Women’s Political Lexicon: Feminist Theories

Feminist Theories is one of the six volumes that comprise the Women’s Political Lexicon published at the end of the 1970s, in the wake of the Moro kidnapping and the dramatic transformation of the political landscape in which the feminist movement had been born and developed. The book’s title, which appears in a new edition for the “Archive Readings” series, by speaking of “theories” rather than “theory,” immediately highlights a desire and its limitation: to respect partiality as an expression of each woman’s singularity through a “plural word,” collective, capable of escaping the trap of juxtaposition or mere alignment of differences. Today we can say that it was a successful challenge: to bring into dialogue, without homogenizing them, the two “souls” of the women’s movement: the one that felt the need to establish meaningful relationships with the outside world, and the one that prioritized work within small consciousness-raising groups, as a point of view on themselves and on the world.

Contributors: Betty Bettini, Maria Pia Caporicci, Bianca Maria Frabotta, Maria Grabiella Frabotta, Elena Gagliasso, Giuseppina Giuffreda, Mariella Gramaglia, Giovanna Lionetti, Donata Lodi, Laura Lugli, Paola Masi, Diana Perrone, Paola Piva, Bianca Potì, Norma Rangeri, Eleonora Rizzoni, Angela Ronga, Rosalba Spagnoletti.

Manuela Fraire, psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, has written on female subjectivity and on the unprecedented processes of differentiation that the practice of relationships among women has activated. On this theme, addressed as a specification and historical declension of the relationship that every woman has at the origin with her own mother, one can read her essays in the journals: Memoria, Reti, Orsa Minore, Lapis, Sofia.