Political Schooling: the Spaces and
Modalities of Women’s Political Education in the DC and the PCI
The essay reconstructs the various activities that were carried out by the
Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to
provide women with a political education, at a time when women were about
to exercise their full citizenship with the vote. It focuses in particular on the
DC’s Women’s Movement and on the female central schools set up by the
PCI, and takes into account the years between 1944 and 1953, when a new
phase of Italian Republican history began. The two parties, both of which relied
on profoundly hierarchical structures, were characterized by deep differences
in their formative and organizational decisions, which makes it hard to
advance any comparative hypotheses. Common to both was an awareness of
working towards the education of a female political class which, despite its
ambiguities and contradictions, was to become one the main protagonists of
modernization which, after the Constituent Assembly, involved Italian women
and the country at large.