Introduction
Although a vast body of literature exists on the relationship between Italian feminist groups and women’s health, also in terms of the impact of feminist struggles and practices on services (e.g. the establishment of health clinics) and legislation (primarily Law 194/1978 on abortion),Footnote 1 the problem of psychological and psychiatric health – or inner balance – has received far less attention, except in relation to the implementation of psychiatric reform in Italy.Footnote 2 However, it touched on essential issues that were at the centre of very heated debates in collectives, groups and journals, starting mainly (but not only) from autocoscienza (consciousness-raising)Footnote 3 first and the practice of the unconscious later, which allowed women to examine – autonomously and on the basis of their personal experiences – the effects of gender roles and models, existential contradictions, distress and intolerance, discomfort with doctors, psychiatric hospitalisation, the difficult relationship with psychiatric clinics and the shortcomings of territorial services. In Italy, this debate on psychiatry among women laid the groundwork for reflections and practices that, after 1978, influenced the process of deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric reform; as is known, this process was unique on an international level and had already begun in the 1960s thanks to the experiments of the Basaglia groups in some asylums.
This article analyses the relationship between Italian feminism and mental health in the 1970s, with a focus on Turin. It explores the main theoretical debates that dominated magazines and meetings during those years. The Turin case study is paradigmatic not only for the history of Italian feminism, but above all for the particular relationship between the women’s groups, psychiatry and the process of eliminating psychiatric hospitals in a large industrial city. This is particularly evident in the context of Turin’s unique approach to women’s physical and mental health, which produced a sort of hybridisation between American influences on autocoscienza and the more recent impact of French groups attentive to psychoanalysis and the unconscious (Passerini Reference Passerini1991, Reference Passerini, Bertilotti and Scattigno2005; Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996).Footnote 4
Autocoscienza, the practice of the unconscious and psychic distress
Starting with the very first activities of Italian feminist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s, talking about oneself and gaining awareness of one’s subjectivity as a woman merged with the necessity to know one’s body, to affirm it and defend it from male power and ‘phallocentric’ medicine. The predominantly autobiographical nature of new feminist practices such as autocoscienza (Sandrucci Reference Sandrucci2005; Niri Reference Niri2024) and self-help contributed to the emergence and subsequent conceptualisation of significant social and cultural questions related to well-being, suffering, and psychological and emotional health, thus reviewing the idea of physical and mental health as well as that of care.Footnote 5 A text by the American feminist writer Kathie Sarachild, A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising, translated by Anabasis and published in Donne è bello (a real instruction manual for autocoscienza groups in Italy), summarised why women should come together: ‘In our groups, we share and compare our feelings. Let us let ourselves go and see where they lead us. They will lead us to ideas and then to actions’ (Sarachild Reference Sarachild and Milano1972, 104). A few months later, Roman activist Alma Sabatini assessed the self-help practice in the very first issue of the feminist journal Effe:
Until now, we have lived in ignorance … and we still don’t know how we are made and how our genitals work. The American feminists have shown us with slides how to perform a self-examination … If we then need to visit the gynaecologist, we can adopt quite a different attitude towards the specialist: no longer as poor, ignorant women forced to suffer the cultural and psychological terrorism that is so common among doctors and especially gynaecologists, but as people who are self-aware and informed. If the doctor is willing to accept this different attitude, our insights will be a fundamental basis for diagnosis and treatment. (Sabatini Reference Sabatini1973)
Autocoscienza and self-help soon began to overlap in the activities of the small groups that gathered in private homes, bookshops and in the newly conquered spaces of cities and neighbourhoods, starting with the newly established self-managed women’s health clinics; by learning about their bodies, women took possession of spaces where they could talk about themselves with other women. In a ‘booklet’ on the relationship between the two practices, presented as a ‘tool that allows us to know our bodies’ and that ‘can help us in our liberation’ (Sottosopra. Esperienze dei gruppi femministi in Italia 1974, 98–99), the Gruppo femminista ‘Per una medicina della donna’ offered food for thought:
In relation to ‘medical science’ and its ‘priests’ we still have, men and women alike, a dependent and passive attitude, but this dependence and passivity are more dangerous and fraught with consequences for us women … It is only because we did autocoscienza in feminist groups and understood our historical and everyday condition that we as women recognised a new need to take control of the issues that affect us, and thus also the functioning of our bodies and our relationship with doctors and medicine … Passivity, surrender, resignation and ignorance of the exact things that affect us are attitudes that have been imposed on us since we were girls and which are also those that allow our oppression to continue endlessly. Getting rid of them is a fundamental step towards our liberation. (Gruppo femminista ‘Per una medicina della donna’ 1974, 100–103)
In 1974, particularly following the encounter with a strand of French feminism, Psychanalyse et Politique (also known as PsychéPo),Footnote 6 some Italian groups and collectives introduced the ‘practice of the unconscious’. The latter was seen as a way to help the autocoscienza groups to overcome the deadlock and to analyse those ‘unspoken words’ that had reopened a rift between the personal and the collective (Melandri Reference Melandri1972, Reference Melandri1977, Reference Melandri2023; Guerra Reference Guerra, Bertilotti and Scattigno2010; Libreria delle donne di Milano 1987).Footnote 7 Precisely because they were disappointed with autocoscienza, which was considered a ‘sterile source and aggravation of suffering’, some women had turned to the analytical instrument that allowed them to overcome the ‘victim stage’ and become ‘creators and protagonists’ (Alcune femministe di Donne e Psicanalisi di Roma 1978) of their own liberation (Melandri Reference Melandri1977).Footnote 8 In other words, they wanted to stop seeing themselves as identical to other women and, instead, embrace their authenticity. Hence, the first consequence of the encounter with ‘the French’ (Zamboni Reference Zamboni2019; Archivi Riuniti delle Donne et al. 2002, 1–36; Giardini 2010) was the adoption of the new practice, initially known as ‘women’s relations’,Footnote 9 in some Italian groups and collectives (like the one in Via Cherubini, Milan). It was the move
to a phase in which it became necessary to dig inside the narrative of the lives to see what leaked out but was not said, the need to delve into the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness, to analyse the conflictuality but also the fantasies, desires and fears that emerged from the encounter between women, within groups but also in everyday life, that sort of background or prehistory that ever more explicitly had to do with the relationship with the mother. (Melandri Reference Melandri2023, 76)
The diverse Italian feminist universe gained widespread publicity when a flyer with blue lettering was distributed in Milan in November 1974, titled Pratica dell’inconscio e movimento delle donne (Alcune donne milanesi 1974–Reference donne milanesi5; Ravera and Usai Reference Ravera and Usai1976).Footnote 10
[T]he transfer of the analytical relationship within the ongoing relationships between women should shed light on the difficult reconstruction of the demands and investments a woman makes on another woman. What women try to wrest from the relationship with the man is what has been lacking in their history, and what is still lacking in the relationship with women: the possibility of confronting one’s body with that of another without feeling annihilated, the demand for tenderness and intellectual confirmation … (Alcune donne milanesi 1974–Reference donne milanesi5, 15)
The feminists’ reflections on mental health were based on the direct experience of autocoscienza or the practice of the unconscious. In fact, by then it had become clear to many how, even more than medicine, it was psychiatry that ‘upheld the sexist dogma of fundamental female imperfection’ (Ehrenreich and English Reference Ehrenreich and Englishn.d., 60) and that mental health issues had to be placed within the broader reflection on the right to health, women’s social status and the patriarchal family (Comba Reference Comba1974, Reference Comba1975):
[P]sychiatry claims to cure women’s anxieties based on a definition of female psychology that is entirely functional to the maintenance of women’s subordination in the family; the woman who manifests through neurosis the wear and tear of years of ‘housework’ is treated with psychotropic drugs and at the same time advised to be ‘smiling and serene’ so as not to disturb family harmony, until her progressive reintegration into the role she tried to reject. (Lotta Femminista Reference Femminista1974, 290)
It was a matter of finding an alternative way to deal with female psychic suffering, and feminism – seen as a collective practice among women – could represent, if not the solution, at least ‘a step towards building our strength against this society that wants us alone and passive in the face of marginalisation and repression’ (Collettivo Femminista di S. Croce – Firenze 1977). By stating in no uncertain terms ‘that there can be no alternative psychiatry project if we cannot impose our contents’ (Vitas Reference Vitas1977), the aim was thus to understand how that diversity experienced as deviance could be recovered ‘in a subversive way, in a creative and positive way [making it] an instrument of liberation’ (Tagliaferri Reference Tagliaferri1977).
Feminism and mental health
The permanent masculinisation of the discipline of psychiatry (Del Giudice Reference Del Giudice and Signorelli1996; Signorelli Reference Signorelli2015) continued to ignore ‘a “gendered” specificity of suffering, while it was necessary to consider the irreducible nature of each person’s history as an essential starting point’ (Signorelli Reference Signorelli2015, 102). This observation reopened one of the key theoretical issues underlying the various declinations of feminism: the relationship between women and power. Lia Cigarini summarised it in the expression ‘the objection of the mute woman’: not the woman who never speaks, nor the oppressed woman, but that part of the woman who refuses to ‘be told’, ‘described, illustrated, defended by anyone’ (Cigarini and Abbà Reference Cigarini, Abbà and Cigarini2022, 57–61),Footnote 11 least of all by other women who, being oppressed, lump her in with all the others. This was an apparently paralysing situation, but one that was resolved in the relationship between women – because ‘to speak of women and from them is not so much to fill a hole, but to give different form to the fullness’ (Faccioli Reference Faccioli1982, 65) – and in the ‘discovery’ of the political force of desire:
[S]ubjective resistance to being involved in collective words indicates the generation of an unpredictable desire located outside the already named world, as evidenced by the mutism it provokes. Politicity entails letting it work below the surface until it can be expressed and shared with the desires of other women in a political multiplicity of relations and exchanges. That resistance, that muteness, that symptom of the body must therefore be interrogated in terms of desire. (Zamboni Reference Zamboni2019, 13)
Breaking the silence and criticising the conforming power of psychiatry, as well as the prospects of ‘conscientisation’, made it possible to address one of the most problematic causes of women’s suffering: violence.Footnote 12 The theme of gendered violence was at the centre of many feminist mobilisations in those years and emerged in group meetings in different forms and with unexpected characteristics, which needed to be studied because of the obvious psychological and emotional repercussions. In fact, many forms of violence entered the power relations between men and women, which pertained first and foremost to the sphere of sexuality. However, as Lea Melandri wrote,
the discourse on male violence, oppression, the abuse of power, privilege and so on remains abstract if one does not see the internalised aspect of violence: violence as a denial of one’s existence … this devaluation of the self – the depression, the feeling of being abandoned – continues even in the absence of the man. (1977, 127)
The roots of suffering therefore included the violence of male domination, understood not only in terms of the most obvious physical and psychological aspects of oppression and subjugation of the body, but also – and above all – in terms of the alienation from the self that, starting from that painful sense of inadequacy with respect to the prescribed role, led women to self-control, self-censorship, self-blame and self-destruction.
Hence, for the many women of the Italian feminist groups, the main channel for fully exploring the more general theme of mental health was precisely the experience of the various practices of individual and collective ‘recognition’ of subjectivities. Mental health was linked to suffering resulting from the open contradictions between the self and the imposed, prevalent or partially introjected models of femininity; between self-awareness and social expectations; between behaviour and demanded ‘normality’; and between liberation and guilt. For this reason, many feminists who discussed this issue refused to pathologise suffering when, in most cases, it had political, social and cultural origins. An article by Donata Francescato published in 1973 in Effe already indicated this perspective, which made it possible to discuss the diagnosis and treatment of what seemed to be turning into a mass pathology among women, starting in the United States: the so-called neurosis of the housewife.Footnote 13
American psychiatrists have introduced the term housewife neurosis to describe a set of symptoms that characterise a specific type of ‘psychic disorder’ predominantly found in housewives aged 35 to 55. There are various symptoms, which are different from psychosomatic disorders: from headaches, insomnia, continuous tiredness, dizziness and digestive disorders to emotional states involving ‘unmotivated’ outbursts of anger, mood swings, prolonged periods of depression and apathy.
…However, the very role of the housewife, or the gendered division of roles in society, is rarely questioned. In other words, the conflict is privatised: the problem of this specific woman in this specific family is examined, and no attempt is made to investigate which common factors of social organisation contribute to the emergence of this specific type of ‘neurosis’ that is becoming more and more frequent in housewives in all Western industrialised countries, including Italy. (Francescato Reference Francescato1973)
Although the Italian feminists acknowledged the presence of real mental illnesses, also among women, they set themselves the goal of demedicalising the concept of mental health as much as possible. Two years after the law establishing the National Health Service was approved, Francescato published another article on this topic in Effe, harshly criticising American journalist Maggie Scarf’s successful book on depression, a pathology that seemed to affect women six times more than men. Building on the feminist elaboration of the concept of mental health, Francescato rejected Scarf’s theory that women’s greater openness to personal ties and lack of preparedness for autonomy were rooted in biology and genetics. As a consequence of this natural predisposition, Scarf argued that
[w]omen are more oriented towards others from birth and tend to evaluate and esteem themselves by the yardstick of their affective relationships. Precisely because their self-image is so centred on relationships, they become particularly vulnerable when these ties are broken (through abandonment, divorce, a child getting married, etc.). (Francescato Reference Francescato1980)
Francescato offered an entirely different explanation:
Perhaps the sense of immobility that characterises depression derives precisely from the inner struggle between the ‘new’ part that wants to live the experiences we feel ready for (leaving home, having a child, studying, finding a job, changing jobs, breaking up or forming a deep bond), and our ‘old’ part, which hesitates and wants to preserve the status quo or which has not yet finished a previous task (for example, it still has to break away from the parents, a first love, a first group of friends, a specific environment, a city, etc.). These contradictory drives sometimes lead us to immobility, pessimism and self-denigration.
Francescato’s and Scarf’s perspectives could not have been more different, being based on incompatible conceptualisations of women’s mental health. The history of feminism in Turin allows us to study from below the process by which feminists arrived at this interpretation, influenced by international developments, national comparisons and practices conducted in local contexts.
Turin feminist groups and their approach to women’s bodies and health
Turin’s feminist groups had a very progressive vision of the relationship between women and mental health, which found fertile ground for the implementation of widespread practices and specific actions. Thus, by the end of the decade, a so-called ‘150 hours’ course entirely dedicated to women’s mental illness and distress was organised in Turin.Footnote 14 Furthermore, in the years following the approval of the psychiatric reform, the feminist movement played a key role in the dismantling of asylums in and around Turin.Footnote 15
Until 1973, Turin feminism went through a turbulent period. The ‘first foundation’ phase – in the words of local activist Piera Zumaglino (Reference Zumaglino1996; see also Ellena Reference Ellena, Bertilotti and Scattigno2005) – was characterised by short-lived experiences such as the small Demau group,Footnote 16 the Collettivo delle Compagne,Footnote 17 the Collettivo Comunicazioni Rivoluzionarie,Footnote 18 Rivolta FemminileFootnote 19 and the Collettivo di Liberazione della donna.Footnote 20 At the beginning of the 1970s, American and French feminism began to take root in Turin, thanks to women travelling there and bringing back texts, slogans, ideas and practices. It was from the United States that Maria Teresa Fenoglio imported that new perspective made up of ‘autocoscienza, [of] a different way of relating to people, [of] communes where children do not grow up neurotic, of organised women’s groups’ (Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 121), which led to the birth of the feminist commune in Via Petrarca, in the San Salvario district, which soon became the headquarters of the collective of the same name.Footnote 21 Turin feminism thus moved to an extra-local dimension (Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 125),Footnote 22 which brought the women of the Collettivo di Via Petrarca into direct and physical contact with other – both Italian and international – feminists. The short-lived Collettivo di Via Petrarca made way for Alternativa Femminista and the Collettivo Femminista Torinese. The former was the most faithful heir of the Via Petrarca feminists; although its content was new, it maintained a strong link with the political forces of the movement’s left, believing firmly that ‘there is no women’s liberation without revolution nor revolution without women’s liberation’.Footnote 23 The latter had a heterogeneous composition and progressively abandoned external activities and political action, becoming immersed in an intense form of group self-analysis.Footnote 24
From 1973 onwards, the women’s movement in Turin began to grow, partly because of the mobilisation around issues of national importance, such as Gigliola Pierobon’s trial and the related campaign for the liberalisation of abortion, or the campaign for the ‘no’ vote in the 1974 abrogative referendum on divorce. It promoted one basic idea: the time had come for women to regain control of their bodies. While the theme of women’s health had previously only been the subject of theoretical reflection, influenced by documents arriving from the United States, it subsequently began to be understood as ‘the lever capable of changing the material conditions of existence, through struggles that would see the greatest possible number of forces support the creation of public clinics, but controlled by women’ (Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 298). In fact, Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective was translated and published in Italy in those years.Footnote 25 Destined to become a masterpiece of feminist literature on women’s medicine (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1974), it sparked the great feminist battle about and in favour of health clinics. Thus, in 1975, a CISA office opened in Turin that provided ‘the necessary information to women intending to terminate their maternity (men will not be received)’ (‘Torino – Aborto si apre il CISA’ 1975, 1),Footnote 26 and between 1975 and 1976, the first self-managed women’s health clinics sprang up across the city: Barriera di Milano,Footnote 27 Falchera,Footnote 28 San Donato,Footnote 29 Nizza Millefonti (inside the Sant’Anna obstetrical-gynaecological hospitalFootnote 30) and Mercati GeneraliFootnote 31 (Jourdan 1976, 69–73; Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 299; Amadori, 2018–Reference Amadori2013;9, 55–77; Adorni, Amadori and Petricola Reference Adorni, Amadori, Petricola and Todros2022, 27–64). They were created to meet the widespread demand coming from feminist self-help groups to have places where the gynaecological visit could be changed from a relationship of power to the sharing of an experience (Franzinetti Reference Franzinetti1987, 181–186; Cima Reference Cima1987, 188–192).Footnote 32
Moreover, in the summer of 1975, the Coordinamento cittadino dei consultori autogestiti was created.Footnote 33 Following the approval of the national law establishing family clinics (Law 405 of 1975), it became particularly active in claiming spaces where the ‘information that technicians give to women who use the clinic [and] the type of services they provide’ were ‘the result of discussion and exchange of opinions and experiences between doctors, technicians and women’, and tried to change ‘the traditional relationship between doctor and patient, [which was] authoritarian in most cases, paternalistic among the more “open” doctors’.Footnote 34 The Coordinamento also played a leading role at the national level, especially in relation to the issue of abortion, launching ‘the proposal of the Bologna conference (October 1975), which formed the basis of the famous demonstration in Rome on 6 December 1975’ (Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 300).
A further step in the direction of the reappropriation of control over one’s body and health was the birth in Turin of the Intercategoriale donne Cgil-Cisl-Uil, a women-only trade union organisation. From mid-1975 onwards, the Gruppo unitario intercategoriale delegate Cgil-Cisl-Uil had been formed, which began to meet separately at the CISL headquarters in Via Barbaroux (Giorda Reference Giorda2007a, 109; Zumaglino Reference Zumaglino1996, 301–302). Some of the first items on the agenda were women’s employment, domestic and care work, the conditions of women workers and women’s role in society (Cinato, Cavagna and Pregnolato Rotta-Loria Reference Cinato, Cavagna and Rotta-Loria1979; Federazione Regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte Reference regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte1981).Footnote 35 These issues were particularly relevant in the aftermath of the approval of the equality law and Fiat’s attempts to circumvent it in 1978 (Cinato, Cavagna and Pregnolato Rotta-Loria Reference Cinato, Cavagna and Rotta-Loria1979, 164–165; Federazione regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte Reference regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte1981, 13–14, 53–61). However, it was mainly the growing number of women’s health problems that provided an opportunity for the Intercategoriale donne and feminist groups to collaborate. In 1978, they proposed a ‘150 hours’ course on women and health, which was a huge success: 1,300 women enrolled and dozens of coordinators worked with more than 60 groups. It allowed many women who were not involved in the feminist movement to talk about anything related to knowledge of the body, their relationship with doctors and medicine, family relations, sexuality, maternity and – existing or lacking – services. Thanks to the autocoscienza model adopted from the outset in the meetings, they could share their distress and intolerance, situations of psychological and emotional malaise, and real psychiatric problems (Cinato, Cavagna and Pregnolato Rotta-Loria Reference Cinato, Cavagna and Rotta-Loria1979, 166–167; Federazione regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte Reference regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte1981, 93–126).Footnote 36 While reflecting on the successful outcome of the course, the organisers identified one limitation, in particular: the fact that the theme of mental health had been neglected until then, despite it being central to the participants’ demands.
Another topic that regularly emerged in the health course was ‘nervous exhaustion’, and it was clear from the experiences of many [participants] that general practitioners do not take this problem seriously enough, or perhaps they lack the necessary knowledge. Instead, it is a problem that women often report and that strongly affects our health; another course, which would be difficult to set up but possible, could be ‘Women and Mental Health’. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007a, 279)Footnote 37
Maria Teresa Battaglino,Footnote 38 a feminist and social worker in the psychiatric hospital in Collegno, recalled the initial framework of this new experience as follows:
Feminism encouraged women to no longer hide their distress and pain, to do autocoscienza, that is, to not only search within society but also within themselves, in their own life paths. At the same time, we engaged in politics, in the sense that all this was being socialised and we asked public bodies and institutions to gear up; new and reformulated services were needed based on the demands of the new subjectivity. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007a, 283)
What made it possible to tackle the new questions on women’s psychological and emotional well-being was precisely the format of the meetings of the first ‘150 hours’ course on women’s health. As participants’ and organisers’ testimonies, preparatory documents and transcripts of the meetings demonstrate, it drew heavily on the format experimented with by the many autocoscienza groups in previous years. In autumn 1979, moving from the health of the body to inner balance and mental health, the Intercategoriale donne and the feminist groups and collectives began planning a new ‘150 hours’ course on women’s mental health. This was a few months after the approval of the psychiatric reform and the birth of the Casa delle donne through the occupation of a former women’s psychiatric hospital – a fundamental step.
In March 1979, tired of waiting for the municipal administration, which had promised to find a space for the Casa delle donne, the protagonists of the various experiences launched in the previous months decided to occupy the women’s psychiatric hospital in Via Giulio, which had been closed for over five years (Bollettino delle donne 1978a, 3; Petricola Reference Petricola, Adorni and Tabor2024). The aim was clear: ‘[T]o transform into a place of liberation, joy and life what for years had been the symbol and beastly instrument of segregation and social oppression of women who had tried to resist their condition’ (Federazione regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte Reference regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte1981, 162; Giorda Reference Giorda2007a, 261–278). Trade unionist and activist Tina Fronte explained the reason behind this decision:
Maria Teresa Battaglino, who worked as a social worker in the psychiatric hospital of Collegno at the time, launched the idea of opening the Casa delle donne in the former women’s psychiatric hospital in Via Giulio. The huge building had been abandoned for some time, and there was a renovation project underway to turn it into municipal offices. The choice could not have been more perfect or symbolic. I was not unfamiliar with places of confinement (I had even volunteered with the ‘madmen of Collegno’ and Dr Pascal’s women’s groupsFootnote 39), but when I visited the building for the first time I cried. It was terrible. In the days following the occupation, I spent time (I confess: on sick leave, as I no longer had annual leave) with other female comrades cleaning and doing electric work, because the rooms were not lit. I even enjoyed painting large avenues and landscapes on the walls. Days full of all kinds of initiatives and debates followed. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007b, 119)
During the occupation, the link between the experiences of the occupiers and the stories of the women who had been held in this space served to clarify the political proposal: the need to address the issue of women’s mental health.
The women … had occupied Via Giulio in 1979 to create the casa delle donne. What dominates is the perspective, anguish and ghosts of those who were confined in Via Giulio. The reading of a ‘female’ internment reveals a denied sexuality, and the violence of this denial is acted out by the same sex that still transmits it. There is no space to talk about the occupation; there is space to talk about the death and the denial that were enacted there. The difference between those who tried and those who did not is strong. We must give those who suffered and endured … silence the right to speak. The diary of the occupation circulates, and one sentence stands out: ‘The silence of the walls holds more than only ghosts without resonance.’ Footnote 40
Then, it was freezing and everything was dirty; it was really scary, [because] it was a huge building and we had closed some doors to reduce the space we occupied, but beyond that, you didn’t know what was there.
And it was especially scary because there was still something in the air, this suffering karma of the women who had been sectioned there. Some of the braver comrades carefully explored the various rooms and found writings and diaries belonging to women who had been confined there. I don’t remember who collected them, and perhaps they have been published. I remember huge corridors, occupied by one of Turin’s Women’s collectives every six or seven metres, each one having brought their publications and materials there. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007b, 58)
The experience of that space, the awareness of the suffering that had occurred there and the discussions in the groups – fuelled by the reading of medical records and letters – led many women to reflect on the relationship between women and psychiatry: ‘When I am here,’ someone wrote, ‘I often find myself thinking about the women who were killed here under the pretext of insanity. I try to imagine their faces, their sadness. Isn’t it great that there are now women full of life, joy and creativity?’ (Bollettino delle donne 1979, 8). When confronted with the biographies of the confined women, their individual living conditions took on new meaning, and reflecting on their health issues increasingly helped them to link their own mental health to the various forms of subordination, exclusion and violence to which they were subjected, and to the profound inconsistencies between individual and social expectations.
Franca Ongaro, among others, demonstrated the general potential of women’s stories of confinement – well outlined in Giuliana Morandini’s book (1977) – to help women who were not imprisoned yet still not free to understand themselves:
These women, made passive by the passive role imposed on them, feel guilty for having desires, for wanting to exist beyond the service they provide; they feel guilty for loving, getting pregnant or not having a husband, and perhaps they are forced to accept internment in a psychiatric institution as the only possible way to hide their shame; they are blamed for not being able to bear misery, poverty, children to raise, the man who comes home to eat and sleep and does not speak to them, and perhaps they try to kill themselves or forget by drinking. One of the answers to this emptiness, this despair and this declaration of powerlessness is the psychiatric hospital, where one permanently becomes a thing, piled on top of each other, where one exists neither for oneself nor for others.
…In fact, the merit of this text, for which we are indebted to Giuliana Morandini, lies in letting the women internees speak for themselves, in having respected – by limiting itself to a few restrained and discreet interventions – the need to finally give them a voice that could be heard, a voice that essentially speaks of the non-story of these incomplete and truncated lives, in which most women can recognise themselves (Ongaro Basaglia Reference Ongaro Basaglia and Morandini1985, IX–X)
This recognition had two consequences: on the one hand, confinement in a psychiatric hospital reflected the mechanism by which, through the diagnostic labelling of non-pathological behaviour, new forms of exclusion and segregation were produced that affected all women, not just those who had been confined; on the other hand, the existence of the field of investigation – above all autobiographical – of women’s mental health emerged even more clearly, a field that still needed to be studied in depth in order to give greater theoretical and empirical solidity to the interpretations that some Italian feminists had begun to advance.
Women and mental health
The ‘150 hours’ course on ‘Women and Mental Health’ was a unique case. Although there was no shortage of courses on women’s health in Italy, these tended to focus on illness, and while some studies closely examined the psychological effects of gender oppression, the relationship between women, mental health and psychiatry was rarely as central as in the Turin course. This is because in 1970s Turin, the anti-institutional movement and feminist groups found significant common ground, primarily because of the key role played by some activists working in psychiatric homes in the process of deinstitutionalisation.Footnote 41 Launched in 1980 with 150 participants, the focus was on psychiatric services, the inefficiency of territorial psychiatric structures and the characteristics of women’s illnesses, building on the premise that there was a lack of ‘elaborations that neatly identify the connection between women’s psychic pathology and our reproductive function within society’ (Federazione regionale Cgil-Cisl-Uil del Piemonte Reference regionale CGIL-CISL-UIL del Piemonte1981, 115). It was the Bollettino delle donne that announced the new monographic theme, which flanked the more traditional ones on maternity and employment:
We would like to check whether mental health is a question of balance between the role imposed on us as women and our real life, our aspirations, desires and needs.
How do we maintain our psychological balance, if at all?
Through what sacrifices and renunciation?
How do we juggle the traditional role of women (as daughters, wives and mothers who live for and through family members) with the emancipatory role of working women who fulfil themselves through their jobs and social commitments? (Bollettino delle donne 1980, 5–6)
One of the main authors of the course proposal was Maria Teresa Battaglino, a psychiatric hospital employee and leading figure in the process of deinstitutionalisation in Turin.
The venues chosen for the Women and Mental Health course were the new psychiatric clinics; these had to be contaminated by the presence of women and the self-reflexivity introduced by the women’s collectives. We had to broaden the discourse, involving other women and preventing them from entering these places only as users. On the contrary, to ensure that they were welcomed as users in times of need, we had to be there as ‘healthy’ women, that is, in moments of clarity, to create spaces where one could look inside oneself and to do so in places of therapy as citizens.
… Sexuality, the relationship with one’s mother, motherhood – I remember these being the central themes that arose during the course I attended at the psychiatric clinic in Lungo Dora Savona…. Themes that easily emerged from the women sharing their distress, their struggle to manage their responsibilities. The value of the 150 hours [course] lay precisely in the fact that they were ‘normal’ women, not ideologised like us, who perhaps conveyed simple yet profound ideas more truthfully. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007b, 30–31)
The scope of discussions about women’s distress and the extent to which the link between this distress and gender emerged during the meetings are evident in the recollections of participant Elvira Giampaolo:
A very important aspect of the Women and Mental Health course was the issue of prevention. Being able to identify and understand the causes of your illness, fatigue and the feeling that you were no longer up to the task of managing a certain situation, even the simplest one, such as looking after a newborn baby, which is a beautiful thing but also a major upheaval. In other words, a new responsibility that you had never had to face before, one that carries a very strong and unacknowledged burden, as a woman and mother in a society like ours. To be able to recognise that you are scared, to say it, to acknowledge it, to make yourself aware and to understand that it is not just your problem, but one that many women face, and that you can find understanding and concrete support to take on the responsibility of motherhood within this problem – I think this is very, very important. The group addressed this problem and provided tools to help us manage our lives, not only at that moment but also in the future. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007b, 138–139)
Two years later, these themes resurfaced in texts about the relationship between feminism and mental health by some women who had participated in the course on ‘Women and Mental Health’, again published in the Bollettino delle donne:
Our distress, the mess, the kick … we now see everything in terms of not only our individual limitations and ambitions (which certainly exist – it’s not as if they’ve disappeared), but also and above all the unrealistic demands of society and our own expectations, which are largely determined by social demands and linked to our role as reproductive women:
‘I am firmly convinced that if I place my problem – my going mad precisely because of my maternal role – in a collective and social dimension, this also means I can better understand the links between my problem and my identity. I am convinced that behind our conflicts are our feelings of guilt, and that behind the feelings of guilt there is clearly the relationship between my search for emancipation, my needs and a motherhood that I wanted, but whose social code is not determined by me…. Confronting myself with many other women, I have come to understand how, having desired “natural” motherhood, I have ended up entangled in the knot of problems raised by the incompatibility between “institutional” motherhood and emancipation, which are both socially given ideals.’ (Bollettino delle donne 1982, 20)
During the preparation of ‘Women and Mental Health’,Footnote 42 the course organisers proposed running a seminar to ‘first clarify among ourselves what collective references we give ourselves in order to do this research publicly with other women … to seek a greater level of clarity among ourselves … in order to then have the necessary security to present the course to other women’.Footnote 43 In other words, it was ‘a methodological proposal … to address some elements of lack of clarity … on which there are minimum common working hypotheses that we set ourselves, and that we then want to submit to wider assessment by other women’.Footnote 44 This proposal ‘still falls within feminist research, that is, in the search for elements from the woman’s point of view, [from] our [point of view] … that give us the possibility to proceed in this story of attempting a road … to remove some of these more general chains of oppression’.Footnote 45 At the preparatory seminar, held in Robella d’Asti, Battaglino gave voice to the experiences of many of those present. Feminism, she said,
allowed my conscience to retrieve a whole field of analysis of the broader social relations underlying my restlessness … it gave me tools to achieve immediate change, not the change that would have occurred with the advent of socialism, but a change that, to some extent, I was actively trying to bring about through more general, collective processes, verified by my female comrades: for example, by delving into my issues of dependence and my relations with a man.Footnote 46
In this course, what I wanted to try to analyse is [whether] feminism has said something more than psychiatric drugs, on the one hand, and certain advanced techniques of therapy, on the other … It seems to me that if this is the case, if it happens, it already deals with at least that level of prevention we were talking about … in the sense that it already serves to not push us to say to someone, ‘cure me because I’m smashed, I’m a bit of a weakling’, but if anything to use the cure starting from the fact that certain mechanisms of why you are weak are clear to you. So the level of power in relation to the use of these techniques is already different.Footnote 47
Illness was the joint product of an internal and external judgement,Footnote 48 that is, of a personal condition labelled using deep-rooted medical and cultural categories that defined ‘woman’ as subordinate, weak and incapable, sometimes sick, dangerous and sexually uncontrollable. The various forms of somatisation – or ‘pathological demonstrations’ – thus communicated a silent distress that was both personal and shared, as the minutes of a summer meeting of a group at the Lungo Dora Savona psychiatric clinic reveal:
E.: I think that if at the beginning someone had in mind that there really was a clear, decipherable cause, I’m ill and such, I think that these doubts, at least as far as I’m concerned, no longer exist. I never thought there was a reason why someone gets sick or goes crazy. There are a number of reasons that, in my opinion, cannot but be related to the role, to subjectivity and to the kind of response you can give and receive from others.
A.: I mean, it’s a bit like filling up when the barrel overflows. When someone goes crazy, it could be due to a lot of things, even if you blame the last one, that is, the classic drop that makes the barrel overflow, but it’s not that: it’s all the drops that have made the barrel overflow.Footnote 49
The Turin feminists wanted to shed light on the daily and pathological experiences of the women participating in the course, either as students or coordinators, so that they could challenge the characteristics and aims of psychiatry as both a medical speciality and as a territorial service. In doing so, they once again criticised – as they did more generally with medicine – the delegation to the technician,Footnote 50 proposing an alternative approach to the idea of simply treating illness, according to which ‘the only thing you can talk about to understand what mental illness and its mechanisms are is your own life’.Footnote 51 The participants in this ‘150 hours’ course thus confirmed what had emerged in previous years among women who had experimented with autocoscienza, the practice of the unconscious and self-help in small groups and self-managed women’s health clinics. While this idea had not been consolidated, it resurfaced with great intensity in the discussions among the 1,300 women who had enrolled in the women’s health course a few years earlier: the awareness of the specificity of women’s suffering and the refusal to medicalise it, based on the growing belief that psychiatric diagnosis ignored and concealed the underlying reasons for dissatisfaction and illness. Hence, the request to conceptualise mental health differently arose in order to prevent female pain and inner distress from being given a diagnostic label, because much (but not all) of that distress could be explained differently by passing through the necessary phase of collective ‘conscientisation’. Battaglino was fully convinced of this during the preparatory seminar of 1980:
Feminism … provided me with a non-pathological basis for my restlessness. There was a total abyss between my restlessness and the liberation projects that began in 1968 … Although I was familiar with psychosomatic disorders and knew that my stomach aches stemmed from my anxieties, knowing only the relationship between the two never helped me to eliminate the pain. Instead, during these years of collective research, I seemed to be – and, to a certain extent, I was – quite well. Not so much because I managed to link cause and effect, [relating] my headaches to my problems, but because I had reached a level of consciousness regarding the relationship between my illness and my condition as a woman and a mother.Footnote 52
But to what extent did psychiatric services embrace this awareness? Battaglino recalls the discussion about this topic as follows:
Unfortunately, during the course we failed to verify one of the important assumptions of the programme, namely, the extent to which these services responded to the specific needs of women. In my opinion, this was the result of the service technicians’ limited willingness to participate in the course, except for a few young female psychiatrists at the beginning of their careers who came a few times – I am thinking of Anna Viacava and Maria Zuccolin. We did not see a single male psychiatrist, even though they were deeply committed to the struggle for liberation from the psychiatric institution. This gave us, as coordinators, food for thought, because we were unable to mediate between the wealth of ideas and content that the women on the course brought, and the fact that these technicians did not show up. There was a difference in motivation, but we failed to offer any convincing reasons to make them participate. At that stage, I think the technicians were not interested in the specific needs of women; they were much more interested in working-class suffering. (Giorda Reference Giorda2007b, 30–31)
Although the limitations of territorial psychiatric services were clear, the participants in the ‘150 hours’ course dedicated several meetings to the issue of their functioning, offering many valuable insights. These services, envisaged and stimulated by Law 180, were contingent on broader health services under Law 833 (Giorgi and Pavan Reference Giorgi and Pavan2019; Giorgi Reference Giorgi2024). Many doubts were raised:
In psychiatric clinics, one draws, one expresses oneself more freely but almost never gets to the bottom of the problem; one deals with situations in terms of repair, patching them up in a superficial way but without trying to have any impact or delve into them.Footnote 53
What therapy tools, other than psychotropic drugs and hospitalisation, does the public structure use? We denounce the imbalance between the public and the private response, which in Italy is not subject to any legal regulation and which gives an answer at very high prices or, at any rate, the illusion of knowing the causes of our illness.Footnote 54
A much-debated point concerned fears that the territorial services’ all-encompassing nature and integration, as envisaged by the reforms, would increase the risk of new forms of social control, and that, faced with a woman who was ‘searching, torn apart by the awareness of this moving situation’, the answer was ‘adjustment as normalisation’.Footnote 55 It was again Battaglino who identified the crux of the matter, namely the danger of reinstitutionalising mental illness:
[L]aw 180 is a tragedy; I don’t know how it turned out this way. The movement adopted certain coordinates of struggle, questioned certain types of things and even developed some alternative practices, but not as a permanent, static model: just a model to be used in specific circumstances.Footnote 56
Hence, feminist groups – both in Turin and elsewhere – feared that the National Health Service, within which the new organisation of psychiatry was included, could have a regressive outcome in the way mental health was dealt with if it was interpreted in a bureaucratic way, halting the processes of liberation and participation that had led to the deconstruction of psychiatric institutions, in particular, and medical knowledge, in general. On closer inspection, it was the same concern that had accompanied the development of women’s health clinics (which had already become ‘family clinics’) during the initial phase of the health reform, as they gradually lost their original fundamental characteristics, first and foremost ‘social management’ and the fact that they were born ‘as a service for women’ (Collettivo Donne Baggio et al. 1982, 63). This criticism was largely based on the denunciation of the process of institutionalisation and the resistance to change, which ‘in fact stifles any possibility of real recovery of health and deprives women of the ability to manage their condition and remove the causes that produce non-health, throwing them back into delegation, passivity and the continuous reproduction of illness’.
‘It is worrying to see how, in the implementation phase of the reform, the tendencies that emerge in the name of rationalisation, of a medical project, are those belonging to the … logic … of medicalisation, of the intervention on symptoms, of the apparent demand,’ when the logic that belonged to women was, instead, ‘one of prevention (which does not refuse to address health, but traces it back to the conditions that produced it), revealing the real and overall conditions of non-health, which intervenes in the areas and with the necessary means to treat women as the overall subject of health, not the object of illness,’ producing ‘a demand that contains the social fact.’ (Donne di Medicina Democratica di Milano e provincia, Unione Donne Italiane - comitato provinciale di Milano 1981, 45)
Having reflected on mental health more than others, the Turin women were thus able to identify the main danger of this institutionalisation in the implementation of psychiatric and health reforms:
We must avoid … falling into the trap of becoming embroiled in the bureaucratism of the institutions we are forced to deal with (as has often happened in the daily work in health clinics), becoming a group that exists purely as a result of a negotiation. We need to turn this moment into an opportunity to reconsider our experience and the plain contradictions, how to overcome the ‘minuscule management’ approach to the service that has often stifled our expectations and our capacity for analysis with respect to the broader health problem. (Coordinamento Gruppo Consultorio – Torino 1983, 18)Footnote 57
Women, feminism and psychiatry
In the 1970s, discussions among Italian feminist groups and collectives about women’s wellness and illness began with the broader theme of health and knowledge of one’s body. However, they soon moved to personal, theoretical, clinical and political issues related to mental health. This perspective encouraged feminists to address the role of psychiatry, with some questioning the confinement of women in psychiatric institutions. In fact, the condition of these confined women mirrored the condition of women in general, emphasising the need to deconstruct suffering through listening and speaking, thus raising awareness among women of their position as situated bodies and their unique perspective on the world.
We are used to rationalising and repressing emotions, and we are unable to grasp the level of despair that these women experience when they have no real alternatives; for them, conscience cannot translate into action, pushing them down a path of self-destruction from which there is no return. We have a personal story in which we have tried to free ourselves from our traditional role through culture, which is why our approach is more rational than emotional. Many pathological demonstrations are a means of expelling the guilt of not being able to be as one should and, simultaneously, an extreme way of communicating discomfort. The ‘demonstrativeness’ always confirms the individual nature of the woman’s discomfort, preventing her from communicating with other women in solidarity and collectively, and always pushing her back into male dependence, even medical dependence. It is difficult to face this form of suffering, which is both displayed and denied, this internalised false consciousness.Footnote 58
The importance of considering the point of view of confined women was also noted by Ongaro:
Listening to the voices of women in our psychiatric hospitals gives us a sense of the space in which these lives have been confined and the contradictory cultural messages they have been the target of: motherhood – apparently presented as a virtue, yet never socially supported and aided – can only be suffered as a threat and avoided as a guilt; the freedom to be your own boss, to decide for yourself and to move through the world as an individual, emphasised as a right yet frowned upon as a sign of moral degradation, and therefore something that is conquered at the price of moral degradation; the cultural view of women as sexual objects, at the same time punished for being so; and finally, as a backdrop, the unwanted and abandoned child, the secret abortions, the betrayed love and the solitude of those who feel ‘abandoned’ and know they do not exist independently. This is the world that emerges from the voices of the female internees. (1978, 114–115)
The transition from women’s self-awareness and autocoscienza to the criticism of psychiatry and psychiatric institutions was by no means obvious or easy. In fact, even the women who reflected most on the relationship between gender, psychiatric institutions and deinstitutionalisation did not always draw the necessary operational conclusions from their reflections.
[A]lthough the experiences of women who supported women with psychiatric disorders raised certain issues about being a woman, they left the psychiatric institutions unchanged, and all the more so the women who continued to be imprisoned there. They thus failed to get to the core of psychiatry, let alone return the suffering to the social, to the social of the female community. (Signorelli Reference Signorelli2015, 91)
In order to ‘get to the core of psychiatry’, it was necessary to fully adopt the feminists’ approach to medical knowledge and mental health. The establishment and functioning of territorial psychiatric services, the creation of awareness of the causes of women’s mental health disorders and the process of deinstitutionalising patients (in particular women) ended up by investing women with a more general responsibility that (also) concerned the redefinition of care. In the words of the Turin feminists,
if psychic distress and the suffering that stems from it are deeply internalised historical data, there is no standard cure. One can speak of equilibrium, of seeking equilibrium, of a new equilibrium, but this not only has no model; it is not static either.Footnote 59
For many, the relationship between gender and psychiatry was fundamental, as Signorelli has observed:
If being a woman, if having a woman’s perspective reflects an uncertain, ambiguous and much more ‘false’ way of seeing things, then women’s illness must be understood in this way, and being a professional worker means always operating in this ‘double’ [situation] … As one women once said: ‘When I am sick I don’t like being at the Centro-Donna; when I am well I realise that it is better than when I am sick [and] I stay here.’ This place enables a process of gaining awareness by reading one’s suffering. In other words, it enables the only real process of overcoming illness, since talking about healing is useless: the awareness of being ill and the identification of tools that allow one to avoid it. (1998, 5)
To conclude, the case of Turin shows that there was a real possibility of interactions between feminism and the psychiatric reform movement. In fact, in the years following 1978, the experiences proposed by feminist groups with regard to women, mental health and psychiatry also partially influenced the process of deinstitutionalising psychiatry in the local context, particularly in terms of social and care work carried out by institutions in close collaboration with the third sector.
Translated by Andrea Hajek
Funding statement
This article is based on research conducted in the context of PRIN 2022 Narration and Care. The deinstitutionalization of the asylum system in Italy: history, imaginary, planning (from 1961 to today), funded by Next Generation EU, Mission 4 Part 2 CUP: F53D23007380006.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Daniela Adorni is responsible for the constitutive project of the Interdepartmental Research Centre ‘Luoghi|Persone|Patrimoni: storia della salute mentale e dell’assistenza socio-sanitaria’ at the Department of Historical Studies (University of Turin). She is also the scientific coordinator of the research projects Memorie che curano. Storia orale del superamento degli ospedali psichiatrici (1960-2000) and Patrimoni da curare. Laboratorio di storia visuale sulla Certosa di Collegno (1960-2000). She is a member of the joint UniTo-PoliTo research group on places of juvenile internment in Piedmont. Together with Eleonora Belligni, she co-edited Diverse in corpo e in spirito. Donne sole, impure, eccentriche, devianti nell’area mediterranea tra età antica e contemporanea (2018), the outcome of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Donne fuori dalle norme. Dall’antichità all’età contemporanea’, of which she was the coordinator. In collaboration with Davide Tabor, she has organised numerous seminars and conferences on female internment and the deinstitutionalisation process and co-edited Memorie che curano/Memorie da curare. Patrimoni culturali della storia della deistituzionalizzazione psichiatrica a Torino (FrancoAngeli, Milan 2024). Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the local unit in Turin for the PRIN 2022 Narration and Care. The deinstitutionalization of the asylum system in Italy: history, imaginary, planning (from 1961 to today). She is also the PI of the University’s Public Engagement project Atlante storico della deistituzionalizzazione psichiatrica (Torino 1960-2025).
Davide Tabor is a contract professor at the University of Turin. His areas of research expertise include nineteenth- and twentieth-century social history, the history of psychiatry, oral history and visual memory, forms of individual and collective memory, urban history and the history of welfare. At the Department of Historical Studies (University of Turin), he has conducted research on the memories of deinstitutionalisation, also using oral history methodology, and on the application and effects of Italian psychiatric reform. He has written several essays and has contributed to various public engagement projects on these topics, including the AISO residential school on oral history in the landscape and in the archives of liberation from the psychiatric institution (2022, 2023, 2024) and the valorisation of the private archives of the ‘third sector’. Together with Daniela Adorni, he is working on a ten-part web documentary (Healing Memories) on the closure of psychiatric hospitals in Turin. He is also part of an interdisciplinary research group that is designing the ‘Atlas of deinstitutionalization’, an interactive online map telling stories and memories of confinement in and liberation from psychiatric hospitals. He has a former editor of Contesti. Rivista di microstoria and is currently a board member of the Italian Association of Oral History. In 2024, he co-edited Memorie che curano/Memorie da curare. Patrimoni culturali della storia della deistituzionalizzazione psichiatrica a Torino (FrancoAngeli, Milan 2024) with Daniela Adorni.
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