Mothers and families in Italy from Fascism to 1968

Although Italian society was profoundly altered by the postwar economic miracle (1957–63), with large-scale migration and the rise of consumer culture reshaping how people thought about gender, relationships, prosperity and happiness, the institution of the family proved remarkably resilient. Those migrating to the northern cities often travelled with or joined family members in the city (Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg1990, 219; Crainz Reference Crainz2005, 108). Rural parents might strategise to organise a match to a man with a secure factory job, to ensure a more prosperous life for their daughter (Cullen Reference Cullen2019, 34–36). While the proportion of women in the workforce increased in western Europe after 1945, the numbers of Italian women working decreased in the same period (Tasca Reference Tasca2004). The idea of family honour persisted, especially in the rural South, until at least the 1960s, as illustrated by the 1966 abduction of Franca Viola. Her case brought about widespread public outrage although no legal change until 1981 (Cullen Reference Cullen2016, 97–115). It must have seemed to many girls coming of age in the 1960s that the images and examples of modern, liberated lifestyles presented in films and magazines were often illusory. Luisa Bellè describes how a new generation of women in 1960s Trento found that new freedoms also brought a painful awareness of their limits, as they left home to attend university but had to battle against the early curfews of the religious-run student residences and the different expectations for men and women (Bellè Reference Bellè2021, 100–104).

Although girls and young women might enjoy an extended period of relative liberty, particularly as they remained longer in education, it was still expected that marriage would follow, and the weight of motherhood was present as both cultural idea and expectation. Marina D’Amelia has explored the cultural importance of the mother, bound up with sentimentalism and religion, to the newly unified nineteenth-century nation, while the political importance of mothers and motherhood to the Fascist project is well documented (D’Amelia Reference D’Amelia2005; De Grazia Reference De Grazia1992, 41–76; Quine Reference Quine2002, 129–174; Whittaker Reference Whittaker2000; Garvin Reference Garvin2015). The Fascist-era posters and newsreels of the ONMI (Reference Milani1957) welfare organisation (1925–75) were directed towards state control of women’s fertility, although these aims were often cloaked in sentimental images and language. A serene mother embraced her child, in an echo of Catholic iconography, on the 1926 ONMI information booklet for new mothers. A mother’s love for her soldier son beamed out of the 1939 poster for the National Day of the Mother and Child (De Grazia Reference De Grazia1992, 75). Following the fall of Fascism in 1945, there was no great rupture with the past, and the image of the traditional, Catholic family remained important to the Christian Democrats in their project of moral reconstruction, even as it grew increasingly out of step with a changing society (Caldwell Reference Caldwell, Duggan and Wagstaff1995; Bernini Reference Bernini2007). Neither did the Italian Left, in the context of the Cold War, articulate any strong progressive alternative models (Casalini Reference Casalini2011; Bellassai Reference Bellasai2001).

It was within the protest movements of the late 1960s that the project of radically reconfiguring the Italian family began. Rupture with family featured strongly in the discourse of 1968 activists. Fiorella Farinelli, a student activist interviewed by Luisa Passerini, recalled seeing the slogan ‘I want to be an orphan’ pasted up in her faculty building and found that it resonated strongly (Passerini Reference Passerini1996, 29). Passerini’s women activist interviewees experienced much stronger feelings of rebellion against the mother – and all that she represented – than the father. Feelings towards the mother could be characterised as a violent rejection: ‘unmeditated repulsion, out of nausea, disgust, aversion’ (Passerini Reference Passerini1996, 33), or, as Farinelli put it, ‘I knew that in my life I wanted to be everything except what my mother was, that’s it’ (Passerini Reference Passerini1996, 34).

Rebecca Clifford’s oral history of activists also found deep gendered imbalances in the attitudes of the 1968 generation towards their families (Clifford Reference Clifford2012). The testimonies she gathered revealed how women activists often experienced deeper rupture with their parents than their male counterparts due to the more rigid strictures placed on young women’s behaviour, and stressed feelings of shame, disappointment and sadness in their accounts of clashes between mothers and daughters (Clifford Reference Clifford2012, 213–215). Many women active in the student movements of the late 1960s went on to become founding members of the various feminist groups, in Rome, Trento, Milan and elsewhere, by the early 1970s (Bellè Reference Bellè2021; Clifford Reference Clifford2012). Rupture with the family – ideal and real – remained a structuring idea of the 1970s feminist groups. In Milanese consciousness-raising groups, there was a strong psychoanalytic focus on mother–daughter relations (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 77–78), while critiques of marriage and motherhood were explicit in the campaigns for legal divorce and abortion.

Feminism and motherhood

Carla Lonzi drew attention to the deeply rooted structures of oppression that shaped women’s lives in the context of both patriarchy and late capitalism in 1970s Italy. ‘We do not wish to think about motherhood all our lives,’ the 1970 manifesto for Rivolta Femminile declared (Bono and Kemp [Reference Bono and Kemp1970] 1991, 38). While Lonzi theorised about the creative and transformative potential of children in Sputiamo su Hegel, she also identified the notion of maternal love as women’s sole possible fulfilment as limiting women’s creative potential (Lonzi Reference Lonzi1982, 42–43). This critique reflected the discussions of second-wave feminists across Europe and the USA in the early 1970s. The desire for women’s lives not to be dominated by the expectation or experience of motherhood often spilled over into full-scale rejection. A collectively written book by a radical French feminist group, ‘Enslaved Motherhood’, described the oppression of motherhood under capitalism (Duchen Reference Duchen1986, 55–56). Until social conditions changed, they argued that motherhood could never be desirable. Feminist attention was directed, overwhelmingly, towards the matter of reproductive choice, and the campaigns for legal contraception and abortion. Pregnancy and childbirth, when discussed, were treated with horror and disgust (Duchen Reference Duchen1986, 62–63). For Simone de Beauvoir and the co-authors of ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’, published in Le Nouvel Observateur as an opening statement in the campaign for legal abortion, pregnancy was ‘a sort of tumour in your belly’ (Le Nouvel Observateur 1971). Subverting the idea of pregnancy as a natural experience, they recast it instead as disease or aberration.

In Italy, too, there was little space for motherhood in the manifestos and discussions of the early feminist groups. Attention was instead directed towards women’s bodies: sexuality, women’s health and reproductive choice were the concerns of consciousness-raising groups, practical initiatives and activism (Bellè Reference Bellè2021, 57–63; Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 64–125; Stelliferi Reference Stelliferi2015, 24–27, 41–49). This was not just an indication of feminist thinking about the family; it was also a reflection of the age profile of the mainly young women students and recent graduates who formed the core of many early feminist collectives (Bellè Reference Bellè2021, 96–125) and who were mostly concerned with sexual freedom and bodily autonomy. The Pompeo Magno collective in Rome drew in women from a variety of backgrounds, although many were students and most did not have children (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 100). The campaigns for abortion, which mobilised 1970s Italian and French feminists most of all, focused on women’s right to control their bodies and to self-determination (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 84–88). Deciding to have a child could also be seen as a refusal of feminism as a collective project and way of life (Scattigno Reference Scattigno and D’Amelia1997, 290). Motherhood was rarely explored in detail in the early 1970s. When it did come up in manifestos and discussions, it was treated in negative terms (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 239–240; Scattigno Reference Scattigno and D’Amelia1997, 285–288). The early manifestos and public demonstrations of the Roman activist groups that would coalesce around the Pompeo Magno collective followed Carla Lonzi in their desire to separate feminine identity from motherhood. ‘But you woman, pre-mother, mother and post-mother, who are you really?’ was the opening question of an exhibition organised by Rivolta Femminile activists on mothers’ day 1971, in Piazza Navona (Stelliferi Reference Stelliferi2015, 23). The exhibition was staged with the aim of bringing more women into the movement by confronting them with the ordinary oppression of patriarchy and the family. It was only after the legalisation of abortion, in 1978 in Italy, that a space was opened up for more nuanced explorations of motherhood. As Duchen put it, once abortion became legal in France in 1975, ‘the notion of choice, however limited, allowed women to consider motherhood in terms other than negative’ (Duchen Reference Duchen1986, 60).

At the same time, some feminists were aware that simply characterising motherhood as a choice was not always the most useful way of thinking about the complex web of desires, feelings and obligations that characterised women’s experiences. In 1970, the Canadian-American feminist Shulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which called attention to the repressive manner in which love structured women’s lives, binding them to men and family (Firestone [Reference Firestone1970] Reference Firestone2015). She identified pregnancy and childbirth as a time when women were particularly vulnerable to male oppression, calling for technology to remove the burden of reproduction from women’s bodies, and for children to be raised not in families but in collectives. Devoting a chapter of her The Dialectic of Sex to love, Firestone argued that ‘women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture’ (Firestone [Reference Firestone1970] Reference Firestone2015, 113). In her analysis, it was not just violence, power or the law that reinforced the patriarchy, but love. Her primary concern was with men, women and romantic love, although the critique, when conceived in terms of care, emotional labour and the manner in which maternal love binds women to their traditional role in the family, could also apply to mothers and children. Many Italian feminists were aware of how maternal love was used to reinforce normative ideas of family, in a culture where Catholic teaching about the family was strongly underpinned by sentimental iconography of mothers and children. In Sputiamo su Hegel, Carla Lonzi commented on how ‘the myth of maternal love’ restricted women’s potential at the peak of their lives (Lonzi Reference Lonzi1982, 43). When Italian feminist writing contended with motherhood, it often included a critique of maternal love: either a mother could be criticised for loving her children too little or too much, or she risked losing herself completely in the sacrifices demanded by motherhood (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 240–242).

In Effe magazine, ideas about maternal love were used to structure critiques of institutions and social structures. The love of a mother for her children was such a familiar trope in Italian culture as to be bound up with expectation and even duty. Yet it was also part of the day-to-day experience of motherhood, and it had a radical potential, when the availability of contraception and legal abortion began to allow women to choose, in the notion of the loved and wanted child. There was also a shift over time, with greater space opened up in the late 1970s for positive and more nuanced interpretations of motherhood.

The experience of motherhood in Effe: between love, duty and excess feeling

Although the attention of Effe, in keeping with the concerns of the broader feminist movement, was often on the institutions and structures that governed women’s reproductive lives, there was also space from the beginning to explore the experiences and emotions of a range of women about motherhood. The February 1973 feature ‘The Rage of Being a Mother’ was a frank and wide-ranging discussion between five women, identified only by first names and initials, about the experience of mothering in early 1970s Italy. It also reflected the feminist concern with autocoscienza, or partire da sè (knowing yourself or starting from one’s own position), the Italian adaptation of the feminist notion of consciousness raising (Effe 1973b). Many of the Italian feminist collectives placed group sessions of autocoscienza at the centre of their practice (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 66–70; Bellè Reference Bellè2021; Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 155–180). These sessions brought activists together to examine their own experiences and attitudes towards sexuality, the body, patriarchy and the family. Although the notion of consciousness raising originated among US feminists and civil rights activists, the Italian practice also had roots in psychoanalysis, which was a strong feature of French feminism (Bellè Reference Bellè2021, 55; Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 181–207), although its use was not without controversy in Italian feminist groups (Scattigno Reference Scattigno and D’Amelia1997, 289). Some of the original contributors to Effe were trained in or practised psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and often specialised in parents and children.

The attention of the women interviewees focused on the gap between the sentimental ideal of motherhood and the complex, difficult reality. The article opened with Anna N.’s admission that she sometimes found herself momentarily hating her children and felt trapped by them. The fact that ‘maternal love’ was assumed to be natural made these feminist mothers fear being seen – and indeed seeing themselves – as ‘unnatural mothers’. Teresa admitted feeling shame for having moments of rage or hate, like Anna had. At the same time, she was convinced that this apparently unnatural, shameful feeling was probably much more widespread. Luisa saw rage as the direct counterpoint to love: in loving your children with proper dedication, you lost some measure of independence, she reflected.

The notion of ‘sacrifices’ was key to the discussion, reflecting how ideas of motherhood were strongly inflected by Catholicism. As Pope Pius XII reminded mothers in 1957, the mother’s ‘fundamental principle should be … her continuous sacrifice’, and it was her duty to put family before all other considerations (quoted in Patriarca Reference Patriarca, Morris and Wilson2018, 43). The bestselling Catholic magazine of the postwar decades, Famiglia Cristiana, reinforced the ideal of the mother–martyr figure: a mother should be prepared to give anything for her children, including her own life in childbirth (Morris Reference Morris, Morris and Wilson2018, 84–86). The model of motherhood as one that involved total self-sacrifice was also discussed within the Italian feminist movement: activists reflected on the sacrificial example of their own mothers, sometimes with reference to their own decision not to have children (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 241–242).

Did maternal love necessarily involve sacrifice, the women asked each other, and was it always rooted in resentment? Marisa, a separated mother with older children, felt quite free and was worried about spending enough time with her children, given that she worked full time. Luisa answered her: ‘That’s why you haven’t felt rage. Because you haven’t actually sacrificed yourself for your children.’ The women also reflected on their choices to become mothers, and how others might use this information to deflect complaints about their lives, although there was still a difference, Marisa reflected, between ‘choice and martyrdom’. In the absence of legal abortion in 1974, and given women’s uneven access to contraception, at this stage motherhood was not a choice for all Italian women, although it was beginning to be reframed in that way.

The discussion then turned its attention to the children, asking how a mother’s choice to be independent, work, or dedicate herself entirely to her children affected their development. Most agreed that a mother dedicating herself solely to her children did not benefit either person, in the long term. Marisa asserted: ‘The obsessive and constant presence of the mother can also cause harm to a child.’ Luisa agreed, suggesting that the children, once grown, might seek the same sort of dependence in their romantic relationships. Here we can see the discourse on ‘mammismo’ encroaching on ideas of the mother–child relationship. Marina D’Amelia identified that the stereotype of the overbearing Italian mother and her pampered adult son emerged in Italian culture after 1945, reflecting anxieties about mothers, sons and the nation (D’Amelia Reference D’Amelia2005, 7–49; Patriarca Reference Patriarca, Morris and Wilson2018). The idea that a mother who loved too much could be harmful to her children could also be found in progressive, left-wing opinion, fitting with both the feminist need for independence and the concern about raising men who would need mothering by other women. Writing in Epoca magazine in the 1950s, Alba de Céspedes had cautioned her readers against becoming the kind of mother who loved her son too much (Morris Reference Morris, Morris and Wilson2018, 95–96). In her view, the tendency arose when women were trapped in loveless marriages, transferring their love instead to their sons. Her solution was social progress and the empowerment of women, a radical position in the context of 1950s society. The Effe discussion constantly pushed against the idea of maternal love as instinctual, pointing out the ways in which it was culturally constructed and bound up with expectations about time and care work, even though they subscribed to the ‘mammismo’ stereotype, which suggested that too much motherly love could be a problem. There was also a concern for children in Marisa’s wish to spend more time with them, as in the worries about whether too much or too little love (which could perhaps be better read as attention and care) would affect them.

If there was a cultural concern in late twentieth-century Italy with mothers loving their sons too much and pampering them in adulthood, the trope of a more complex and conflictual relationship between mothers and daughters was reflected in many sources, including in feminist writings and the testimonies of women activists (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 245–248; Passerini Reference Passerini1996, 32–36; Clifford Reference Clifford2012, 213–215). Several articles in Effe probed the complex feelings of love, obligation and connection between mothers and daughters from the point of view of the adult daughter, sometimes suggesting that ‘mammismo’ could be just as harmful to daughters as sons. If many feminists chose not to have children, they all shared the experience of being a daughter and receiving a mother’s love. Milanese feminist groups, drawing on psychoanalysis, were especially committed to exploring the implications of being a daughter for their feminist activism, through their consciousness-raising sessions; similar concerns also spilled into Effe (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 77–78). The January 1977 special issue on motherhood contained two such reflections. D.V.’s short article on ‘Why I don’t have children’ located her decision not to have children in her complex feelings towards her own mother (D.V. 1977).

Thirty-five years old and a committed feminist, D.V. remembered her late mother as a woman who had sacrificed everything for her daughter, because she saw no other way to live. Her apparent love for her husband did not last long after he returned from war, leaving her ‘nothing other than her obsession for [her daughter]’. D.V. found her mother’s excessive attention stifling and rebelled against it, judging her mother incapable of giving her the real ‘infinite and impossible love’ that she needed to grow as an individual. ‘Feminism instead helped me understand that loving your own mother viscerally, which we can’t help doing, does harm to all of us. Not until we have exorcised the mother figure … will we really be able to tell if and why we want to become mothers.’ The article echoed Alba de Céspedes’ comments about mothers’ excessive love for their sons. If the relationship between mothers and daughters was usually represented as one of friction more than excessive care, D.V.’s testimony suggested that the notion of ‘mammismo’ might prevent young women from becoming mothers themselves.

Sandra Sassaroli, a surgeon who was beginning to specialise in psychiatry and psychotherapy by the late 1970s, wrote in the same issue about her work as a therapist and her ‘problem daughterhood’, which she connected to her ‘problem of non-motherhood’.Footnote ² By that time, she was also part of the Effe editorial team (Colombo Reference Colombon.d.). In her work with families, she identified a classic pattern of the mother who created an ‘exclusive, ambivalent, paradoxical bond’ with her children. Sometimes she transferred her own feelings onto her children, so that often behind the figure of an unwell son lurked an unwell mother. The son was torn between the desire for independence, often barely articulated, and the excessively close bond with the mother. The third part of the puzzle was the absent or distant father. She, too, located the problem in the fact that women were socialised to believe that motherhood was the only identity possible for them, and the power to change these unhealthy patterns lay in women themselves. Maternal love, the various interventions in the magazine suggested, was a powerful force that was closely connected to the patriarchal order. Liberating mothers from this excess of feeling would benefit both women and their children. What was needed, Effe writers suggested, was a more collective approach to child-rearing, to reduce the burden of duty and cultural expectation that traditional family relationships placed on both mothers and children.

The call for collective mothering was echoed by other feminist collectives active in early 1970s Italy. One collective argued that the ‘asilo nido’ childcare system kept children artificially segregated from the adult world. What was needed was a less formal, communal approach to childcare so that ‘the love for children could be spread more evenly’ (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 240). It was unclear, however, how close those ideas came to being translated into reality. In 1975, Antonella Nappi argued that Italian feminists were still too possessive of their own children; while in theory feminists spoke about children in the collective, there was still a deep, personal resistance in practice to more communal parenting styles on the part of feminist mothers (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 245). The enthusiasm for collective approaches to mothering would also dissipate as the decade wore on, the communal sentiment of the early 1970s eventually giving way to a different perspective that was less ambivalent and more rooted in the body.

Mothers, children and institutions: rights and duties

The interests of mothers and children were evidently connected; attention to children and the need to balance freedom with care in the relationships between parents and children were recurrent themes in Effe. It was also recognised that the answer to the problems of both excess maternal love and the intense pressures of motherhood lay in the need for better support structures for families. This concern reflected the broader climate of anti-authoritarianism of the late 1960s, and the attendant critiques of the traditional – Catholic and capitalist – family model. The preoccupation with children was reflected in Don Lorenzo Milani’s work in the rural model Barbiana school (Milani Reference Milani1957) and the way his Lettera a una professoressa caught national attention in 1967 (Tonelli Reference Tonelli2007, 90–93). The critique of the nuclear family and the need for collective alternatives were features of late 1960s protest groups as well as becoming concerns of the feminist movement (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 163).

Maud Bracke found that Neapolitan feminist groups were especially concerned with the lives and rights of children. In a regional culture where Catholicism and the family were especially central, a refusal of motherhood was much more difficult. Instead, Neapolitan feminists tended to connect feminism to motherhood, paying attention to the rights and welfare of both women and children (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 163–164). Their initiatives incorporated welfare for poor children and support for women’s care work. While Neapolitan feminists may have paid particular attention to children, there were other local child-centred initiatives. In Trento, feminist groups drew attention to inadequate childcare facilities and campaigned about the lack of green spaces for children’s play (Bellè Reference Bellè2021, 128, 153–155).

Several articles in the early years of Effe noted that not only were existing childcare provisions inadequate – places in the asilo system were very limited while classes in the scuola materna were often overcrowded – but they were also authoritarian, invested in perpetuating both capitalism and the patriarchy (Effe 1973a; Francescato Reference Francescato1974). There were also several articles exploring alternative models of childcare, often drawing on psychoanalysis and allowing children freedom of development – including sexual – that they did not have under the existing, limited and authoritarian models. The influence of US counterculture, in addition to left-wing models, was clear. Donata Francescato, co-founder of Effe, had trained in the US as a psychologist and published a book about communes as an alternative model in Reference Francescato and Francescato1974. Her 1974 article explored alternative nursery models, in the US, Germany, Russia and, closer to home, in Milan (Francescato Reference Francescato1974). Tilde Giani Gallino’s Reference Gallino1975 article about toilet training reflected her training as a psychologist in late 1960s California, where, as a student of Erik Erikson and as a translator of Herbert Marcuse, she encountered ideas of both psychoanalysis and late 1960s counterculture (Gallino Reference Gallino1975). A further article in 1974 explored an anti-authoritarian nursery in Rome, which was heavily influenced by the approach of A.S. Neill, and his ideas about freedom in schooling (M. D.A. 1974). While these articles did not explicitly reference maternal or family love, their concern was with children’s free development, which, as they saw it, could be equally hampered by authoritarian or overbearing families as by state-run school and nursery regulations. When solutions were suggested, they usually pointed towards collective and co-operative approaches to child-rearing and childcare as the antidote both to authoritarian and de-humanising state systems and to the overbearing mothers of many family settings.

At the same time, some other articles in Effe magazine made it clear that maternity was not just a burden but a right, and that the freedom to choose had to include the freedom to be a mother. The institutions of the state may have been outdated and may have offered insufficient support, but they were also used to police the boundaries of the normal family and to decide who was allowed to be a mother, whether on the grounds of class, morality or regional background. Articles highlighted how different aspects of the state set out models of proper motherhood – in children’s school texts – and decided what kind of behaviour made a woman fit to mother her children, through family law courts (Vannuccini Reference Vannuccini1974; Conti Reference Conti1978). A 1973 article syndicated from the French feminist magazine Le Torchon Brûle explored the case of a mother who resorted to infanticide in the absence of reproductive choice (Effe 1973c). The article investigated how both the social conditions that drove her to infanticide and the legal system deprived her other children of their mother’s love and care, showing how reproductive choice was not just about the right not to be a mother.

Effe magazine did not just reflect discussions happening within the second-wave feminist movement; it also reported on initiatives that extended and complicated the definition of feminist activism. The November 1973 issue carried an article publicising the case of the Casa della Madre e del Fanciullo (Home of the Mother and Child) in Lambrate, established in 1972 on the outskirts of Milan (Effe 1973a). The Casa was intended as a new type of institution where single mothers could live in sheltered accommodation with their babies, benefiting from childcare and subsidised rent, in contrast to the older network of religious-run foundling homes that routinely separated mothers and babies (Quine Reference Quine2002, 229–248; Corriere della Sera 1973). By late 1973, conflict was brewing between the women residents and the authorities, who were concerned that some women were spending too long in the new facility. Unable to afford childcare and market rents once they left the establishment, the women were usually deemed unfit to care for their children, who were taken from them and sent to the local foundling home instead. The young mothers also resented the surveillance of the authorities who ran the home, aiming instead to transform it into an autonomous commune for mothers and babies. The public protest staged by the women residents and reported in Effe in November 1973 was in keeping with the anti-institutional movements of the late 1960s, which began with Franco Basaglia’s anti-asylum movement and the publication of L’Istitutione Negata in 1968 (Foot Reference Foot2015, 44–52). The women’s plans to turn the institution into a sort of communal living arrangement also fitted with the broader late 1960s critique of the family, while they used the language of feminism to frame their protest. Their first experience of political protest was the struggle for their rights as mothers.

They were all young women, some minors, from working-class and sometimes southern migrant backgrounds. Theirs was not a struggle for reproductive choice, which they did not have, some describing how they became pregnant as a result of sexual abuse. What the women were demanding was the autonomy to mother their children in the manner they chose. They refused the shame of illegitimacy and wanted the financial means to live independently with their children. They also highlighted the inadequacy of childcare provision, drawing attention to the structural inequalities which made the ability to mother their children a privilege and not a right. As 24-year-old Renza put it, ‘I very much wanted my daughter, even though he [the father] told me he wanted nothing to do with her. It is a responsibility that I took on myself and I do not burden others with it. But having a home, and the social assistance to raise our children, these are our rights’ (Effe 1973a).

While the protest achieved some initial victories, reuniting some mothers and children who were separated, and attracting media attention in late 1973, it was not successful in the long term. A letter from the women protesters to Effe magazine in January 1974 reminded readers that the protest was continuing, although it no longer received much media coverage (Effe 1974). The Milanese women’s appeal to Effe is an indication of the magazine’s heterogeneity, affording space not just to reportage, but to dialogue (Corriere della Sera 1981). The protest of the young mothers in Milan also demonstrated how a feminist critique of public health and welfare institutions might be grounded in the struggle not just for reproductive choice but also for women’s autonomy to mother as they chose.

Sensuality, emotion and the pleasures of motherhood

While social structures and institutions deeply inflected women’s experience of motherhood, there were voices present from Effe’s inception suggesting a different perspective: one that focused on a healthy relationship between mother and child, characterised by sensual pleasure and emotional connection. The most significant contribution of this kind came from Elena Giannini Belotti, who wrote fiction and works of feminism in addition to her role as director of the Centro Nascita Montessori. The Rome-based birth centre was founded in 1961 to promote natural birth and child-centred infant care, following the ideas of Maria Montessori.Footnote ³ Belotti contributed to Effe in 1973 with an article entitled ‘There Are Ways and Ways of Coming into the World’, which connected the structural violence of patriarchal society with the everyday violence that, she argued, adults committed against children (Belotti Reference Belotti1973). The way in which newborn babies were treated in their first days of life was a glaring example of this ordinary – invisible and unspoken – violence. She characterised washing, dressing and placing the baby in a separate nursery – all standard practice for a hospital birth in 1970s Italy – as forms of brutality, but asserted that ‘it is precisely in the feeding of the newborn that the violence against him emerges most dramatically’.

Breastfeeding was subject to close medical regulation in Italy, and Belotti argued that common practices such as ignoring a hungry baby’s cries, waking to feed according to a schedule, hurrying a baby or limiting their time feeding were all part of this ordinary structural violence (Cullen and Rowold Reference Cullen and Rowold2024). Belotti wished to recast breastfeeding instead as a relationship between mother and child. Rather than feeding according to the strict schedules that hospitals, public health professionals and childcare manuals advised, she suggested that mothers pay attention to their baby as an individual with their own preferences and needs. If women were now insisting on their own personhood, then they had to recognise the personhood of infants too, she argued. Her 1973 book Little Girls also made the breastfeeding of girls a feminist issue, asserting that subconscious gender discrimination meant that baby girls were fed less than boys (Belotti Reference Belotti1975, 31–39). She believed that reframing the breastfeeding relationship (for those who wished to breastfeed) would also bring joy and satisfaction to mothers. ‘Breastfeeding, in fact, doesn’t have to be a miserable obligation that ends in resentment and complicates the relationship between mother and child, but a shared pleasure,’ she suggested.

Belotti’s voice was a relatively isolated one in 1973, and the publication of her article is another indication of the open approach of the Effe editorial team, who defined feminism in broad terms. Belotti’s ideas eventually found greater company in the late 1970s and 1980s when more nuanced discussions of motherhood began to emerge, exploring the pleasures and possibilities as well as the burdens and responsibilities. As motherhood began to shift from ‘destiny’ to a matter of choice, following the parliamentary commitment to legislating for abortion provision in 1976 (Bracke Reference Bracke2014, 83–87), Effe published several articles that tentatively explored the possibilities of a positive, feminist approach to motherhood.

A collective statement written by a ‘group of women’ asserted that the feminist struggle for reproductive rights had reduced motherhood, somewhat narrowly, to repression. In contrast, they defined their motherhood not in terms of duty but love, asserting that women’s historic roles as mothers had given them qualities of ‘affection, tenderness and the capacity to love, which men had lost’. They claimed: ‘For us, to reappropriate motherhood means to live it like a new time to be enjoyed in our lives, like an intimate and profound bond of affection with another person, not to be castrated by the repressive role of “mother”’ (‘Group of women’ 1977). For them, love was not part of the repressive structures of the institution of motherhood, but a separate quality, which gave joy, satisfaction and meaning to the experience of being a mother.

Such thinking could veer into biological essentialism, and in 1978 Tilde Gianini Gallino denounced the ‘egoism’ of having a child through IVF (Gallino Reference Gallino1977). The motivation to have a child, even at the cost of one’s health or without a partner, might be called ‘sublime maternal love’ by some, she wrote, but, ‘let us call it by its real name … egocentrism’. Such technological advances only glorified male scientists and catered to women who were unable to imagine any other possible role for themselves than that of mother. At the same time, it fitted with the early 1970s emphasis on the need to reframe maternity as a communal, collective experience, which, by 1978, was being placed in tension with the new focus on the bodily pleasure and power of childbirth and motherhood.

In discussions of the sensual pleasures of maternity, the focus tended to be on reclaiming the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth rather than early motherhood or the mother–infant relationship. The Bologna feminist collective published their reflections on motherhood in June 1978, with discussions veering between the question of choice and the empowerment of pregnancy (Collettivo femminista 1978). Although there were some reflections on the sensual, bodily joys of maternity, the focus was on the pregnant body. Giovanna, an artist, wrote in March 1977 about how, at the age of 30, and after years of rejecting motherhood, she found herself wanting to become pregnant and discovering joy and power in the physical changes it brought: her swelling abdomen and full breasts. The article was accompanied by drawings she made of her baby: in her view they signified the limitations of language in capturing the bodily and emotional experience of maternity, and the pleasure she took in her baby that defied easy narratives (Giovanna 1977).

The discussions published in Effe in early 1977 reflected a changed feminist perspective on motherhood. It led to a series of national conventions, held in 1978 and 1980, with the aim of reclaiming maternity as a feminist experience (Ribero Reference Ribero1999, 244–245). Some talks were published afterwards in the magazine. While feminists of the early 1970s had largely rejected the idea of motherhood as natural and instinctual to women, by the late 1970s some feminists were re-embracing this perspective. This was due to both an increased recognition of the patriarchal nature of the hospital system and the broader feminist movement, originating in the US, urging women to seek empowerment in their bodies, in contrast to Shulamith Firestone’s earlier rejection of women’s reproductive capacities, beginning with the Boston Women’s Health Collective and Our Bodies, Ourselves (Davis Reference Davis2007). The home birth movement was also beginning to take off in Italy in the late 1970s (Scattigno Reference Scattigno and D’Amelia1997, 291).

Grazia Honnegger Fresco, who had succeeded Belotti as director of the Centro Nascita Montessori, was the headline speaker at the 1980 conference. Her address focused on the sensual pleasures of breastfeeding and the closeness of the mother–infant relationship, whose non-verbal language was instinctual (Fresco Reference Fresco1980). There was a confluence with the natural childbirth movement, growing in strength in the US and Western Europe in these years. A Roman collective focusing on childbirth published an Italian edition of the Californian midwife and natural birth advocate Raven Lang’s Birth Book in 1978. Published in the US in 1972 and blending instruction with photography of the pregnant and birthing body, Birth Book aimed to reclaim natural childbirth as an empowering experience.

If childbirth could be empowering, early motherhood continued to be a much more ambivalent experience for feminists. The personal perspectives published in Effe continued to emphasise the claustrophobia and exhaustion of early motherhood more than anything else.Footnote ⁴ Fresco and Belotti, despite their child-centred approach, were aware of the toll that breastfeeding on demand placed on mothers. While she argued that mothers and babies should not be separated following birth, Fresco was uncertain about the ‘rooming in’ system prevalent in the UK which abolished the hospital nursery altogether, transforming the ‘right’ of mother and baby to be together into a ‘duty’ (Fresco Reference Fresco1980).

Belotti continued to develop her ideas as a feminist and natural birth advocate although she realised that ideas about natural birth and breastfeeding could also be used to disempower women (Belotti Reference Belotti1985, 81–108; a trend later documented in Martucci Reference Martucci2015). While natural childbirth could fit relatively easily into the transnational feminist celebration of the female body, the repetitive and mundane nature of the care work of early motherhood, as well as the balancing of needs between mother and child, sat less easily within the framework of 1970s feminism.