A complex mediation of interests: Christian Democracy women in feminist times

The “conservative party par excellence” of the Italian political history, the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), developed a political discourse around women since its very emergence. Not only did it support with financial and logistic aid women’s organizations of Catholic inspiration and formed ‘Female Sections’ internally to its party organization, but it also stimulated important legislation favoring women’s equality. With the emergence of the feminist mobilization in the 1970s, however, the notion of women’s interests broadened substantially: feminist activists developed a political discourse that went beyond women’s formal equality, moving towards a more complex personal, social, and cultural discourse on women, on their role in society, on their autonomy, difference, and specificity. The feminist experience of the 1970s radically touched the cultural perception of women’s issues in Italian society and marked a point of no return for all women, including Christian Democratic women. While the official discourse of the party remained anchored to the equality dimension, without recognizing women’s political participation and/or autonomy as individuals, the Christian Democratic women developed an intense internal discourse on the need to reconcile the party’s traditional positions on women with the changing perception of women and of their social roles. Based on the original documents published by the Christian Democratic ‘Female Sections’, this paper will show how Christian Democratic women opened themselves to the language of the feminist movement and to their slogans (such as ‘the self determination of women’ or ‘women’s liberation’) by adapting their meanings to their own cultural and identity frameworks. Hence, despite opposing what they interpreted as individualistic and libertarian drives within the feminist mobilization, Christian Democratic women engaged in a complex mediation on women’s interests, with the intention to mediate between feminism and conservative positions.