The women in "My Brilliant Girlfriend" are not easy to mess with.
In the classroom, there is a random test, and the female teacher specially instructs the girls to give the boys some color.
After school, Lila was retaliated by the boys and threw a stone back, even if she broke her head, she would not let go.
The friend was threatened by Marcello, and she put the knife directly on the other's neck.
The protagonist Elena said:
Here, even though you are a woman, you can't be too polite, women fight harder than men, they pull their hair and hurt each other.
This is Naples in the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, Italian feminist consciousness was slowly awakening in a chaotic and violent social environment.
What they lifted was not a stone, nor a knife, but a resistance to male oppression, a microcosm of the Italian feminist movement.
But in fact, the road for Italian women to fight for their rights is very tortuous, and the struggle does not lead to results.
More often, they have to continue to face reality and helplessness after fighting back hard like Lila and Elena.
Speaking of which, Italy is a leader in feminism and attaches great importance to women's education.
Although the term feminism was coined by the French philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837, feminism was born as early as the late 13th century in Italy.
During the Renaissance, the Italian writer Christine de Pizan read The Legend of the Rose by the French writer Jean de Meun.
She believes Jean denigrated women in the book, portraying them as vulgar, immoral, and even blaming them for the misfortunes of men's lives.
So angry that Pizan deliberately wrote a book in vernacular French to complain about him, making the first European feminism sound.
The book, Le Livre de la cite des dames, creates a utopian city where women are respected and appreciated and their rights are defended.
Pizan uses classical and biblical examples to demonstrate that men and women are equal and that women are important participants and contributors to society.
She points out that the low status of women is not a birth defect, but a lack of education.
More than 500 years later, feminist Simone Beauvoir said:
The first time we see a woman use her pen to protect her gender.
Under the voice of Pizan, Italian intellectuals have attached importance to women and female education, and some Italian female writers have publicly supported it.
Although women were still unable to enter university and obtain higher education at that time, there was a phenomenon that men supported women's education.
But in the eyes of men, this education is to make women more submissive to themselves.
It wasn't until the 17th century that women writers attacked it head-on, refusing to obey any man who would oppress women to gain power and status.
Some of them even vowed not to get married and advised their friends not to get married either.
Perhaps because of the extreme bias of female writers, the status of Italian women has gradually risen, and they can participate in political decision-making together with men.
Especially in the middle and late 19th century, in the movement initiated by Italian feminists such as Ana Maria Mozzoni , some laws to protect women's rights were passed and revised, the first woman was admitted to the university, and more and more Married women can gain financial independence…
However, when the first wave of feminism in the West arrived in the 20th century, Italy began to lag behind.
In 1922, Benito Mussolini came to power and created fascism in Italy, which had been a pioneer of feminism.
Under the oppression of fascism, Italian women were excluded from politics, deprived of the right to work, and reduced to reproductive tools.
Before the outbreak of World War II in 1923, before Hitler came to power, Mussolini had already provoked a fascist war of aggression in an attempt to conquer new colonies, but every time he was defeated.
In 1935, he even sent an army of 200,000 people in an attempt to take Ethiopia.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Italy and Germany formed an alliance to attack France, Britain, and even the Soviet Union...
War is a huge meat grinder, and Mussolini needed a steady stream of soldiers to go to the front, so he set his sights on Italian women.
He believed that the children of poor families were the main source of soldiers, and that women were a machine for the production of these soldiers.
On the one hand, he hyped up the importance of female fertility and carried out brainwashing education that prides itself on fertility.
On the other hand, "improper" taxes and fees are levied on factories, discriminating against women's work and encouraging them to go home and have children.
After 6 centuries of hard work by Italian women, the rights they fought for were wiped out in an instant.
At this time, western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of the first wave of the world feminist movement. Women in these countries are encouraged and supported to take jobs that discriminated against them before.
Until the coup d'état in Italy in 1943 and the fall of Mussolini, fascism always shrouded Italy, but it did not overwhelm all Italian women.
During this period, some feminists secretly formed an anti-fascist alliance, launched a feminist movement, and refused to become a reproductive machine by means of birth control.
After World War II ended in 1945 and the anti-fascist war was won, Italian women finally got the right to vote, but nearly half a century later than other Western countries.
In the middle of the 20th century, the West ushered in the second wave of feminist movements, and Italian feminist consciousness gradually awakened in this movement.
For a long time, the Italian feminist movement is mainly divided into three schools: liberalism, traditional socialism and gender separatism.
Until the early 1970s, influenced by the Marxist trend of thought, the Italian feminist movement combined with "workerism" and "liberalism" to create a new form of feminism.
In 1972, feminists such as Selma James (American female writer) and Brigitte Galtier (Italian feminist) formed the International Feminist Group in Italy.
In the view of traditional feminists, discrimination and oppression of women who go out to work is the inevitable result of joining the "working class" to launch a resistance, but in the view of international feminist groups, women who do housework in the family should also be one of them. molecules, they said:
What women do is work up to an average of 99.6 hours per week. There is neither the possibility of strikes, nor absence, nor any demand, and it is completely unpaid labor.
Marxist feminists believe that women's housework is also a form of value production, and can be exploited just like outside work. And the housework is free and disrespected like a slave.
So they launched a " Wages for Housework" movement, demanding financial compensation for women's housework, and paying attention to their emotions in addition to compensation.
Soon this movement spread to other Western countries, and combined with sports teams from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and other countries, its scale and momentum are no less than today's "Me Too", and it has become one of the early transnational social actions.
And after the feminist movement of "paid housework", the divorce law, abortion law and other laws to protect women's rights and interests have been successfully passed in Italy.
They finally got their wombs back, legal rights to contraception, abortion, free divorce and compensation.
By 1980, Italy had also signed the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women" , which was formally ratified in 1985.
Today, however, more than 30 years later, the male-dominated Italian political party, for the voice of women, listens to the voice of women, but ignores it after listening.
Recent data show that in Europe, the status of women in Italy is relatively low. The proportion of women in the Italian lower house is 11.5% and that in the Senate is 8.9%.
From the government to the president, feminist organizations are weakening, and most of the female officials who have been promoted have nothing to do with feminism.
Only four out of ten Italian women choose to work outside the home, and their average income is half that of men.
The working conditions of Italian women are difficult, and they have to make a choice between working and having children.
Maybe Italian women are no longer Italian women in the Renaissance, but Italian men are still Italian men hundreds of years ago!
They appear to be listening carefully to their calls for rights, but in reality still expect women to be submissive.
References:
[1] Feminism in Italy, Wikipedia
[2] Feminism in the Renaissance, World History, 2015.02.05
[3] "We spit in Hegel's face" - Worker Feminist Movement in Italy in the 1970s, Window of the World, 2017.03.23
[4] A Review of 150 Years of Feminism in Italy, Miguel Malagreca, International Women's Journal, 2012.07.22
[5] What Happened to Italian Feminism, Michelle Tarnopolsky, 2011.05.05
—
Author/Two years younger
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Bao Ci Er"
© The copyright of this article belongs to the author Pocier, please contact the author for any reprint.
View more about My Brilliant Friend reviews
