The PCI and the Development of The Woman Question

Abstract

The PCI’s development of the woman question in the post-war period was organised on an axis whose poles were the family and its capacity for change and women’s right to waged work. In its elaboration of that theory and in its projection of a politics consonant with it the party combined the emphases of the international communist movement with the strength of cultural traditions that echoed those of Catholicism. In its concentration on the family and in the legislative initiatives that it followed, the PCI confined its activities to a generalised appeal to notions of injustice and inequality. Such an appeal relied on the concept of equality to be found in the formal tenets of socialism; as such it stands testimony to a necessary but unexceptional set of traditions.