Italian Women and International Cold War Politics, 1944-1968

Notes

Introduction 1. I prefer not to translate the names of the Unione Donne Italiane and the Centro Italiano Femminile, but they are sometimes translated as Union of Italian Women and the Italian Women’s Center, respectively. 2. See my own Immigrant Women and Feminism in Italy (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006) and “‘Join Us in Rebuilding Italy’: Women’s Associations 1946– 1963,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 82–104. 3. For a good start to correcting this oversight, see the essays in Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer-Schoffman, eds., When the War Was Over: Women, War, and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956 (New York: Leicester University Press, 2000). Recent monographs on women and the Cold War include Mire Koikari’s Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2008) and Helen Laville’s Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002). 4. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943– 1988 (New York: Penguin, 1990). 5. Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 6. Laville, Cold War Women. 7. Luisa Tasca, “The Average Housewife in Post–World War II Italy,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 92–115. 8. Mario Del Pero, “Containing Containment: Rethinking Italy’s Experience during the Cold War,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 4 (2003): 532. 9. My own “Join Us in Rebuilding Italy” and “Emancipation or Liberation? Women’s Associations and the Italian Movement,” Historian 67, no. 1 (March 2005): 73–96, are examples. See also Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna: Feminism in Italy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986); Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy (Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 136–44. 10. Patrizia Gabrielli, La pace e la mimosa: l’Unione donne italiane e la costruzione politica della memoria (1944–1955) (Rome: Donzelli Edirore, 2005); Il club Notes 192 notes to pages 6–9 delle virtuose: UDI e CIF nelle Marche dall’antifascismo alla guerra fredda (Ancona, Italy: Il lavoro editoriale, 2000). 11. Fiorenza Taricone, Il Centro Italiano Femminile dalle origini agli anni settanta (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2001). 12. See, for example, Fiorenza Taricone, “Il Centro Italiano Femminile e l’idea d’Europa,” and Mimma De Leo, “L’Unione donne italiane fra rimozione e riforme,” in Cittadine d’Europa: Integrazione europea e associazioni femminili italiane, ed. Beatrice Pisa (Milan: FrancoAngeli 2003), 21–92. 13. For a comprehensive overview of the historiography of Cold War Italy, see Antonio Varsori, “Cold War History in Italy,” Cold War History 8, no. 2 (May 2008): 157–87. 14. Molly Tambor, “Red Saints: Gendering the Cold War, Italy 1943–1953,” Cold War History 10, no. 3 (2010): 429–56. 15. Christopher Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism,” in Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture, and Society, 1948–58, ed. Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1995), 1–24. 16. Karen Garner, Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925–1985 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). 17. Ibid., 2. 18. Francisca De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547–73; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 11 and 386–88. 19. Gabrielli, La pace e la mimosa; Pojmann “‘Join Us in Rebuilding’”; Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy, 136–44. Interpretations of the UDI as a tool of the Italian Communist Party, established in Birnbaum’s Liberazione della donna and Donald B. Meyer’s, Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden, and Italy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), have been difficult to overturn. As recently as 2008, Chiara Ferrari uncritically perpetuated the view of the UDI as a flanking organization of the Communist Party in its first decades of operation. See Ferrari’s “Contested Foundations: Postmodern Feminism and the Case of the Union of Italian Women,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 569–94. 20. Susan B. Whitney, Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 21. Gabrielli, Il club delle virtuose; Taricone...