“First of all, we should discover the veracity of the a priori existence of every dualism in every possible human context and in every sexed individual, whether male or female, and even when we cannot ascertain this, and given that such dualism now belongs to us, we should study and attempt to practice its overcoming. I presume that the how is the historical task of women.” It is from this initial consideration that Daniela Pellegrini decided to found the first Italian women’s group in Milan in 1965, calling together her friends. Initially, she named it “Dacapo” (Women Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism or also Women at the Head).
Later, it was changed to “Demau” (Demystification of Patriarchal Authoritarianism).
If Simone De Beauvoir affirmed her desire to be recognized as a subject, but the culture in which this was to occur defined hers as the “second sex,” Daniela Pellegrini affirmed the necessity of making themselves completely autonomous from this culture that produced this hierarchy and from that “second” that derived from it. She therefore advocated for solidarity among women, a consciousness-raising that would make them aware of being able to live for themselves, as women, in their own ‘transcendence’ that would no longer define them as “female to the male.”
In the group’s programmatic manifesto, Daniela Pellegrini highlighted the fact that the sexual division between male and female produced two categories of cultural values where everything positive, strong, and winning is attributed to the male and where everything negative, weak, and losing is the image of the feminine. From a reading of a different biological datum, in fact, an entire social, ethical, and cultural organization descended, where the “winning” categories, the masculine ones, also determined class, race, and economic relations. All of this had to be questioned so that the relationship between the sexes would change and therefore the culture of the human species in general.
In 1969, strong echoes of American feminism and the practice of consciousness-raising that was emerging there arrived from the United States. New groups were born in Milan and the Demau group, after sharing meetings for several months with Rivolta Femminile, a group founded in 1970 by Carla Lonzi upon her return from the States, resumed its work precisely from the practice of consciousness-raising.
Immediately afterward, it had close relations with the French group Psychanalyse et Politique of Antoinette Fouque, with whom it shared and deepened research on sexuality and the relationship with the mother, themes that would from then on be the central ones of the entire women’s movement of the 1970s.
Thirty years later, Daniela Pellegrini returned to that initial affirmation, contesting on one hand the thought of difference and its radicalization in the “Two” that has been affirmed in the last decade, defining it as “fundamentalist” at the expense of pluralities and freedoms, and on the other hand reading the maternal symbolic figure, affirmed as the place of female authority, as yet another product of dual opposition: the two-faced Janus of patriarchal power.
It is interesting to note how the thought of Daniela Pellegrini and the latest developments in American feminist thought, while coming from completely different paths, find once again a coincidence of perspective: the overcoming of differences. Daniela Pellegrini defines it as a “third place in a choice of positive and shared human values.”

Daniela Pellegrini (Belluno 1937) lives in Milan where, together with Nadia Riva, she is the driving force behind the Cultural and Political Circle of Women, Cicip & Ciciap, which they founded in 1981. With Nadia Riva, she conceived, managed, and financed the magazine Fluttuaria, signs of autonomy in women’s experience, of which seventeen issues were published between 1987 and 1994.
In the 1960s, Daniela Pellegrini worked as a creative director in the largest advertising agencies in Milan. She abandoned her career to dedicate herself entirely to the politics of the women’s movement: she first transformed her home into a commune, where she lived with her daughter and twelve other women throughout the 1970s, opened and managed with the most radical part of the Milanese movement the Women’s House at via Col di Lana 8, preferring this project to the contemporary one of the Women’s Bookstore of Milan to which she had also initially contributed.

Mariuccia Masala