Feminism/feminisms: notes for a future history
The starting point for this article is a survey on the 1970s feminist movement
literature from which it emerges that this movement has lacked full
historiographical attention. The core of the study is the Italian case, although
with reference to the international context. This article takes into consideration
certain historiographical issues, starting from an investigation of the
meaning to ascribe to the phrase “feminism in the 1970s”. The first issue
concerns the relation and the differentiation between feminism, meant as the
political expression of women’s subjectivity, and the social movements of the
Sixties and Seventies, with a focus on the facts of 1968. The second centers
on the question of the transformation of feminism itself in the course of the
Seventies and Eighties, mapping the different phases that have taken the
history of contemporary feminism beyond the Seventies. In this framework
another issue becomes relevant: the relation between feminism and its many
offspring shows that there is not only one feminism and that this movement
has been characterized by multiple and different outcomes.