The literature that focused on political parties and women’s representation typically looked at political parties on the left. The Italian case is no exception. It is in particular to the Italian Communist Party, the main leftist party which became the major institutional reference of the feminist movement of the 1970s that scholars mostly focused upon. Almost ignored, instead, is the pattern of women’s representation by the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), the “conservative party par excellence” of the Italian political history. Should this lack of scholarly attention be interpreted as a substantial indifference by the Christian Democratic Party to women as political and social subjects? If we examine the figures of women’s descriptive representation by the DC this would indeed seem to be the case. The average percentage of women elected in parliament with the DC lists from 1948 to 1992 was below 4% and even lower was the percentage of women represented in its internal decision-making organs. Beyond those data, however, we get to see a different picture. Not only did the party develop a political discourse around women issues since the constitutional period of the Italian Republic, by pressuring for the introduction of universal suffrage and for the implementation of a legislation that favored women’s access to the labor market. But the DC did also turn to a more ‘modern’ conception of women after the emergence of the Italian feminist movement. Strongly pressuring for such changes, through the Female Movement of the party, through publications on the party journal and through speeches at the Congresses, were the very Christian Democratic women. Although overtly anti-feminist, those women reinterpreted the feminist slogans of personal realization, autonomy, and self-determination through their own cultural and partisan identity, with the intention to be representative of the moderate sector of the female Italian electorate.
