Women and work: the long march of the Italian women

dsleep and work. On June 23, 1902 Milan wakes up with a loud shouting of little girls in the street. Hundreds, almost all between the ages of seven and fourteen. They are the “piscinine”, tailors’ apprentices. Poorly paid, they have very heavy shiftseven fifteen hours a day. They go on strike, led by fourteen-year-old Giovannina Lombardi. And, after a week of protests, they get a few more rights. One small step.

Italian women at work: the rights won

But the whole history of women’s work is made up of small steps that changed the lives of millions of women. He tells them Missesseries podcast in five episodes created by Intesa Sanpaolo and Chora Mediawhich you can find on the main free audio platforms. The guiding voice is by Serena Dandini, the interventions are by Fiorella Imprenti, labor historian, by Rossella Certini, pedagogist, and many others. Together, with the precious documents of the Intesa Sanpaolo Historical Archive, they reconstruct the long march towards equality that has lasted for more than a century.

If we read the code of 1865 we cry. Women are under the guardianship of their father or husband: they must ask permission even to spend the money they earn. It was the First World War that messed up the carsyou. While the men fight, the doors of some well-paid jobs, often public ones, open up for them. An example? The Postman (Editrice Nord), the story of Anna Allavena, the first postwoman of the Kingdom of Italy, written by her great-granddaughter Francesca Giannone, is also the story of a small revolution.

Then there are the nurses. Four thousand girls, who will become ten thousand (“the white army”), decide to leave for the front. Fearless. Maria Antonietta Clerici, Maria Andina and Concetta Chludzinska, in the days of the defeat of Caporetto, receive the order to leave, but they do not abandon the wounded, they are taken prisoner and spend four months in a concentration camp. Many brave deeds have been forgotten. It took Ilaria Tuti’s novel Like wind sewn to the earth (Longanesi), to bring back into the collective memory the “Lady doctors”, (Caterina Hill, Teresa Murray and Louisa Garret Anderson) who, unable to practice in hospitals, founded one of only women in France to treat wounded soldiers.

Women and work: married and fired

After the nurses, there it isand typist. On October 3, 1936, at the Ambrosio cinema in Turin, 135 women of all ages, dressed up for the party, took part in a competition. In six minutes they have to copy the preface written by Mussolini for a book on the war in Ethiopia. The prize for the fastest is an Olivetti typewriter. Alice Basso, who chose the typist Anita Bo as the protagonist of four delightful novels set in Turin in the 1930s (the last one is The eagles of the night, Garzanti), explains: «Typing was a magical profession, because it emancipated generations of girls in the first half of the 1900s. It allowed them to join companies that often had hundreds of employees and to work extremely closely with high-level executives by typing out their documents. But in the official deeds they called them “young ladies”.

Singles who, once married, were fired. After all, the man would have thought of working… Dismissal due to marriage was normal. Since there was no law forbidding it, they simply did it. And no one was surprised. We have to wait for 1963 to have a law that certifies the obvious: you can’t fire a girl because she’s getting married ». Let’s take a step back. By law, women were paid half as much as men (theirs is considered a “supplementary” income).

Off-limits professions for women

«During fascism» says the historian Imprenti, «they could not exercise professions considered intellectually high, such as teaching history, philosophy or Italian in high schools. The notices of competition excluded them from many positions, and hiring could be 10 percent of the total. Even for Pope Pius XI, women’s work was “a very bad disorder”, absolutely to be eliminated. But women could do something: telephone operators, cashiers, stenographers, announcers, seamstresses, secretaries and typists». In the 1950s, after the war, the Resistance, the fall of fascism, there were still off-limits careers, as the judiciary. Women are “too good”, “weak in judgment”, or in any case unstable because they have periods and therefore, in “those days” they are not objective. The bans symbolically fall in 1963, the year in which the American astronaut Sally Ride conquers a seat on NASA’s STS-7 space shuttle.

The Comet Lady

Amalia Ercoli-Finzi, the first Italian graduate in aeronautical engineering, honorary professor at the Milan Polytechnic, comments: «We are victims of history, except for a few moments when someone enlightened decided that women too had abilities, in general we were relegated. There was a division of labor that suited men.” She was born in 1937, she has seen the change and has been an active part of it since she was a child: «In middle school, the mathematics teacher, a priest, convinced my parents to enroll me in scientific studies. After high school, there was a choice of university. My father wanted me to be a math teacher. I wanted to “do”, and “do” is for engineers. The family resigned».

Enrolled in university in 1956, when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite, and graduated in 1961, when the first man, Yuri Gagarin, flew into space, Amalia Ercoli Finzi had stars in her destinyor. Therefore they call her “the lady of the comets”. She talks about it passionately: «The comet lives in the dark far away, often in the Oort cloud, and therefore experiences its little world in the dark and in the cold, because we are only a few Kelvin degrees away. Suddenly, due to some small gravitational problem, it moves away, sets off – it’s a love story – attracted by the sun it has heard about and reaches up to it, emits its gases, and we see this marvelous tail with the naked eye. After that the sun that attracted her lets her go because she is a butterfly, and she returns to her cold and dark world. But she had a wonderful love story.’

Ercoli Finzi has collaborated with NASA, ESA, ASI, the most important space agencies in the world. He struggled. AND confesses “a small wrongdoing for a good purpose: at university, if a girl deserved 27 in the exam, I gave her 28. The difference is small, but women have always suffered injustices and, for once, I committed one for their benefit. I helped self-esteem. Some have reached important positions. But they are single, big stars. We need them to become constellations».

The odds and the jolt

According to the 2022 Global Gender Gap Report, we will only achieve true parity in 132 years. «Let’s hope less, a small discount, maybe 100 instead of 120» he jokes Cristina Scocchia, managing director of IllyCaffè (and since 2019 Knight of the Legion of Honor).

«In Italy, only 3 percent of company heads and 15 percent of head physicians in hospitals are women, but being pessimistic doesn’t help. In recent years we have experienced an acceleration: women’s quotas, entry on boards of directors, presence in politics, but often we are dealing with role models. With quotas we were imposed by law, we gave a joltstuck a foot in the door, yet prejudices resist, and the road to meritocratic leadership is still long.

I myself, as the head of the company, am “exotic”. Often, when I enter the “button rooms”, I am the only woman. When I was CEO of Kiko, a cosmetics brand, they said: «Yes, you did it because lipsticks are for girls» (would they have told a man?). We have won the right to work, but the right to a career, which men have always had, not yet». Madeleine Albright, the first US secretary of state, described the situation with a good joke: «True equality will be achieved when a stupid woman can hold the same position of responsibility as a stupid man».

The podcast Misses: spotlight on women’s empowerment

In the five episodes of Misseseven little-known or even forgotten protagonists.

Signorine is the podcast series in five episodes by Intesa Sanpaolo and Chora Media which tells the stages of women’s work in Italy from the end of the 19th century to the present day through precious original materials, including documents from the Intesa Sanpaolo Historical Archive. Written by Ilaria Orrù with the supervision of Sara Poma, Misses turns the spotlight on some protagonists of female emancipation in the world of work. There are lesser-known ones (such as Anita Klinz, the first art director in Italy in the 1950s) or forgotten ones.

All have in common the courageous decision to reject the imposed rules. The first four episodes of the series are already available on the main free audio platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts), on YouTube and Intesa Sanpaolo On Air, a digital container that brings together voices, stories and ideas about the future. Try the fifth today, July 8th.

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