Antonella Baccaro (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
G.them men at the front and women in the bunkers or refugees with the rest of the family. The war in Ukraine, in terms of equality, takes us back almost a centuryto a World War II situation.
A shock from which it will be difficult to recover, since even the pandemic had already drawn a furrow, albeit less dramatic, between male and female destinies.
The fact is that the abolition of compulsory conscription in many Western countries it erased a passage that once profoundly distinguished the lives of boys from that of girls, providing us with the illusion of equal duty.
An impression heightened by the increasing presence of women in the Armed Forces and by the appointment, in Italy as elsewhere, of ministers of defense. But the reality is different and we must acknowledge it: no one denies that the fate of women who stay at home to defend themselves, looking after those who remain or those who leave is cruel and risky.
Certainly the reality of the front requires an extra gap. That of those who put their life on the line but above all in every moment is called to decide on that of another human being.
Taking life is an act that is not part of the experience of most of us womenas ours is linked exactly to the opposite: bringing existences into the world and sometimes looking after them until death.
A few years ago, for the Tempo delle Donne, I dealt with the theme of care, trying to understand if the indisputable feminine attitude, portrayed over the centuries by literature and other arts, glorified in images such as that of the “angel of the hearth” , were it not for the women of today who work a combination to be dissolved.
The answer was that the attitude cannot be a cage and that care today should be shared. I still think so. But the images of the men at the front lead me to think that in exceptional times, such as a pandemic or a war, our diversity is self-imposed.
Can this be considered a retreat of humanity? It is. But what is war, if not a return to primordial impulses that we thought we had suffocated?
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