Revolutionary networks. Women’s political and social activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957)

Abstract

The Cold War era has generally been represented as a moment of conservatism when it comes to women’s activism. While women’s political participation in the Second World War had been studied in detail, women’s political and social activism in Cold War Europe has remained under-researched. In my dissertation, I show the liveliness of women’s political and social activism in Italy and Yugoslavia in the early Cold War period (1945-1957), demonstrating that women’s antifascist organizations played an important role in everyday Cold War politics, at the local and at the international level. The thesis studies in particular the local and international activities of the Union of Italian Women (UDI) and of the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ), two women’s organizations founded during the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, which continued to play an active political role after 1945. It also takes into account the activities of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (UDAIS) in the contested border city of Trieste. The dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork research in Italian and former Yugoslav archives. Oral history interviews and autobiographies represent a crucial complement to the archival research. Archival documents, and excerpts from oral history interviews and autobiographies in Italian, Serbo-Croatian and French are translated and organized into a single historical narrative, which demonstrates the entangled history of women’s antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia after 1945. By writing this entangled history, I show that transnational connections were established by women across the Italo-Yugoslav border, and across Cold War borders. I explore the bilateral and multilateral relations of the UDI, AFŽ and UDAIS, and their shifting position towards the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). This dissertation is founded upon three main theses. The first thesis is that antifascist women’s organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics in Italy and Yugoslavia. Throughout the dissertation, I reconstruct the different forms of women’s activism and explore the complexities and limits of left-wing women’s political agency and subjectivity. I focus in particular on the female leaders of antifascist women’s organizations, and on their position towards the base of rank-and-file militants, and towards the “feminine masses”. My second thesis is that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations were crucial in promoting women’s emancipation in the Cold War period. Antifascist women’s organizations promoted women’s literacy on a large scale, as well as access to work and political participation. On the basis of a Marxist faith in modernization and historical progress, antifascist female leaders fought against women’s juridical, economic and social inferiority. Thirdly, I posit that Italian and Yugoslav antifascist women’s organizations provided women with imaginary and physical connections across Cold War borders, not only between Italy and Yugoslavia but also between the West, the Second World and the Third World. As I demonstrate, women’s antifascist internationalism allowed progressive ideas about women’s emancipation to circulate across borders.