Feminism, Journey among the women of the seventies. The Book

QWhen photography bears witness to history, it expresses one of its precious peculiarities: making memories. Generous and empathetic, simple and direct, the images accompany us in times and paths that we have ignored or buried.

This intent, clear and powerful, emerges in Hatching a new world. Journey among the women of the seventiesthe book that merges the images of Paola Agosti and the words of Benedetta Tobagi.

Authors and feminism

Paola Agosti was born in Turin in 1947he documented the condition of women and talked about feminism, photographed worlds and countries and portrayed the protagonists of the 20th century. Benedetta Tobagi was born in Milan in 1977writer and journalist, has always dealt with the 70s.

Embracing the decade of what is defined as “the only successful revolution of the Italian 20th century”, that of women, Agosti photographs it and Tobagi, who was born precisely then, fifty years later, rearranges it to talk about it again, so as not to forget and re-grasp those germinal concepts that were fundamental in the long battle of women.

An exceptional witness

We leafed through the pages of this volume with an extraordinary witness, Lea Melandri, originally from Romagna, Milanese by adoption, feminist, journalist, theorist and essayistwho has passionately dedicated her entire life to reflection on patriarchy and the war against women. With her the conversation takes flight, crossing themes and theories, evoking people and events.

Hatching a new world marks the fundamental stages of women’s battles and brings the word feminism back to our time.
Feminist culture has never entered this country: we don’t talk about the 70s and we know very little, it is necessary to rediscover in more depth what they were. Today the word feminism is even more frightening than feminicide, which is why, when I am invited to speak in various contexts, I ask to be presented as a feminist. The term is still pervaded by prejudice: we are those who hate men, who are lesbians because they are with each other. The stereotype remained.

Citing Adele Cambria, feminist journalist and writer, Benedetta Tobagi talks to us about two souls of feminism: a Roman one, dedicated to political action and documented by these images and a Milanese one more aimed at raising awareness. Was it really like that?
There was not a dichotomy between the two souls, but in Milan in particular an innovative and creative practice had developed, self-awareness. In reality, the feminist movement had had great moments of cohesion. Female revolt, the 1970 manifesto drawn up by a group of women, of which Carla Lonzi was the soul, had united and belonged to the entire feminist movement. Then, in ’74 and ’75 in Pinarella di Cervia and in ’76 in Paestum three fundamental conferences took place, in which more than two thousand women, coming from all over Italy, met to discuss.

How was the movement’s relationship with the males of the left?
It was very confrontational. Rossana Rossanda once told me: “They didn’t just hinder you, they opposed you.” It was true. What was most scary was separatism. In the feminist self-consciousness groups, in which we had chosen to be only women, we started from an intuition, which in my opinion was very important and truly revolutionary: we realized that women had internalized the male vision of the world, that is, the masculine was within us. Precisely for this reason it was necessary to start a separatist practice. We had to question a substantially economistic approach, which did not consider the problems linked to the body and sexuality. We were the generation that discovered and brought to consciousness a millenary repression: the relationship between man and woman and everything that concerned the body, motherhood, the erasure of female sexuality. This was seen as the element that broke the great class unity.

It was the discovery that the personal is political.
Exactly, the other great insight. We had realized that in personal experience there are the most universal human experiences, which however until then had been confined, left there, in the secular immobility of the private sphere. So, when we said that the personal is political, it simply meant that in the life of each woman there is an unwritten story: the experiences of the body, the man-woman relationship, sexuality, motherhood and family ties have always belonged and belong. to history, culture and politics. We had inherited from centuries of male domination the separation between the body and the poliswe had been left out of history and culture, not just the government of the world. Self-awareness, comparison and reflection on our lives investigated what I call the memory of the body, all the experiences that profoundly marked us in childhood and adolescence and which often do not even become memories because they are too painful. Digging into that imagination, into what we have inside was an enormous job, which lasted more than 10 years.

Then there is the question of gender.
Yet another intuition of feminism. Women have always been gendered, while males have a hard time feeling they belong to a gender. The natural destiny of the woman was to be an erotic body for the pleasure of man, a body that generates life, mothers always and forever, even in love relationships, in which the woman takes care of her partner and children and more general of the family. Women were thought of as functions and not as people. Our revolution was to say: we are individuals, we are people, not a gender.

Let’s go back to Feminism

We started from the book by Paola Agosti and Benedetta Tobagi in which the word feminism shines again without hesitation and without fear. Who are the feminists today?
In my long journey I have had the opportunity to encounter four waves of feminism, but today I can say that Not one less, the movement born in Argentina in 2015 and then become international, contains many instances that belong to the historical heritage of feminism and adds new ones. First of all, it brings the term feminist back into use and speaks with great clarity about sexism and connivance with racism, colonialism and nationalism, forms of violence connected to each other. This was his strength. The other extraordinary prerogative of this movement was to bring out the subjectivities that do not recognize themselves in normative heterosexism, that is, all those subjectivities that are subjected to homophobic and transphobic prejudice, the vast LGBTQIA_+ galaxy.
With the feminism of the 70s we dug inside ourselves to destroy and change the imposed and internalized models, today it seems to me that there is more action, networking and street demonstrations. However, I fear that for a true reflection on subjectivity there is still a lot of work to be done.

Are you referring to violence against women and feminicides?
Yes, women have emancipated themselves, but the question of the body is still, today more than ever, central. The body of advertising, the erotic one and the maternal one and the tortured body of the victims of violence. I dedicated a recently reprinted essay to this topic Love and violence (Bollati Boringhieri, 2024). Unfortunately, we are faced with the fact that the urgency of the problem of the man-woman relationship does not come from our practices, but from feminicides, from a wild and archaic violence – the power to give life and death, possession – which does not she tolerates having a free body in front of her, no longer at her disposal, since women today are more aware, they can and want to choose their life. The case of Giulia Cecchettin in particular has exposed the issue of male violence. There is a father who expresses his pain, but also says that this violence affects and concerns all men and all of society. Gino Cecchettin channels it out of the private sphere and Elena, Giulia’s sister, takes a further step by using the feminist slogan “The murderer is not sick, but is the healthy son of patriarchy”, bringing the power to unmask back to feminist culture. what was the normality of violence against women. There is a need to change attitudes and consider femicide a cultural problem and not measurable in terms of judicial punishment.