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At the turn of the twentieth century the Catholic Church promoted women's associations in an attempt to reassert Christianity in a struggle against its liberal and socialist adversaries. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) called on Catholics to address a raft of serious problems resulting from social and economic transformations. This gave rise to a Christian Democratic movement and, within it, to Catholic feminism. Focusing on two Catholic women's periodicals, L'azione muliebre and Pensiero e azione, the author studies the emergence and the nature of Catholic feminism as well as its suppression by the Church.
Keywords: Catholic feminism; femminismo cristiano; Italian feminism; women and the church
The early Catholic feminist movement in Italy, usually referred to as femminismo cristiano, was born in the latter years of Leo XIII's papacy. After less than a decade this vibrant and promising feminist movement came to an abrupt end during the pontificate of Leo's successor, Pius X.To understand the nature oí femminismo cristiano it is necessary to look at its contemporary social and cultural context.
Women's Rights in Liberal Italy
The unification of Italy in 1870 did not improve the condition of women. The overriding and exclusive preoccupation of the Risorgimento elite had been with the creation of an Italian state, and this precluded any consideration of women's emancipation.1 Indeed, the 1865 Italian civil code restricted women's rights in major areas, assigning women the status of a minor for their entire lives. The code ruled, for instance, that in marriage only the father could exercise patria potestas over the children and that solely in the case of the father's incapacity or death could it belong to the mother. The civil code, moreover, denied women the right to administer their own property; in contrast, the only limitation to the husband's powers was the property's inalienability. For women in Lombardy, who had managed their own property under Austrian rule, this was a backward step.2 Like large sections of the male population, women had no voting rights at either local or national elections.
Discrimination against women was evident also in education and employment. Even though the Casati Law (1859) decreed that instruction should be equal for both males and females,3 educational needs for the two genders were perceived differently. Whereas...