I rischi del 'materno'. Pensiero politico femminista e critica del patriarcalismo tra Sette e Ottocento (Italian version only)
Casalini Brunella

The feminist thought had difficulties in imagining the individual realization of women outside the maternal social function, a function that historically took shape in conjunction with the birth of family intimacy. As a matter of fact, in modernity the origin of private space, thought no more as a privation moment, but on the contrary as a place for emotional satisfaction, of “a free and fulfilled interiority”, interlaced with the history of creation of a femininity identified with maternity. Authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were not able to release from a presumed feminine nature or vocation the feeling of devotion and opening on the other innate side of the motherly, with its undoubted critical potential towards forms of atomistic and possessive individualism. This contributed to keep the women prisoners of the trap of a maternity ideal which exalted the feminine, but at the same time it subjected the desire of individual self realization of the woman to the social priority of her reproductive duty, to the necessity of non betraying the social expectations put in the “republican maternity”, in an ideal that granted to women the duty of “men maker”.

Brunella Casalini is researcher of political philosophy and teacher of political doctrines history at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Florence.