Mafiosi and Terrorists: Italian Women in Violent Organizations

[Table 1] This short paper analyzes and compares the role that women have played in two very different violent organizations in Italy, the leftist terrorist Red Brigades (BR) and the Sicilian Mafia. While sexual equality and autonomy from traditional forms of authority were a dominant factor in Italian far-left groups, the Mafia's hierarchical structure has retained its patriarchal authoritarianism and male exclusivity despite the expanding role of women in its administrative and commercial functions.

In order to understand how this polarization could exist in two contemporary Italian organizations it is necessary to look first at the historical and cultural context in which each developed. The Red Brigades were children of their time, baby boomers in a rapidly industrializing society caught up in a tide of popular protest--a heterogeneous mix of partisan heroics, anti-Vietnam War militancy, and revolutionary zeal--of which they believed themselves to be the vanguard. Feminism was a minority motivation within the minority that opted for armed struggle, but the protest that nurtured it was a mainstream movement grounded in the relatively emancipated society of Italy's industrial north. The founding principles of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, were constructed in mid-nineteenth century Sicily around archaic rituals and vows of honor and silence, whose defining ethos of omertà literally signifies "the ability to be a man." Female exclusion from the patriarchal order is not simply the consequence of the chauvinistic nature of the organization Cosa Nostra but a projection, albeit distorted, of a set of traditions and a value system, which still survive in southern Italy today.

Violence

The Italian Red Brigades and the Cosa Nostra have a number of features in common: a hermetic and hierarchical structure, a clear division of roles and responsibility, and the premeditated use of violence for specific goals. But here the similarities end. The most striking difference lies in the purpose and nature of violence in the two organizations. Left-wing violence derives from Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, is altruistic, symbolic, and has long-term aims; its targets are the representatives of a power system to be overthrown in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Mafia violence, by contrast, is immediate and pragmatic, aimed solely at the pursuit of profit and the conservation of power and influence for the clan. Rather than overthrow institutional authority, the Mafia prefers to erode and suborn it; hence its essentially conservative nature. However, the purpose of this article is not to compare the Red Brigades with the Mafia, but to focus on gender roles in two types of organizational structure in which the practice of violence is a defining characteristic.

Feminism in Italy

In the postwar period until the mid-1960s, Italian society was characterized by a political and cultural paternalism that was promulgated by the Catholic Church and both principal political parties, the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Communist Party (PCI). Although women had fought alongside men as partisans in the Second World War and assumed an increasingly important role in the workplace, trade unions, and political formations, the law discriminated heavily against them and in favor of men. Women were essentially defined by their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Divorce was only legalized in 1970; before that, marital unfaithfulness was a crime applicable to women and punishable with three months of imprisonment. A man could beat his wife with impunity; his adultery was not a criminal offence, and a wife could only be granted grounds for legal separation if the husband's infidelity had caused a public scandal. Moreover, abortion was a crime until 1978.

Against this background, the women's movement grew rapidly from the late 1960s onward. The momentum was strongest in northern Italy, where the female workforce in the factories of the industrial triangle of Milan, Genoa, and Turin became the focal point for political mobilization on behalf of women's causes. In the more rural southern regions, high unemployment rates and...