Ripensando la storia della maternità

Résumé 0

In Italy the 1990’s was one of the most vibrant periods in the reflection on motherhood within the feminist movement. The impact of women’s right to choose if, when and how to be a mother influenced gender relationships and exchanges among the generations. Feminist thought on motherhood took different paths, stressing the symbolic authority of femininity, female genealogies and the importance of the maternal bond as a new paradigm for the organization of a society open to the care of others. The journal Memoria, the first intellectual experiment on women’s and gender history in Italy was one of the networks that shaped The History of Motherhood (1997). The volume explored an under researched theme, and expressed a transition in the political subjectivity of the generation active in the Seventies. The volume was shaped by a political context in which the desire and production of knowledge on motherhood took place. It also preserved the diversity of approaches and perspectives related to the study of maternity with an emphasis on the modern and contemporary periods, offering a synthesis that did not take for granted the linear paths of emancipation and modernity. Among the inevitable lacunae, I must acknowledge a lack of visual sources. Despite an initial academic diffidence, The History of Motherhood has in the long run contributed to the growth of a field of investigation. New questions and new sources have shed light on family and patrimonial strategies, access to welfare, single and working mothers, associations, and rights not only among the élites, but among the less privileged. Recent research on the maternal body, reproduction and birth from antiquity to the new reproductive technologies opens the field to new questions and future investigation, challenging conventional chronologies.