“Mwhile we die of hunger we worry about the vote for women”, was the headline in the Resto del Carlino of 31 January 1945. Italy is that of neorealist films, we are poor and very thin, with broken shoes and rumpled clothes, the children are tumbling in the desolation, there is no bread. How did an issue that had never warmed public opinion pass?
The story begins in 1861, when we were born as Italians, but less as Italiansbecause the Albertine Statute denied the vote to those who already had it in Austro-Hungarian Lombardy, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and in Veneto.
The petitions to request it begin: in the front row lto Lombard journalist Anna Maria Mozzoniwho fought against the prejudices that women were unstable due to hormones, unclear in their judgments and therefore unreliable. In the face of angry, aggressive, impulsive, irrational men of all times.
Danda Santini, director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
It was not listened to, but the debate reopened in 1906 with new petitions from Italians such as Maria Montessoriwith Grazia Deledda in 1909, the first woman candidate in Parliament, amidst a thousand controversies (she is already a mother and writer, how can she be a feminist and a member of parliament?) while the socialist Anna Kuliscioff carries the issue within his party.
The first lines can be glimpsed: Don Luigi Sturzo, founder of the Popular Party, included in his program in 1919 the extension of the right to vote to womenwhile Pope Pius
The issue was put on hold during fascism, but World War II brought women not only into factories and offices, but also into the Resistancein political organizations, in assistance to those in greatest difficulty and in Pro Voto Committees.
Alcide De Gasperi (DC) and Palmiro Togliatti (PCI) took up the request together: on 30 January 1945 it was discussed in the meeting of the Council of Ministers as the last topic and, it seems, with little attention. Just like when the “pink quotas” passed, almost surreptitiously, many deputies were already on their way home. It passed, immediately.
Maria Castaldo, 82, an almost blind mother of nine children, is assisted by an employee as she casts her first vote on her life in Anzio, the scene of the Allied landings that led to the overthrow of the fascist government in Italy. (photo Getty Images)
A year later, March 10, 1946, eligibility for those over 25 was added. The most important appointment was on 2 June 1946: to vote together for the deputies of the Constituent Assembly and on the Monarchy or Republic referendum. They voted with a turnout of 82 percent, despite one in three being illiterate.
Illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini
21 deputies were elected out of a total of 556. Some were very young (Teresa Mattei and Nilde Iotti were just over 25 years old), mostly married with children, 14 graduates, many former partisans. The majority worked, especially in school. They will collaborate methodically, Catholic and communist, in a “political sisterhood” that made our Constitution one of the most advanced in the world on rights: we owe them the end of the presumed legal incapacity of women.
The parish priests feared that the women would be influenced by their communist comrades. The red husbands who would have succumbed to the call of conservative and pro-monarchist parish priests. We like to think that they voted with their minds, which worked neither better nor worse than those of others.