Carla Lonzi is the most loved feminist thinker in the world» writes the philosopher Annarosa Buttarelli in the incipit of the short introductory note to the new edition, of which she is the editor, published by La Tartaruga, Of We spit on Hegel and other writingsa selection of works that, more than 50 years after their appearance, have not lost their disruptive effect. They retain all the dazzling strength of their author who has always eluded categories and identifications with her dazzling complexity.
Too large a family
Born in Florence on 6 March 1931, Carla was the first daughter of Agostino Lonzi, who in those years was starting a small industry, and of Giulia Matteini, a Piedmontese girl with a teacher’s diploma that had never been used. The arrival of her sister Lidia, who will later be followed by Marta and the other brothers Vittorio and Alfredo, shocks Lonzi in such a way that it gives her the sensation of having lost the affection of her parents.
At 9 years old he manifested the need to live far from the family unit, he asked to remain in the Badia di Ripoli boarding school, where he had spent the summer of 1940. He remained there until he was 13 and was then reunited, by his father’s will, with his family.
After classical high school, he studied Art History at the University of Florence. He comes to Paris to escape disappointmentand tested when the first boy she falls in love with gets engaged to her sister Lidia. It’s the period when his health begins to deteriorate with inflammation of the lungs, as if all the internal work that has been trembling incessantly inside her since she was little had reverberated physically, undermining her. In the French capital she became passionate about the world of theater and scenography to which, once she returned to Florence in 1956, she dedicated her thesis entitled Relationships between the stage and the figurative arts since the end of the 19th centuryconsidered so innovative and original that it could open the doors of the academic world.
Carla Lonzi, however, refuses that type of career, instead he chooses to try his hand at art criticism between Rome, Milan, Turin and the United States, discovering new talents, writing for magazines, curating exhibitions of the most important Italian and foreign avant-garde artists of the time. A journey culminating in the book Autoritratto, considered an epochal text, in which conversations recorded on the tape recorder with 14 artists (the only woman is Carla Accardi) are assembled in the form of collages through which Lonzi distances himself from the traditional role of critic, to investigate the soul of artistic personalities and the secrets of creativity, seeking that authenticity that he has always wanted to discover.
But art is not the world in which one can fully recognize oneself. She distances herself from it. Not entirely, because in his life until the end there will be one of the artists he interviewed, the sculptor Pietro Consagra, her partner after the end of her marriage to the chemist Mario Lena, with whom she had her son Battista. Meanwhile, the feminist tide is arriving all over the world and for Lonzi it is a revelation, like the coming true of a prophecy she has long awaited. «In this outlet I realized that an identification of myself was automatically emerging, which until then had been left suspended and in the impossibility of which I had consumed an infinite amount of energy. This is how I arrived at feminism, which was my celebration” He says.
The new edition of the famous book by Carla Lonzi (ed. La Tartaruga)
After the publication of the manifesto, again in 1970, Lonzi released the first of the legendary green booklets (the publications of the Scritti di Rivolta Femminile publishing house, founded with Carla Accardi): Let’s spit on Hegel. The title is provocative, the content is incendiary. Considered one of the milestones of feminism, translated abroad, it is a book of denunciation, a cry of anger and redemption in which Lonzi incites women to reject the culture based on the male model with the gesture of making a clean sweep of everything the one that has excluded and oppressed them for centuries.
It is refuting the philosophy conceived by men and so-called revolutionary ideologies such as Marxism, it is demolishing a violent and silencing history, acting to dismantle a system
system of patriarchal power that conditions women by depriving them of freedom and the possibility of being fully themselves.
Female pleasure at the center
«The unforeseen destiny of the world lies in starting the journey again to travel it with woman as the subject» writes Lonzi. Starting from the recognition of women and the rediscovery of free sexuality in all forms with female pleasure placed at the center of the scene, as she explains in The clitoral woman and the vaginal woman.
In Shut up, actually speak. Diary of a feminist Lonzi talks about himself outside of any convention and literary canon, in a mix of biography, self-awareness, poems and thoughts; in Vai pure, a dialogue recorded and then transcribed with Pietro Consagra, he instead fixes the moment of summary of a relationship on irreconcilable points of two individuals who recognize each other as two cultures: «that of the woman who tries to lay the foundations for her recognition, that of man who refers to the needs of “what his needs are”.
Lonzi will never stop writing, asking questions, radically analyzing everything around her down to the last one. A tumor of hers killed her at just 51 years old in Turicchi, the farm she purchased in Chianti where she loved to take refuge from the most pressing anxieties of her life. What remains of her is the power of a brilliant mind, her divergent thoughts that translate into words with the effect of thunder. Still capable of moving, inspiring, generating reflections, of making living reality flare up, the one that can be useful every time, when patriarchy takes over again.
Because Carla Lonzi doesn’t stop talking to us and in moments of darkness continues to explode with an astonishing, marvelous, thousand-coloured light: «The goal does not exist, the present exists. We are the dark past of the world, we create the present”
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