Girls in ’68

“Conflict with the family and, at the same time, leaving the family; a plunge into the great wide world, cultural horizons thrown open, a naive and intoxicating discovery of personal freedom, outside of dogmas and impositions: this, in short, was my ’68…” This is the opening of the testimony by Vittoria Longoni, one of twenty former combative revolutionary girls in the year marking its fiftieth anniversary.

Coming from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, from the provinces or large cities, from the universities of Milan, Rome, Turin, or Trento, they recount the transformation of their lives in “Girls in ’68,” the book published by Enciclopedia delle donne and edited by the Fondazione Badaracco.

Today they are journalists, magistrates, teachers, researchers, university professors, photographers, artists, and writers. They remember the year that revolutionized everything, from personal relationships to the way of doing politics, offering a “different” perspective compared to the predominantly male-authored publications that have commemorated ’68 in recent months.

Theirs is the gaze of women who arrived at feminism and who, in the reconstruction of their dual identity, reveal how a contradiction remained open at the time: that of the unequal relationship between men and women. Within an anti-authoritarian practice that aimed to overthrow every form of dominance, a political thought and intentionality that denounced male predominance was, in fact, entirely absent.

The twenty women of ’68 are accompanied by three testimonies from the generations that followed them: from those who lived through the 1970s, those born in the 1980s, and finally, the girls of today’s new feminism.

The volume includes period photographs by Paola Mattioli.

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