TOthey had filled a room with the light of the colors of dozens and dozens of flags. They came from every corner of the globe. From New Zealand to South Africa, from Iceland to Russia. In 1909, militants and political activists gathered in London to participate in the International Women’s Congress for the Vote for Women organized by The International Woman Suffrage Alliancethe league that fought for women’s suffrage on a global level.
The English capital seemed the ideal place for the conference. On the banks of the Thames, the suffragette movement with their revolutionary actions had catalyzed England’s attention on the issue of women’s suffrage.
Among the rows of assembly benches, covered with scarlet cloths, there was also the green, white and red tricolor, represented by the delegates of the National Council of Italian Women among which stood out a face illuminated by two large, attentive and curious dark eyes that tried not to miss any details. They belonged to a journalist and writer, an incomparable speaker who was even an entrepreneur: Clelia Romano Pellicano.
1905. A suffragette procession in London (photo Getty Images).
The vote to improve the lives of female workers
Beautiful and elegant, as she appears in the portraits, but even more cultured, intelligent, acute. In that historic assembly he spoke, receiving applause and consensus: «I narrated, for Italy, our struggles, our hopes, unable, alas, to speak of conquests and victories. I said that we didn’t aspire to vote for the mere pleasure of playing “politics for politics’ sake”[…] but to improve the conditions of the female working classes, and participate, without a mask, in the lives of our husbands and our children” she writes in one of the reports she creates for the magazine The Woman.
Marchesa Clelia Romano Pellicano (1873-1923) was born in Naples to an Apulian father, president of the Court of Appeal, and an American mother
There are three articles full of details, written with touches of witty irony, which they convey the scope of the global emancipationist battles of the early 1900s. At almost every latitude, women are starting to fight to count. They demand not only the vote, but also equal rights and freedoms.
Clelia Romano Pellicano collects their principles and objectives, sketches portraits of the world leaders of suffragism, describes the atmosphere of the meetings and parties of those days, tells of an event he witnesses: the release of a group of suffragettes who had attempted an attack on the House of Commons. An extraordinary testimony, which remained hidden in the archives for a long time.
It is now possible to read it in full in the volume New and old world. Life and words of a pioneer of feminism published by Le Plurali, edited by Clara Stella, co-founder of the publishing house and university researcher of the Integrated Philologies department of Seville, who has put together a precious selection of writings through which to rediscover and reconstruct, 100 years after his death and 150 years from her birth in 1873, the activity and pioneering spirit of one of the most fervent Italian supporters of women’s suffrage.
“New and old world. Life and words of a pioneer of feminism” by Clelia Romano Pellicano edited by Clara Stella (Le Plurali).
Romano Pellicano had inherited civil commitment from his family. His father, Giandomenico, who had fought for the unification of Italyto, he was a magistrate and deputy; his mother Pierina, born in New York, was the daughter of the legendary Garibaldi general Giuseppe Avezzana who operated between Italy and the United States. Clelia had the opportunity to grow up in a cosmopolitan and cultured environment which gave her the opportunity to learn English and French and to become passionate about literature.
Books on female independence
At 16 she married the Marquis Francesco Maria Pellicano, a Calabrian politician, a union that she defined as a “rare union of reason and heart”. It was her husband who helped her find a publisher to publish her first book Coupleslater re-edited with the title Life in twoa collection of daring stories defined by the press as “scrub adventures”, because they spoke of female independence, seduction and desire, betrayals and separations.
1909. The suffragette meeting in London in which Clelia Romano Pellicano also participates (photo Ipa / Alamy).
The work was signed, so as not to cause too much scandal, with a pseudonym that will accompany the writer even when her real name is printed clearly in her literary productions: Jane Grey, like the unhappy English queen who reigned for only nine days in 1553 before being imprisoned and beheaded, a historical figure for whom Romano Pellicano had nurtured a true cult since childhood. She had been so impressed by the Queen’s portrait that she had cut it out of a rare and precious edition of the book History of England provoking the wrath of his father.
That alias had allowed her to break the mold again, to “cast her gaze on the things of the world” as Anna Santoro writes in Il Novecento – Anthology of Italian women writers of the first twenty years (ed. Bulzoni). A gaze that was capable of intercepting patriarchal stereotypes and all those prejudices that suffocated female freedom: «The most monstrous violation that collective tyranny has ever consumed in the field of thought was committed on women, that of sexualizing the brain too, denying it vital nourishment and free horizons necessary for its normal development” he says in the preface he elaborates for the book Woman and the law of MP Carlo Gallini, among the first in Parliament to present a legislative proposal for suffrage open to women.
“The twentieth century – Anthology of Italian women writers of the first twenty years” by Anna Santoro (ed. Bulzoni).
It was at the first National Congress of Italian Women
The word is Clelia Romano Pellicano’s ideal dimension through which to communicate her ideas and struggles that she carried out between Rome, the driving force of political activity, Castellammare di Stabia and Gioiosa Ionica, where the family properties were located. She participated in the first historic national congress of Italian women in 1908 which was held in the Capitol; she was among the first promoters of petition n.6676, presented by Anna Maria Mozzoni, which asked the Italian government for women’s suffrage; she founded a league in which women and men together mobilized in favor of legislative reforms such as the abolition of marital authorization, a rule that limited women’s legal capacity by depriving them of autonomy and independence.
For the magazine The New Anthology Roman Pelican carried out an investigation on Calabrian women workers in which he highlighted their industriousness, denouncing the difficult conditions in which they lived between harassment and unequal treatment. It was this land and its women that inspired the literary work that brought her the most success: The Calabrian Novellas.
“Le Novelle Calabresi” by Clelia Pellicano (Paperleaves).
And it was always Calabria that projected her into a new challenge. When her husband died, Romano Pellicano found herself with seven children and an estate to manage. He founded Calabro Forestale, a timber company which he enlightened with an avant-garde spirittaking care above all of the working conditions of employees.
She continued to write, participate in conferences and hold conferences to obtain the right to vote for women which would only arrive in 1945.. Romano Pellicano will not have time to see it realized, he died in 1923: «If this century has seen the dawn of recovery, the next will see the sun of freedom rise! Nor would I change my luck with my lucky nieces. We have sown, they will reap.”
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