Journalist, politician and intellectual, Luciana Castellina is one of the most influential figures on the Italian left. Through her voice, we can journey through seventy years of Italian history, recounted with her radical thinker's approach. At the heart of her approach has always been, and still remains, an uncomfortable question: why do our societies continue to function as if women did not make up about half the population?
“I was involved with the trade union throughout the 1970s, mainly for Il Manifesto and, before that, as editor of a Communist Youth Federation newspaper for many years, starting in the 1950s. Of course, we also dealt with economics, in the sense that there was the big problem of the industrial boom at the end of the 1950s, when young people were hired in factories for the first time, including young people on the left. There were the first youth mobilisations, which were in some ways closely linked to the economic aspects of the industrial boom, so economics is part of politics, there is no doubt about that. But if you ask me if I feel like an economist, I say no, but I have been very involved in the trade union movement.“Starting from the bottom means that democracy needs subjectivity, that everyone feels like a protagonist in what is happening in the world and not just handing out flyers about what someone else says, in the Parliament or somewhere else.”"Today we are not facing a victory of capitalism, but its crisis, which is the opposite. Capitalism no longer has the margins it had in the thirty years after the war to be able to carry out a series of reforms, to do what was called the social-democratic compromise that worked so much so that until the 1970s there were many health reforms, pension reforms, many things that are no longer possible because today there is an ecological limit.""It has been discovered that we cannot continue to produce goods and making profits, as capitalism does on the basis of the marke; it is no longer conceivable, and we need to correct all this strongly, because the ecological issue is not an ideology as they say, it is a very serious, very important issue. Otherwise we will all end up like the dinosaurs.""Women have finally realised that capitalism produces patriarchy because it is closely linked to forms of production based on exploitation: the situation of women is as it is, because it allows those in the market, who are only interested in profit, not to pay for reproduction." For example, I remember that the first thing I wrote on this issue, in the early 1950s, in a Communist Party economics magazine called Nuova Economia, was an article in which I proposed that FIAT workers should not go on strike, but that their wives should refuse to raise their children, take care of the house, etc. Without the care work done by wives, FIAT would have been forced to close. It is a rudimentary way of addressing the problem, which feminism has since then developed further.”“Let’s look at the housewives' wage that was proposed in the 1960s by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a feminist from Padua. I believe it is wrong because this is not just a women's issue, but one that concerns society; therefore, it is society that must build the structures to enable women to have children and care for elderly family members when they are ill. Everything that happens is always the responsibility of women, but providing a wage to housewives ends up petrifying women in a role that cuts them off from everything else.""I am afraid today, with all the talk about the need for women to have children to counteract the demographic decline, we risk returning to a backward view of the role of women. The problem is being addressed in a superficial way, without real social change: instead of creating the conditions for a work-life balance, the idea is being promoted that the solution is simply to bring women back home, relegating them to traditional roles.""The issue of gender quotas, if pursued for too long, risks becoming an illusion. At first, they were useful in demonstrating that women were perfectly capable of performing the same roles as men. Today, however, this obstacle has been overcome: no one openly says that a woman cannot do something because she is inferior. The feminist movement has won this battle."
“The whole issue of feminism and therefore also of patriarchy stems from a very serious historical deception that I call the deception of neutrality: all our laws, all the rules of society, from shop opening hours to the main rules, are addressed to a neutral citizen; but since neutral children are not born, as we know they are born male or female, that neutral citizen was designed on the basis of male identity, and this model was then imposed on women as well, pretending that the differences between men and women did not exist or were irrelevant. But the truth is that men and women are not equal at all, yet the law and institutions have regulated society as if everyone had to conform to a single standard and a single body: the male one.”“Simone Beauvoir said something that I always keep in mind: Discovering what it means to be a woman is the work of a lifetime.”“Self-awareness groups were a way to open up an inquiry into oneself and reflect on 'who the hell am I' and discover that one is a woman. That is precisely why the feminist movement has moved forward, developed as is now, much stronger and more important than it was before, thanks to this work of self-inquiry.”"I even feel nostalgic for the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane), when there were 500,000 women members. It was an incredible achievement because it meant coming out of the isolation of the family and starting to participate actively in community life. We fought fundamental battles, such as the one for nurseries, which are an essential achievement for women's freedom. Yet, even then, we always fought a little less than men. As if, despite the struggles, part of us always remained in the background, as if we still had to justify our right to be fully present."“The socialisation of care work: this seems to me to be a fundamental issue. It is necessary to review all laws, starting with the Constitution, which is beautiful, but certainly did not take into account the problem that men and women are not equal. I also dislike the other feminist slogan, which says that we want equality. Equality suggests that we want to be seen as men, but that is not true. We want to claim our diversity as something that has equal value and importance, perhaps even more than what men do."“The real point is to completely rethink the organisation of the society in which we live, starting with concrete aspects such as the way cities are designed. Those who designed cities never took women into account, simply because for centuries they were relegated to the home and excluded from decision-making processes. This has a direct impact on economic and social dynamics. I created a task force on ecology, involving the best scientists and professionals in the field. We analysed the role of the sea, agriculture and the coastline, but also the need for urban reorganisation. Today, at a time when we can no longer afford to expand concrete without limits, we need to mend and rethink our cities. And this time, it must be women who say how they want them to be, because the city we live in influences the way we move, work and care for others. This is an economic issue.""I believe we must bear in mind that men are experiencing the feminist movement as a great psychological trauma. Femicide, in fact, does not affect weak women, but those who want to be self-determined, work and live freely. It is a pathological and violent reaction to a process of emancipation that is now irreversible. Lenin said that there is no revolution without bloodshed, and this also applies to the feminist revolution; therefore, in some ways, it is inevitable.""We have a big problem: that is, we need to help these poor men transition and become aware, because the other difficulty in the fight against patriarchy lies in the fact that men are often people we love, and fighting them is not easy, so all we can do is support them in this transition process.""Another important issue is that there is an anti-capitalist aspect in women's liberation, and I want to be part of a workers' movement because it helps me to free myself from a system that includes the exploitation of women."
Silvia Federici is a lucid and radical voice in contemporary feminist thought. An Italian philosopher and activist who became a naturalised US citizen, she has dedicated her life to exposing the hidden mechanisms of capitalism, starting from a revolutionary perspective: domestic work is not gratuitous love, but unpaid labour that sustains the entire economic system.
Her thinking ranges from economics to politics and social relations, refusing to consider capitalism reformable.
"I do not consider myself a feminist economist because, although I consider important the work that many feminist economists have done, I place myself in a perspective very different. For one thing, I reject these boxes, these divisions that are typical of bourgeois thinking. In reality, there is no economic world separate from all political relations.
The feminist economic movement, moreover, has different souls within it.""I do not believe that there is such a thing as a reform of capitalist economic thinking. There is only a critique of this thinking, because capitalism cannot be reformed. We can study it, we can understand how to organise ourselves and what tools to use to criticise it, but not with a view of improving it. My fear with regard to part of feminist economics is precisely that there is this illusion of being able to reform the system, to build a capitalism with a more human face. But this would be nothing more than a form of consolidation [of the system itself]."Within the feminist economic movement, there is an important distinction. I think, for example, of Antonella Picchio, who used her knowledge of economics for a more effective criticism. Some comrades have studied the world of economics in depth and came back with useful knowledge, but useful for criticism, not for a reform project. I believe that this is the difference: there are those who enter the labyrinths of economics to analyse it better and dismantle its mechanisms, and those who do so with the idea of being able to reform it, hoping for a more humane capitalism."
"I participated from the beginning in the campaign Wages for domestic work, which officially began in 1972 with a famous meeting in Padua, organised by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who was then part of Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle) and came from that experience. At that meeting, it was decided to launch an international campaign for domestic wages, thanks in part to her essay, which was fundamental to the campaign itself. Mariarosa Dalla Costa argued that domestic work is not natural work, almost biological, as it has always been treated in the history of left-wing movements. Nor is it a remnant of previous economic systems, such as feudal relations. Domestic work is, instead, a specifically capitalist form of work, because it is production in the same way as industrial production. But it produces something even more fundamental: it produces the workforce, the workers, the very capacity to work. This essay overturned the traditional left-wing view of domestic work. It is not an activity separate from the world of production, but the very condition of production."
"Another fundamental contribution was to highlight that capitalism is founded on unpaid labour. Contrary to Marx's claim, it is not paid labour that is at the centre of capitalist accumulation, but unpaid labour.""The campaign Wages for domestic work is part of the great anti-colonial movement, which was one of the most important struggles of the twentieth century.""My contribution, on the other hand, has been to expand on some of these reflections. For example, my essay Wages for Housework has been read around the world. In particular, the opening sentence – They call it love, we call it unpaid labour – has been written on many walls and is still relevant today. Even today, we are still dealing with the devaluation of domestic work and care work.""For me, the debates, research and work we did in the early 1970s, starting with reflection on domestic work were fundamental to all my subsequent work. From there, began the historical analysis of capitalism, the role of women in capitalism, the witch hunts, up to the present day.""Over time, our concept of reproduction has expanded. We started with domestic work and care, but then we saw that reproductive work is much more extensive. It includes schooling, healthcare, agriculture, food production, environmental care. All of this is social reproduction."
"[Feminism] for me was a fundamental experience, even if it wasn't always easy. We had divisions, break-ups, difficult moments, and yet it was an enormous experience. Precisely this collective dimension was central. I believe that all my work has always started not from theoretical needs, but from practical, organisational needs.""I also experienced this within academia, but even there I always tried to work with colleagues. I have never had an individualistic view of knowledge production. I have always tried to build collective spaces and even today, after so many years, I continue to work with a group of women. I believe that on a personal level, it has helped me a lot not to get discouraged."
An economist by training but a subversive by vocation, Antonella Picchio is the person who has contributed to bringing feminist economics to Italy since the 1990s. She did not want to fix the system, but to expose it from within, starting from its roots. Through personal memories and anecdotes from her professional life, Picchio recounts how her theoretical approach was born from her family experience, from her childhood perspective of seeing her mother, sisters, brothers and father lead different lives and receive different levels of remuneration. From there, she began her struggle to ensure that the economy stopped pretending that reproduction was done 'for love' in the private sphere. A struggle that, in her words, seems to be more important and urgent than ever.
“I remember that day I had to get ready, pick up the children from school, sell their bicycles because we were leaving [Cambridge] for Italy the next day, so I went to say goodbye. Sraffa said to me, ‘But what do you want to do?’ I said 'I want to study wages as the price of reproduction, because there is the role of reproduction, which is what my mother did.’ So he spent half an hour with me without ever asking who I was.”
“[Feminist economics] is the only hope of saving economic theory, as well as explaining and placing feminism within the structure of the system and not in the private choices of men who continue to consider their relationship with their wives a private matter."“Even now, after twenty years of talking about wages at work on Sundays, about reproduction, you don't hear a word from them about the work for love. There is still so much to do. Reproduction always takes place in the intimate space.”
“I only saw networks when the feminist movement was born and I was in a network. There was a moment when I had to choose between the group and my life, and I decided that the group was important, not because my comrades consoled me so much, but because they were my movement, I needed the movement, the strength of the movement.”“In my opinion, now we have to fight above all for this, we have to destroy this myth of the financial market because this is really the dirtiest game they are playing now, there is even bitcoin in what decides the value of the currency.”“I believe that the concept of reproduction, of work in the specificity of bodies, is exactly the centre point of everything.”
“I have a primary interest in choosing subjects. In a way, I chose it because I could put things from my life into it, the women in my life, their anger, their irrationality. That's what got me interested because my mother's heart was there, for example, because she was rich, but her brother mixed it up. Then there was my father's brother who fought with the fascists in Spain, then emigrated to Argentina to work in agriculture. So, you put all the people you mentioned into the economy... At a certain point there is this thing that is a piece, you find the lives you know with their tensions, with their courage, this thing seems more interesting to me than any financial or even business act, so what is behind the market.”
“There was a famous teacher in Venice, a very talented one, who taught me about the resistance. Because of her, I even got good marks in my exams, even though I always sat at the back of the class so as not to appear to be one of the top students.”
A world-renowned expert in demography, Graziella Caselli is famous not only for her numbers and statistics but also for her long-standing belief that only the history of women can tell the real economic story of a country.
Listening to her is like taking a longitudinal journey through concepts such as longevity, motherhood and pregnancy, which evolve over time in our society but often remain trapped in stereotypes and mental cages. First and foremost is the constant desire to ignore care work, which condemns a country to demographic and economic decline.
“I graduated in Statistics in four years with a thesis based on the work of MIT: from zero growth in the economy to zero growth in demography. I wanted to see what the long-term effects were, up to 2000, of population growth heading towards zero, and zero growth in the economy following this growth.”“I was one of the first to understand that what was needed was to increase female employment, but to give women this opportunity it was crucial to have nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools, all full-time, from the birth of their child. In other words, to have the possibility of facilities capable of bearing the burden of children. And we began to conduct surveys. We asked women how many children they wanted. At first, when they had more than two, they always said two. Later, and even today, if you look at the latest surveys and ask the younger generation how many children they want, they either say no, or if they say yes, they say at least two. And they don't have them.”“If you follow the history of women's fertility from a demographic point of view, you will find the economic history of our country from a female perspective. That is, it is the percentage of GDP given to reproductive assistance, fertility and the family. If you promote fertility with bonuses, women will not follow you. Women need to plan their fertility, to plan their lives and those of their children.”
“No one ever thinks that support for fertility and reproduction means support for the country's economy. They never think about it, but it really means increasing GDP, as well as helping women to fulfil themselves, so to speak, because if they graduate, if they get their diploma, it is because they want to use their diploma, their degree, to build a different life than staying at home.”“The other point is that today's wages are so low for everyone that a single wage in the family is no longer enough. It is not a demographic problem, it is a social and economic problem, but it is linked to demography, because the development of the family, i.e. the development of motherhood desired by women, comes through economic support.”
“Another important point linking demography and economics is longevity, i.e. the survival of women, which is much higher than that of men. So, more women than men reach the age of 65, the retirement age, so to speak.”“I won the World Population Association's degree in 2012, which is a bit like the Nobel Prize for demography, and there are very few women who have won it. They gave it to an Italian woman for her contribution to demographic studies. These are longitudinal studies. That is, reconstructing individuals' survival stories based on the reconstruction of their life stories. These studies have linked the life stories of different generations to their longevity. I discovered many things and was the first to discover them.”
“Let's say that Nora Federici was undoubtedly important to me. Even though I am not a student of Nora Federici, she had a big impact. Because she was a woman, she ran the institute, she was the first female demographer. I took over her chair. Then, of course, I worked with Minister Finocchiaro, who, in my opinion, was the only one who could bring about change in equal opportunities; and then, it was very important for me to work in this Commission for Equal Opportunities, because it was a huge stimulus to start giving a lot of importance to gender studies.”
She is known mostly because she was the first woman to lead the CGIL trade union, but Susanna Camusso has always been first and foremost a feminist. She has always rejected the label of economist but has never refused to deal with economics. She has fought on the ground for decades to negotiate contracts and defend the rights of workers, convinced that the only way to change the world of work was to bring about a feminist revolution. In her view, we still live in a world that has turned priorities upside down, and in order to put them right, we need to reinterpret economic data through the lens of the care economy.
“In reality, I have been involved in economics all my life, in the sense that you cannot deal with work and people's rights without also measuring yourself against economic contexts and the choices that economic contexts determine. I think it is clear that the objection is entirely about the word 'economist' and not about the word 'feminist', which belongs to me and identifies me, even within the great plurality of feminist movements and feminist thought.”
“Rethinking, or rather re-reading, the world's economic data in the light of the care economy really changes the horizon, the vision, the perspective and even the choices we make. And if I have to project this onto my fundamental experience, which has been that of a trade unionist, it would mean completely changing the hierarchy of the value of work that is usually used. It is a well-known unwritten hierarchy, but it is one where if you work in finance, you must be well paid and highly valued, whereas if you work to save people's lives, you are at the bottom of the ladder.”“When it came to rebuilding a horizon, it became what I call a 'debate over commas'. That is, a universal acceptance of liberalism as an ideological and economic perspective, and then you qualified as more progressive if you added a few commas to smooth out some of the rough edges. But you didn't address the issue and the substance of the fact that you cannot imagine, you cannot accept that the so-called economy also determines the rules and choices of government. Which is a major setback for politics.”
“In Europe, we called it austerity, in the United States they said more simply trickle-down, but in any case, whichever way you look at it, the problem was that the point of view had changed. That is, we have moved from reading society and its needs to reading the needs of the financial system. Now, it is not even true that all capitalism is like this; in reality, it is a choice to change the power relations between politics and the economy. In this, Europe has a great responsibility for not having been able to defend its model.”“In my experience, women's networks have not only allowed me to learn, think, socialise and so on, but they have also included me, taught me, forced me – there are many ways to define it – to always measure myself against two things that are fundamental to my subsequent professional life, if trade unionism can be considered a profession, namely relationships and conflict. Because through networks and collective discussion, you give meaning to relationships that is obviously different from what you normally and customarily have in life; because you learn that conflict is an extraordinary and positive driving force.”“Then, if I think about my life in the trade union, which is almost my whole life, in reality, even there, much has been determined by a network of women. Defining a female identity and content, whether social or economic trade union mobilisation of women alone, broke down a challenging political construct. It was experienced as a break with class identity, which was still very strong at the time.”
“So, in reality, we need something that is not there at the moment, someone with a long-term vision, who is not necessarily the head of a multinational company that sells these products. Why am I starting from here? Because this also brings with it an issue called the redistribution of wealth, the redistribution of social roles, the redistribution of spaces. It has happened in the past – steam changed the world. But it didn't change it by changing ways of thinking and lifestyles. It changed it by creating economic opportunities that were widely distributed and stabilised. We are in the midst of a process that is not stabilising, and this is what destabilises everyone else, because we still don't understand how we should treat the Internet, and we are discussing artificial intelligence.”
“On the one hand, what we need to do is resist, not forget that rights are the only basis through which you determine the universality of conditions. Resist because the methods that are being introduced are methods that tend to prevent both conflict and resistance. On the other hand, I think that if I had to think, which I always find a bit annoying, about what advice to give to the younger generations, it would be to be more wicked.”
