Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837-1920)Women's History Month 2003 by Sunshine for Women

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Anna Maria Mozzoni

1837-1920

Feminist thought had long sprung from the pens of Italian women such as Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta, Moderata Fonte, Lucretia Marinella, and Angelica Tarabotti. Even Christine de Pizan, usually associated with her adult home in France, was born in and spent the earliest years of her life in Pizzano, Italy. Feminism and Italian women's yearning for an improvement in their status was not imported from more intellectually advanced parts of Europe. Rather, women's desire for freedom was long advocated throughout the land.

Italy, descended from the Roman Empire, source of the Renaissance, home of Popes and the Roman Catholic Church, was, like Germany, not unified into a single country until late in the nineteenth century. Like Germany, when unification came, Italy unified under a monarchy, not a democracy. Like other parts of the continent, various parts of Italy went through periods of repression and relative freedom throughout the century. Unlike Germany, when Italian unification, called the Risorgimento, came, it came only through a long physical and intellectual struggle, a struggle in which women played central roles.

The Roman Catholic Papacy had long played an important part in Italian politics. The papacy itself was the secular overlord of about the central one-third of Italy, the region known as the Papal Estates. Papal representatives had long been active in the politics of neighboring states, supporting the position of the church, undermining the authority of secular rulers, and inhibiting the development of Italian democracy.

When the July Revolution broke out In Paris in 1830, the disturbance spread to the Papal Estates. In 1831, a congress of representatives from various parts of the Papal Estates met in Bologna and established a republican government complete with a constitution. Pope Gregory XVI asked Austria, no stranger to meddling in the internal affairs of various Italian states, to suppress the revolutionary movement. Austria sent troops into the region to drive out the revolutionaries. For the next generation this story would be repeated time and again – republican forces would come to power and either France or Austria would raise an army to defeat the Italian republicans and restore the control of the old order.

About the same time, Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, in exile in Marseille, France, established Giovane Italia (Young Italy), an organization devoted to spreading the ideals of nationalism and republicanism to the Italian people. In 1846, the neo-Guelph (pro-papist) movement was invigorated when Pope Pius IX, perceived as relatively liberal and nationalist, was elected. Pius embarked on a program of reform, but it was too late.

In January 1848 the people of Palermo drove out the forces of Ferdinand II, king of the Two Sicilies, triggering the events in Paris and the other revolutions of 1848. With revolution sweeping the continent, to cool revolutionary ardor, Ferdinand granted his Italian subjects a constitution; Leopold II, grand duke of Tuscany, issued a constitution for his duchy; and in Turin, Charles Albert promised to issue a constitution. The Milanese drove the Austrian troops from the city on March 22. Venice likewise expelled Austrian troops from the city and declared a republic. The rulers of Parma and Modena were driven from their thrones. Piedmont nationalists called for a war of liberation to drive the Austrians from Italian soil. In response, Charles Albert of Sardinia mobilized his army and marched to the assistance of Lombardy, which he entered on March 26, acclaimed as the liberator of Italy. Pope Pius IX reluctantly consented to a constitution for the Papal States.

The pope refused to join in the war. In mid-May the revolution in Naples collapsed, and on July 24 the Piedmontese were defeated in battle by the Austrians. Pius IX was denounced for failing to support the revolution and a popular insurrection broke out in Rome. Theodore Dwight in his 1851 eye-witness account of the insurrection in Rome, The Roman Republic of 1849, describes the action of the revolutionaries and what they found when they entered the Holy Office, the part of the Roman Curia responsible for the Inquisition. In early 1849, the papacy again appealed to foreign troops to restore the Papal Estates to the control of the Pope. Despite the valiant efforts of the Republicans under the political leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini and the military leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the combined troops of Austria, Spain, Naples, and France defeated the Romans and in July the Pope was restored.

Gradually the old order was once again restored throughout Italy. The victorious powers demanded that the class-traitor Charles Albert of Sardinia abdicate his throne, which he did in favor of his equally nationalistic son, Victor Emanual II.

Temporarily overwhelmed, but not defeated, the revolutionaries almost immediately began a new movement to drive the foreigners from Italian soil, to reduce the power of the Pope in domestic Italian affairs, and to create a single, republican country on the Italian peninsula. Political refugees flocked to Sardinia where Victor Emmanuel remained faithful to the liberal constitution of his father. Under Sardinian leadership, Italy was unified after a series of "wars" in which Sardinia allied itself first with one European power than another, each time driving a third foreign power from Italian soil until Italy was freed of foreign domination. By the end of 1860, all of Italy, except for the part of Rome under papal control and for Venice, was unified in a Kingdom under Victor Emmanuel. By July 1871, even Venice and Rome were part of the new Italian Kingdom.

Now that Italy was one country, five law codes representing various parts of Italy had to be unified into a single law code for all of Italy. Five distinct law codes had governed various portions of Italy: Austrian Italy, the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies, the Kingdom of the Piedmont, the Duchy of Tuscany, and the Papal Estates. In the new parliament of 1861, women were explicitly excluded from the franchise . Regarding women and family law, the ministers proposed to adopt the most restrictive law code. Italian women, active during the half-century struggle for Italian unification and offended that their contribution to the new Italian nation was not being rewarded, began to speak out in their own defense. Like the men involved in the Risorgimento, the female revolutionaries had suffered financial depravation, exile, social ostracism, familial discord, and worse as they supported the revolution. According to Judith Jeffrey Howard, "All feminists of the 1860s and '70s had been involved in the struggle for Italian unification."

The first post-unification woman to take up the defense of women was Anna Maria Mozzoni. Mozzoni, known as the founder of the Italian woman's movement, became internationally famous for her efforts on behalf of Italian women. Mozzoni began her feminist offensive by focusing on legal reforms. Her 1864 tract, written at age 27, La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali in occasione della revisione del codice italiano (Woman and her social relationships on the occasion of the revision of the Italian Civil Code), began the feminist critique of Italian family law. La donna was targeted to a middle-class audience and reflected the concerns of middle-class women. As Mozzoni aged and her experiences of the variety of women's lives deepened, her feminism expanded to include concerns for and insights about women of other classes, particularly those classes under her own.

Other women picked up her banner. Gualberta Alaide Beccari, daughter of a leading Risorgimento patriot, edited the leading feminist journal, the fortnightly La Donna, first published in 1868 in Venice, then in Bologna in 1878, then in Turin in 1892, where it remained until her death in 1906. In Florence in 1872, Aurelia Cimino Folliero de Luna began a journal dedicated to legal reform. Folliero, a moderate, a constitutional monarchist and no democrat, stressed that legal reforms regarding women were necessary to improve the educational and work opportunities for women. Mozzoni, along with socialist Anna Kuliscioff, an exile from Russia, lead the way in the nineteenth-century woman's emancipation and suffrage movements in Italy. Woman suffrage met with little success, in part because universal male suffrage was not granted in Italy until 1912. The outbreak of World War I effectively ended the woman's movements across the continent. Italian women would not win the vote until after World War II.

A product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Mozzoni held to the essential equality of all individuals, including women. Born to a high status Milanese family, Mozzoni was educated until age 14 in a school for poor girls of high birth, then continued her education in her father's library. Mozzoni advocated an Anglo-American form of feminism, rooted in legal reform and economic opportunity through education and work, for women. Mozzoni herself acknowledged the influence of the Saint Simonians, Georges Sand, Jeanne Deroin, and Jenny d'Hericourt on her thinking. In 1869 Mozzoni translated John Stuart Mill's Subjugation of Women into Italian.

In 1867, Minister Salvatore Morelli, author of the feminist work, La donna e la scienza, introduced a bill into the national legislature for woman suffrage, but it went nowhere. Ten years later, in 1877 Mozzoni presented a petition to parliament for woman suffrage. In 1878 Mozzoni represented Italy at the International Congress on Women's Rights in Paris. In 1881 Mozzoni joined with other republicans, radicals, and socialists in a call for universal suffrage, including woman suffrage. Later that year, Mozzoni founded the Lega promotrice degli interessi femminili (League for the Promotion of the Interests of Women) in Milan to promote a variety of causes of interest to women.

The movements to improve the lives of the poor and outcast did not fare well in late nineteenth-century Italy. No broad middle-class formed in Italy as in other European countries, in part because neither the federal, nor regional, nor local governments supported a universal, free, public education, thereby failing to construct an infrastructure on which a middle-class society could be built.

Disillusioned for a variety of reasons, in the 1880s, Mozzoni turned away from the liberal Left to socialism as the only hope for women. In 1907, Mozzoni presented her last petition. Nonetheless, the agitation by Mozzoni, Kuliscoff, and others caught the attention of men and the woman question was debated throughout Italy: woman suffrage was discussed twenty times in Parliament between 1863 and April 1918.

In a footnote to the article on the woman's movement in Italy, Theodore Stanton writes of Mozzoni:

Miss Mozzoni is one of the ablest and most active leaders of the women's movement in Italy. She is the author of several thoughtful publications on the various phases of the woman question, and is an eloquent orator, as I can vouch, having listened to her opening address at the Paris congress mentioned in the text. But her grandest oratorical effort was the speech delivered in February, 1881, at the Universal Suffrage Congress of Rome, when she offered and supported a resolution in favor of women's suffrage, which was carried by a large majority. (See the Free Religious Index, of Boston, May 19, 1881, where I gave a complete translation of this speech.) Miss Mozzoni wrote me from Milan in August, 1882; "Since 1878, when I published my little pamphlet on the 'Civil and Political Condition of Italian Women' (Delle condisioni civili e solitiche delle Italiane) nothing has changed, except that the progress of socialism is slowly liberalizing public opinion on the woman question, and that the number of female students in the universities increases every year. The development of the higher education of women is checked by the difficulties attending their admission to the gymnasiums, which depends entirely upon the good-will of the professors. I had to make a vigorous personal effort in order to secure a place for girls in the Milan gymnasium. When it was perceived that my friends in the Chamber intended to interpellate the ministry on the subject, the authorities yielded, and to-day girls may pursue their studies at our State schools. During the year 1881-2 there were twenty-five female students at the Milanese School of Fine Arts, several of whom have shown remarkable talent. Public opinion in northern Italy is more advanced on the woman question than the actual situation would seem to warrant. Our women are very intelligent, and there is a tendency among them-especially at Milan-toward liberal ideas. The extraordinary density of the population in this portion of Italy will be for a long time to come a great impediment to their admission to industrial pursuits and public employments. The most insignificant post is sought after by scores of capable men who are very jealous of aspiring women. Public opinion does not rebuff women who seek employment, but it does not aid and encourage them. In a word, we advance slowly. People know that we are in the right, they recognize the justice of our claims, and hold us, who preach the new doctrine, in esteem. But the generation which governs to-day fought for liberty; it was not brought up in liberty. Since the unification of Italy, we have gained a point or two in the code. Divorce and affiliation stand high on the calendar of Parliament, though I am aware that they will not be passed without a long struggle. The Senate, the nobility, the clergy, the queen—who is very devout, very aristocratic and not very intelligent—hesitate at every reform measure. There will be another hard-fought battle over the proposed administrative suffrage, but I think we shall here come off victors. The League for the Promotion of Women's Interests (Legapromof rice degli interessi femminili), of which I have the honor to be president, was founded at Milan in 1881. It is a very active organization, and counts among its members senators, deputies, priests, professors of the university, distinguished writers of both sexes, and a large number of working-men and women.

Today's document is taken from Anna Maria Mozzoni's La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali in occasione della revisione del codice italiano (pp. 219-222), reprinted in Bell and Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol 1, 1750-1880 [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1983] pp. 447 – 448

Since [natural] rights (il diritto) are based on attributes common to the human race and not on individual attributes, and since [natural] rights are perceived as the legitimate claim of every person to the development of characteristic human faculties, and to the fulfillment of all the functions that allow him to attain his goals [in life], I will not hesitate to demonstrate that woman, as a human being, has no fewer rights than man, so long as privilege does not usurp the sacred name of rights.

I will say only that all jurists, even though they do not formulate their opinions according to any philosophical basis of [natural] rights, perceive the will to justice and reason as lying in the notion that rights should be extended to every human being. Yet, since they find themselves unable to deny that woman belongs to the human race, they all begin to contradict themselves whenever they introduce inequality between man and woman. And thus does justice cut with a two-edged sword; while it denies a right to one, it grants a privilege to the other.

So it is that, of all the charges brought against woman with the intention of justifying the iniquitous way she is treated by the laws—charges sanctioned neither by nature nor by reason, but only by the passions—none can be upheld in the face of a very few observations and in view of the true basis of [natural] rights.

[The jurists] say: woman is unfit to exercise rights.

But it is impossible to deny the intelligence of many women, any more than one can refuse to recognize the imbecility of many men. But [natural] rights are not based on individual intelligence.

They say: woman is weak.

But it is impossible to deny the power and strength of many women, just as it is impossible to deny the puniness and chronic illness of many men. But [natural] rights are not based on strength and good health.

You object to the nature of her social roles?

It is impossible to demonstrate and to prove that maternity, running a household, often teaching, trade, industrial production, are less necessary and less noble occupations than those of the ragpicker, street cleaner, or the liveried servant. But [natural] rights are not based on social roles.

Perhaps woman's special physical make-up, which subjects her to crises and ups and downs, makes her inadaptable to the exercise of rights?

The exercise of any civil rights (diritto civile) whatever, not being a mere trifle, will always be performed much better by a healthy woman than by a sick man, whose rights are, nonetheless, not taken away from him. All of which demonstrates that rights are not based on physical make-up.

But her ignorance renders her unfit!

It is impossible to deny the erudition of many women, any more than it is possible to refuse to recognize the ignorance of many men. Who is more cultured, a woman who directs an educational institution or the servant who leads the pigs to pasture? But rights are not based on learning.

Nor could one argue with greater success on the basis of the protection that the man exercises over the woman; we have just seen that this protection is illusory and denied by the law itself whenever it assumes responsibility for checking the husband and defending the woman against him. Nor could one argue on grounds of support, because nowadays the woman contributes to meeting family expenses, either with her dowry, or with her wealth, or with her personal labor, so that the house in which she lives is no longer the husband's house but a conjugal house. Moreover, with regard to a woman who is of legal age, the question of support has no reason to be raised. . . .

Furthermore, one cannot argue [against women's rights] by invoking the manifold cares of the family, because these are no more taxing than those of a smithy who hammers on an anvil twelve hours a day, or those of a government minister who handles the affairs of an entire kingdom, or those of a soldier who is under the burden of stern and precise discipline night and day. . . .

If rights were based on social roles, on productivity, or on personal merit, again one would not be able, without inconsistency and injustice, to exclude women who work, women who produce, or women who have social value as mothers, as manufacturers, or as proprietors. But rights are not and have never been based on any of the above.

Rights are based on the acknowledged, characteristic capacity of a given nature; as such every being of every species has its characteristic rights.

Footnotes:

Reference:

Bell and Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, Vol 1, 1750-1880 [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 1983] pp. 445 - 448

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, liberazoine della donna, feminism in Italy [Middleton, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986] pp. 19-21

Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Theodore Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849: With Accounts of The Inquisition, and The Siege of Rome, and Biographical Sketches with Original Portraits [New York: R. Van Dien, 1851]

Moderata Fonte (Modesta Pozzo), The Worth of Women, 1600, reprinted by University of Chicago Press, 1996

Judith Jeffrey Howard, "The Civil Code of 1865 and the Origins of the Feminist Movement in Italy," in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, eds. Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney and Lydio F. Thomasi (Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1977), pp. 14-20.

Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand, Pegasus Paperbooks, Binghampton, NY 1992

Lucrezia Marinella and Anne Dunhill (ed. and trans.), and Letizia Panizza (Introduction), The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and The Defects and Vices of Men (1600) [Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1999]

Donald Meyer, Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden, and Italy [Middleton, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987] pp. 121-132

Theodore Stanton (ed.), The Woman Question in Europe [G. P. Putnam's Sons: Paris, 1884] reprinted by Source Books Press, NY, 1970

Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, A Biography, New York, Persea Press, 1984

Note: Very little information is available in English on the nineteenth-century Italian woman's movement.

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