Women’s vocational training was a key topic in women’s debates and mobilization in Cold War Italy and in the Global Cold War due to its relevance
The debate on women’s vocational training in Cold War Italy was closely related to the ongoing mobilization around equal pay and the equal value of women’s work, which has a transnational character, as revealed by recent studies.4 The principles of equality between women and men as well as equal pay were written into the text of the Republican Constitution in 1948, which states that “a woman worker has the same rights and, for equal work, the same remuneration as a man” and recognized the right to vocational training.
In the first half of the 1950s, both equal pay and vocational training were discussed in congresses promoted by Italian women’s associations such as the Union of Italian Women (Unione Donne Italiane, udi); conferences devoted to women and women workers organized by political parties including the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, pci); and by trade unions like the Italian General Confederation of Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, cgil). The three organizations shared a common agenda on women’s rights that was advanced by activists and officials who were often involved in more than one of these organizations. Increasing the effectiveness
In 1959, the Committee of Female Associations for Equal Remuneration, established after the ratification of the ilo Convention no. 100, organized a conference wholly devoted to women’s vocational training.5 Several national and international speakers took the floor, including representatives of Italian women trade unionists and workers and officials of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf).6 A few years earlier, in 1956, Italy had hosted the Congress of the International Association for Social Progress (iasp), which approved—under the leadership of Marguerite Thibert and Margarita Schwarz-Gagg—a resolution on women’s work that included vocational training and equal pay as key topics.7
Drawing on a number of archives, especially those of women’s associations (e.g., udi), conference proceedings on women’s vocational training, parliamentary speeches, women’s and union magazines (e.g., Noi donne [We Women]), this chapter analyzes the role played by Italian women, especially communists and socialists, in pushing for a more inclusive and less stereotypically gendered model of vocational training in Cold War Italy. In doing so, it will highlight how the Italian debate was shaped by the state-socialist model of women workers and women’s vocational training from Eastern Europe and Soviet Union as portrayed in women’s magazines. It focuses on the period between 1948 and 1962, during which there was significant debate and mobilization on women’s vocational training but which has never been systematically studied. In March 1948, the National Congress for Female Vocational Education, promoted by the General Office for Technical Training of the Education Ministry,8 marked the resumption of a debate that had its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.9 After the inauguration of the new middle school model in 1962,10 women’s access to technical and technical-industrial institutes in particular was broadened within the scope of the more general development of mass schooling which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s.11
The chapter necessarily engages with different levels of analysis (local, national, and international), illuminating the circulation of ideas on women’s
The first section addresses vocational training and women’s work in the Cold War imaginary, underscoring the distance between opposing models in postwar Italy. On the one hand, the traditional model of the female worker and gendered vocational training inherited from the Fascist regime was still in place; on the other hand, the model of Soviet women workers was being advanced by Italian communist women and left-wing women’s magazines. The second section analyzes the debate on equal pay and vocational training in the 1950s, taking into account the conferences and congresses promoted by women’s association and trade unions, with particular focus on the role played by international organizations such as widf. The third section reconstructs women’s advocacy for more inclusive vocational training in the years known as economic miracle (1958–1963), focusing on major Italian conferences concerning women’s work and training. The role of international organizations and trade unions such as the ilo, unesco, iasp, wftu is explicitly explored in order to understand the connection between the local, national, and international dimensions of the debate on women’s vocational training in Cold War Europe and beyond.
1 Vocational Training, Women’s Work, and the Cold War Imaginary in Post-World War Two Italy
In the aftermath of World War Two, a nationwide debate was initiated on vocational training for women in Italy, as testified by the Convegno nazionale per l’istruzione professionale femminile (National Congress for Female Vocational Training), which was held in Florence in March 1948 and promoted by the General Secretariat for Technical Education of the Ministry of Public Education.13 At that congress, the results of the questionnaires sent to the schools and other institutions and actors involved in women’s vocational
Home economics was still one of the cornerstones of the curricula of vocational schools for women. The theoretical lessons on the home and family wardrobe were combined with exercises related to proper cleaning, the management of crockery and cookware, laundry and ironing, managing and purchasing groceries, and, lastly, food preparation. The declared aim of these lessons and exercises was to “prepare the pupil to run the domestic company alone, following rational norms of economics and hygiene.”17 The syllabus was completed through activities deemed to be distinctively feminine tasks defined as “women’s work”: laundry, sewing, needlework, lacework, and lacemaking. The practical workshops completed at these schools were supposed to provide girls with the appropriate training to independently carry out at least two of the above tasks.
However, it is not always easy to reconcile the new social function of the woman with the traditional tasks that placed her and still put her at the heart of family and domestic life. Finding the right balance between the two forms of activity is a very difficult task because it is a question of running a house and educating one’s children—that is, holding together a family—and at the same time, if necessary, ultimately practicing a trade or a profession. The natural way to achieve this dual purpose is to develop as far as possible specifically female aptitudes on both the empirical level, through imitation, and on a technical level. This will facilitate both a more rational organization of family life and the application of the techniques acquired beyond the domestic sphere, in productive companies.21
This was not the only model of womanhood, women workers, and female vocational training circulating in postwar Italy. Foreign cultural models and practices, exchanges and networks with the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern European countries were, in fact, crucial for advancing a different, modern idea of women in Italy, one that was based on emancipation through paid work and equal rights.22 Women were observers and promoters of such a model, which they reproduced both publicly and privately. At the same time, they espoused the imaginary of equality and the models of emancipation propagated by real socialism23 that was reasserted in Italy by the Communist Party, the Union of Italian Women, and, to some extent, by the Italian General Confederation of Labour. The paradigm of the working mother, the main reference point for left-wing women influenced by the ideal of the communist/Soviet woman, was fortified and legitimized in Italy.24
“Women are everywhere,” according to the memoirs published by members of the Italian delegation, a sentiment repeated in their correspondence and photographs dated 1954 (to be catalogued) in the udi Archive of Bologna, which was probably rather impressive for a Italian woman in the 1950s. Soviet women were blue-collar workers in automobile factories, agricultural workers, and street cleaners, but they also held a leading position in highly sensitive sectors, such as the underground system in Moscow. The modernity of transportation, together with the health system, was highly regarded by Italian women, who considered these sectors to be highly advanced. The 1954 trip was neither the last nor probably the first of such trips, but it gave Italian women from udi a taste of how Soviet women lived. Equality was surely one of the impressions that emerged from the writing of these women. Private accounts of the trip were much less rhetorical than the letter sent by udi women to the Soviet Women’s Committee, but Italian women were genuinely impressed by their encounter with the Eastern bloc.26
udi was inspired by the Soviet emancipation model, especially in the so-called “Red Regions” such as Emilia-Romagna, which was locally governed by the Communist Party.27 Nevertheless, in a Catholic country like Italy, the Soviet model had to be restyled, preserving the crucial role of the family and
In 1950, Noi Donne hosted the feature “Conversations on the Soviet Union,” penned by Rita Montagnana. The communist leader and vice president of the widf answered readers’ questions about the working and living conditions in the ussr, from trends in prices,30 to children’s education, and social services. One article, for example, was dedicated to the condition of Soviet maids, renamed “house workers,” testifying to the rights attributed to them as full-fledged workers: from the working hours set at eight hours per day, to weekly rest-days and holidays.31 It was emphasized that this type of work would soon be superseded by the use of electrical appliances commonly owned. Besides Rita Montagnana, other important communist leaders of udi and the widf wrote reports on their journeys to the Soviet Union, turning their attention to the roles played by women in Soviet society. Maria Maddalena Rossi underlined that women made up 50 percent of the workforce of the Soviet railways, mentioning that the general director of the Moscow underground was a woman, Zinaida Trotskaia.32 The Italian leader shed light on other ordinary women workers, but above all were women who had achieved high-level positions; among these was the vice president of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Soviet Women Zinaida Gagarina, who was not only a politician but also a scientist and the vice rector of the University of Moscow.
Here we move to the matriarchy, one of our delegates said jokingly after coming across numerous women factory managers, executives, employees, and scientists in the Soviet Union. In actual fact, in no other country had gender equality become such a concrete and living reality as in the Soviet Union.34
2 The Debate on Equal Pay and Vocational Training at Conferences in the 1950s
Communist and socialist women belonging to udi used these international models to assert local claims and to call for the advancement of rights for women in the working and social sphere despite their awareness that these very same models were idealized, as recent publications show.35 In communist-led Bologna, for instance, the Declaration of Bolognese Women’s Rights clearly addressed the issue of women’s education and vocational training, promoting the creation of “a women’s vocational skills center for unemployed young women and, across the Province, new vocational courses of various kinds (for sewing, dressmaking, ironing; for shops assistants, farmworkers, etc.).”36 The issue of paid work was at the heart of both the Italian and international
The connection between the local, national, and international levels was relevant not only in the drafting of the document(s) but also in its worldwide promotion. Communist mp and high-ranking trade unionist Teresa Noce38 publicly supported the international document, which the widf was trying to disseminate. udi also played a key role in defining a national and, to some extent, global agenda for women’s rights thanks to its affiliation to the Women’s International Democratic Federation.39 udi was a key member of the federation itself, and several udi women served as officials in its ranks, such as the communist mps Rita Montagnana and Maria Maddalena Rossi; the former was the president of udi, and the latter became vice president of the widf in the 1950s.40 In 1951, Rina Picolato, udi’s representative at the widf, gave the executive committee of the widf in Bucharest41 a well-documented account of the conditions of Italian women workers and the numerous battles promoted together with women’s associations and trade unions, raising also the issue of vocational training in relation to equal pay. In 1953, Teresa Noce published an article on her participation in the 3rd Congress of the World Federation of Trade Unions, mentioning explicitly that she raised the issue of equal pay and providing information about the mobilization on the issue that she was leading in Italy.42 Equal pay and vocational training were discussed jointly at two other two events in the mid-1950s.
The National Conference of Women’s Workers held in Florence in January 1954 was another important venue for mobilization around the issue of women’s vocational training. The 1954 conference put the battle for wage equality and the fight against exploitation at the center of cgil’s strategy for women workers. Across the whole of Italy, 20,000 preparatory assemblies for the National Conference of the Women Workers were held; of these gatherings, 4,000 were organized for labourers, 6,000 for sharecroppers, and over 10,000
One year later, the Second Communist Women’s Conference (Rome, 1955) affirmed the existence of a common women’s rights agenda, while the importance of the role of udi, cgil, and the cooperative movement was declared a pillar of the project to emancipate women.45 Although women workers were the main focus of the pci’s strategy, housewives were also mentioned explicitly, as in the second half of the 1950s, when the campaign “Pensions for Housewives” was launched. Equal pay was a key topic at the conference and was addressed by several delegates including Marisa Rodano, Ines Pisoni Cerlesi, and General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti himself. Pisone Cerlesi, a key figure in the mobilization for equal pay along with Teresa Noce and Marisa Rodano, explicitly mentioned the 1956 conference of the World Federation of Trade Unions, which was devoted to women workers and had placed the issue of equal pay at the top of its agenda.46 The equal-pay principle was clearly stated in the final resolution of the conference together with the immediate goal of the reduction of the pay gap between men and women workers. The Communist Women’s Conference held in Rome in October 1955 was preceded by an intense discussion and wide-ranging debate that led to some interesting developments among the women from Emilia-Romagna and Bologna in particular, who continued to expand on them within the scope of numerous branch conferences (sezione) and hundreds of local conferences (cellula). Many reports testified to the poor labour conditions of
At the 1956 udi Congress, the “right to work” was voiced by Italian women through the so-called “referendum on women’s rights”; this referendum was launched by the association in preparation for the congress in order to better understand women’s working and living conditions.48 Maria Maddalena Rossi’s speech clearly referenced the 1944 ilo Declaration of Philadelphia,49 as evidenced by the relevance udi attributed to the actions of international institutions, namely the International Labour Organization.50 Demands related to women’s work clearly emerged such as equal pay and the equal value of women farmworkers, access to all professions and jobs (including the judiciary, from which Italian women were still excluded in the late 1950s), the safeguarding of maternity and women’s health, the fight against the dismissal of married women, unemployment and health insurance for every woman, and last but not least, pension rights for housewives. In the speech given by representatives of the Young Women’s Commission of udi, vocational training for girls and young women was clearly identified as a matter of concern. Not only was existing vocational training considered outdated; it was also regarded as discriminatory toward women because it was based on sex. Also addressed was the lack of vocational training schools in 785 of Italian municipalities with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. These concerns were reinforced with data: “Between 1952 and 1953, 4,171 of these courses were delivered, with the participation of 185,000 pupils: of these, 60,000 were girls, most of whom attended commercial or handicraft courses; women’s participation in agro-industrial courses was close to zero.”51 In the concluding speech delivered by Rosetta Longo, the
3 Toward More Inclusive Vocational Training: Italian Women’s Activism during the Economic Miracle
In the mid-1950s, the socio-economic and politico-cultural situation in Italy changed significantly. The industrial growth during the years of the so-called economic miracle (1958–1963) generated new employment opportunities for women, in particular younger women who entered the factories and offices of the industrial cities of the north and elsewhere en masse.52 Together with the new visibility of women’s work captured, for example, by the television documentary La donna che lavora (The Working Woman),53 a renewed female leadership emerged in the mid-1950s and coalesced around the important battle for wage equality.54 In addition to the udi Congress, two significant events took place in 1956: the ratification of the ILO Convention no. 100 “Equal Remuneration for Male and Female Workers for Work of Equal Value” and the Congress of the International Association for Social Progress. The latter was held in Milan in March 1956; it was hosted by the Società Umanitaria (Humanitarian Society) of Milan and was partly dedicated to women’s employment.55
The resolution of the Commission for Women’s Labour, chaired by two experts on working women’s problems—Margherite Thibert and Margarita Schwarz-Gagg56—effectively summarized some of the key elements of the national and international debate on technical and vocational training. The
It was the Società Umanitaria of Milan, the headquarters of the Italian section of the iasp, and its president Riccardo Bauer that played a strategic role in creating research and discussion opportunities on the issues of wage equality and women’s vocational training/education during the boom years. A few months after the Milan congress of the iasp, the ratification process of ilo Equal Remuneration Convention no. 100 was completed. Starting on 8 June 1956, Italy was on the list of countries that had ratified international norms concerning “equal remuneration for work of equal value.” Recommendation no. 90, combined with Convention no. 100, explicitly referred to the importance of vocational training for the achievement of equal pay, highlighting the need for the equal training of workers of both sexes and adopting appropriate measures to facilitate women’s vocational training.
In October 1957, a committee of eleven women’s associations ranging from mass organizations that were part of the left-wing milieu like udi, to associations like the Unione Femminile Nazionale (National Women’s Union) of Milan, to religious and professional groups,57 organized the congress “Retribuzione equale per un lavoro di valore uguale” (Equal Remuneration for Work of Equal Value). The congress was hosted and supported by the Società Umanitaria of Milan and addressed the political, economic, and legal implications of the ratification of ilo Convention no. 100 in Italy.58 On this occasion, Leone Diena, the director of the Center for Social Studies of the Società Umanitaria, gave a lecture that dealt with women’s vocational training59 in relation to the goal of wage equality. Diena highlighted the complexity of the issue and the
The cooperation between women’s associations that had begun with the ratification of Convention no. 100 did not conclude at the congress in 1957. As president of udi—the association that played a pivotal role both in the organization of the congress mentioned above and in the battle for wage equality between the 1940s and 1950s60—Marisa Rodano officially proposed transforming the organizing committee of the congress into a permanent structure. In 1959, the Committee of Female Associations for Equal Remuneration under the patronage of the Società Umanitaria of Milan once again promoted a national congress specifically dedicated to the theme of women’s vocational training.61 The starting point was the assertion that the “search for better and greater professional qualifications would allow for a broader and more fruitful inclusion of women into productive activity and a just acknowledgment of women’s work.”62 In the opening speech, Riccardo Bauer argued that women’s vocational training was directly connected to the more general role of women in the labour and social sphere and influenced by the numerous, persistent, and widespread stereotypes and prejudices that would affect future women workers. Bauer critiqued the recent reform measures concerning vocational schools for women, which reiterated the concept of “typically female activities” in a context of profound technological transformation and industrial growth.
Statistician Nora Federici63 provided important data for the discussion, highlighting how, by the late 1950s, “the low average level of education and the near-absolute exceptionality of adequate technical-vocational preparation undoubtedly constitute major obstacles to the broader and, above all, the more extensive participation of women in the economic life of the country.” The actions to be undertaken, in her opinion, needed to include the reform of schools for both workers and the unemployed; such reforms must avoid confining women to traditional fields of female craftwork and address the needs of new generations of women workers/students. Economist Luciano Barca dealt with the more general relationship between women’s employment, vocational training and professional development, highlighting the very diverse socio-economic conditions of Italian regions grouped in two main areas, namely the under-developed southern regions and the industrial-driven northern
Several teachers from vocational schools and professors from universities, along with trade unionists, economists, pedagogues, officials of women’s associations, and government officials participated in the three-day conference. Among the topics discussed were the level of primary education and women’s education; the need to respect compulsory schooling for everyone and in particular women; women’s employment prospects; the school structure and nature of vocational training; proposals for vocational institutes and re-training courses; and wider reforms to technical and vocational education.66 There were numerous discussions regarding women’s vocational training in specific sectors: industry, agriculture, the tertiary sector. The theme of technological progress and the improvement of female qualifications resurfaced in many speeches and was dealt with directly by Ines Pisoni Cerlesi, who emphasized the need to improve women’s vocational training by adapting it to the new boom economy and the professions that were emerging as a result.67 As indicated by Pisoni Cerlesi’s speech, unionists were crucial for an equal determination of wages and, ultimately, for the achievement of equal pay.
A detailed analysis of women’s apprenticeships was made. In 1958, over 170,000 young women had been involved in this type of training and work, representing about 30 percent of the total apprentices. The speech by mp Giuseppina Palumbo, National Secretary of the Italian Federation of Garment Workers,68 referenced more negatives than positives in the condition of apprentices during the boom years. The violation of the norms established by the law on apprenticeships no. 25 passed in 195569 was also a consequence of the lack of training content of the complementary teaching courses delivered to apprentices. Technical-practical traineeships called for a decisive improvement which, according to the unionist, should occur through a concerted effort on the part of unions. Palumbo also referenced the relationship between qualifications, training, and equal pay, arguing that in the case of apprentices, their relative youth often generated inequality in terms of an even greater pay differential.
At the center of the questionnaire was the topic of education and women’s vocational training, but the questions also mapped out the familial status, employment situation, level of education, and, finally, the respondent’s aspirations, desires, and opinions about the job. Berti Di Vittorio emphasized the need to reassert some of the key principles in the hoped-for reform of women’s vocational training and education: the abolition of limits on women’s access to training activities; the expansion of new training/work opportunities; the creation of a coordinating commission that would include representatives from unions and women’s associations; and the consolidation and reform of the territorial consortia for technical and vocational education.
The 1959 conference clearly showed how the Italian discussion on women’s vocational training fit into the broader global context. In his speech, engineer Marco Pantaleo referred to key national and international achievements of the 1950s, recalling the Conference on Public Education organized by the International Bureau of Education and unesco and held in Geneva in 1952. This conference focused in particular on recommendation no. 34, “Access of Women to Education,”72 which represented a document of special significance because it not only asserted the general principle that “general education for
The international situation was also inserted into the communications of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, which underlined how the “profound transformations that occur in society and are reflected in the work of women requiring their upskilling, pose the urgent problem of vocational training of girls and women.”73 The 1959 Italian conference was regarded as a model by widf delegates as it showed the possibility of collaboration between different organizations and very different actors all united around the goal of ensuring that “laws and institutions allow women to exercise their right to education and vocational training.” The communiqué of the widf representative expressed the relations between their organization and specific international organizations—first and foremost the ilo—active in these matters and committed to improving women’s vocational training as well as equal pay claims. In this regard, the 1956 “Recommendations Concerning Vocational Training in Agriculture” was mentioned with respect to the topic of vocational training for women in agriculture.
The widf communiqué clearly expressed how the ilo Recommendation had in actual fact embraced the proposals on women’s vocational training formulated at the wftu World Conference on Women Workers held in Budapest in 1956. The widf also stated that it had underwritten the unesco report approved at the 12th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1958. Lastly, the communiqué emphasized the role of education and vocational training within the broader emancipatory vision of the widf: “The widf has always considered the education and vocational training of women, without discrimination, to be one of the elements of women’s emancipation. In the Charter of Women’s Rights, passed by the Congress of Copenhagen in 1953, the widf placed vocational training among the fundamental rights of women.”74
The 1962 conference marked an important step in the discussion of and mobilization around women’s vocational training and women’s work in general. From the institutional perspective, the theme of vocational training was reiterated by the “National Commission for Working Women.” Established on
That same year, a single middle school was set up (law no. 1859 dated 31 December 1962) which would give graduates access to all secondary schools. This reform had an impact on vocational training schools and technical-industrial schools and ended up triggering a broader reorganization of vocational schools. This did not result in an instant change because until the end of the 1960s, the traditional role of the woman was emphasized in the regulations relating to training in technical applications, which were subdivided into male technical applications and female technical applications.79 For women, dressmaking, embroidery, knitting, and home economics were core subjects. However, women’s access to technical institutes, and to the technical-industrial
It was precisely in a red region like Emilia-Romagna—characterized by forms of local communism and a process of industrialization in which women were present in significant numbers—where the issue of vocational training for women took on an important role in the public debate and in the actions of both women’s associations and the local authorities. Vocational training had been addressed at the regional conference of the Emilian women workers promoted by the Emilia-Romagna udi branches in 1962. The conference attendees welcomed the opening of the first courses for women chemists and electronics experts initiated by the Aldini-Valeriani technical institute in Bologna and held at the technical-vocational institute Elisabetta Sirani. At the same conference, the fact that most of the existing professional courses were still overly oriented toward “typically female” competencies was heavily criticized, and speakers declared their hope that reforms were in the offing.80 A petition containing the main demands of the Emilian women workers was circulated at the conference.81 Among these was the demand for equal pay for equal work and the reorganization of vocational education. After thousands of women in the region signed the petition, it was sent to the Ministry of Labour and the National Commission for Women Workers: no direct reply appears in the archives, however. In Emilia-Romagna, and specifically in Modena, the first electronics technician earned her diploma in 1963.82
4
This chapter demonstrates the relevance of the debate on women’s vocational training in Cold War Italy in the first fifteen years following the establishment of the Italian Republican Constitution (1948–1962). Several conferences and congresses organized by women’s associations, political parties, and trade unions, along with philanthropic associations, debated the intersection of women’s work, equal pay, and vocational training. This chapter identifies three major periods: the postwar years (1948–1953), the mid-1950s (1954–1957), and the economic boom years (1958–1963). Whereas in the first period, vocational training and equal pay were discussed mainly at congresses promoted by women’s associations and trade union organizations, during the second period, women’s work and equal pay began to be discussed in ad hoc conferences thanks in part to the ratification of the 1951 ilo Equal Remuneration Convention no. 100. In the third period, due to the changes occurring in the Italian labour market, namely the increase in women’s employment, the issue of women’s vocational training became topical, and women began to mobilize in support of a less stereotypical and gender-oriented model of training.
Two subsequent conferences promoted by the Committee of Female Associations for Equal Remuneration and the Società Umanitaria of Milan held in 1957 and 1959, respectively, discussed the links between equal pay and vocational training in the debate as well as within the scope of women’s activism. The struggle to implement the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value in Italy led to a new awareness of the importance of improving women’s vocational training, thereby overcoming the gender divide in professional education. In particular, the 1959 conference on women’s vocational training displays the scope of the debate which involved teachers, university professors, trade unionists, economists, pedagogues, officials of women’s associations, and government officials. Moreover, the 1959 conference revealed that the Italian discussion on women’s vocational training was linked to broader international debates around the issue from two different perspectives. On the one hand, foreign delegations, especially those from Eastern bloc state-socialist countries and related organizations were hosted by Italian organizations; on the other hand, globally relevant documents concerning women’s vocational training promoted by international organizations such as unesco were referenced and taken into account in Italy.
This contribution has been realized within the project “Genere, lavoro e cultura tecnica” [Gender, labour and technical culture] promoted by udi of Bologna and supported by the Emilia-Romagna Region and Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna. See
See, for instance, Betti, Campigotto, and Grandi 2019; Cosmai 2017; Della Campa 2003.
On equal pay in the Italian context, see Betti 2021 and 2018. On the equal pay struggle from an international perspective, see Neunsinger and Warrier 2019; Neunsinger 2018; Määttä 2008. On equal pay in Eastern Europe, see Zimmermann 2020.
On the history of widf, see De Haan 2012.
“Progetto di risoluzione sul lavoro delle donne,” 123–124.
Bonafede and Causarano 2019, 219–254; Pironi 2019, 287–318.
Law passed on 8 July 1956, no. 782, “Trasformazione delle scuole di magistero professionale per la donna e delle annesse scuole professionali femminili in istituti tecnici femminili” [Transformation of professional schools for women and attached female vocational schools in female technical schools], Gazzetta Ufficiale, no. 192 dated 2 August 1956.
See De Maria 2021.
The quotation has been translated for the purpose of this article from the original Italian appearing in Medici 1960, 5–6.
On networks and exchanges during the Cold War, see Babiracki and Zimmer 2014; Ilic 2011, 157–174; Autio, Humphreys, and Miklóssy 2010.
See Betti 2020.
“Note di viaggio dall’Unione Sovietica,” [Travel notes from the Soviet Union] (to be catalogued), udi Archive of Bologna.
Correspondence and photographs dated back to 1954 (to be catalogued), udi Archive of Bologna.
On Soviet culture in the Emilia-Romagna Region, see also Fincardi 2007.
See, for instance, Guerra 2000.
On Teresa Noce, see Betti and Migliucci 2023.
On Carmen Zanti, see Ledda 2018, 58–66; Nava and Ruggerini 1987.
xiii session of Executive Committee of the widf (Bucharest, July 18–20, 1952), box. 11, f. 50, Thematic Section “Donne nel mondo” [Women in the world], udi National Archive.
The 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia stated that “labour is not a commodity” and “freedom of association and of expression are essential to sustained progress.” In addition, it extended the scope of the the ilo’s work by affirming the centrality of human rights for all people: “all human beings, irrespective of race, creed or sex, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity.” Maul 2019.
The documentary consisting of eight episodes was released in 1959 thanks to the contributions of journalist Ugo Zatterin and director Giovanni Salvi.
Betti 2018, 276–299.
On Margherite Thibert, see Thébaud 2017; on Margarita Schwarz-Gagg, see Mantilleri and Hervé 2005.
The Conference was promoted by: Alleanza Femminile Italiana, Associazione Nazionale Donne Elettrici, Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane, Consociazione Nazionale Infermiere Professionali ed Assistenti Sanitarie, Federazione Italiana di Arti, Professioni e Affari (fidapa), Federazione Italiana Donne Giuriste, Federazione Italiana Laureate e Docenti Istituti Superiori (fildis), Unione Cristiana delle Giovani d’Italia (ywca), Unione Donne Italiane (udi), Unione Giuriste Italiane, Unione Femminile Nazionale di Milano.
On the Società Umanitaria di Milano, see Della Campa 2003; Colombo 2002.
Diena 1958, 177–204.
Federici in Società Umanitaria di Milano 1959, 23–77.
Berti Di Vittorio 1959, 141–144.
La Commissione Nazionale per le donne lavoratrici presso il Ministero per il lavoro e la Previdenza Sociale, ha iniziato i suoi lavori, [The National Commission for women workers at the Ministry for Labour and Social Security has begun its works] “Posta della Settimana” [Weekly post], 10–11 (1962), 5–9; box 7, f. 4, Thematic Section “Diritto al Lavoro” [The right to work], udi National Archive.
Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici, Appunto per l’onorevole Ministro [The National Commission for women workers, Note to the Honorable Minister] [1962], box 7, f. 4, Thematic Section “Diritto al Lavoro” [The right to work], udi National Archive.
The president of the Commission was Riccardo Bauer, and the vice president was Maria Eletta Martini. The secretariat of the commission was set up in the Ministry for Labour and Social Security and was directed by Elena Gatti Caporaso. Cfr: Ministerial decree, Nomina del presidente e dei componenti la Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici [Appointment of the president and the members of the national Commission for women workers], passed on 23 August 1962, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale [Official gazette] no. 228 on 10 September 1962.
Memorie presentate dai componenti la Commissione nazionale per le donne lavoratrici—Indicazioni in ordine ad un primo programma di lavoro della Commissione [Memorandum presented by the members of the National Commission for women workers. Indications concerning an initial working programme of the Commission] [cisl], box 7, f. 4, Thematic Section “Diritto al Lavoro,” [The right to work], udi National Archive.
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