The Mothers of Us All: Extracts, with comments, from the ‘Yellow Catalogue’ published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore

Abstract

The present paper is Paper No. 1, and forms part of a series together with Paper No. 2 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part I), and Paper No. 3 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part II; Sexual difference: an occasion for being). Papers No. 2 and No. 3 are forthcoming in Law & Literature. The three papers constitute a whole project of translation and commentary composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo n. 2 – Le madri di tutte noi,” published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore in 1982. The idea for the project was conceived by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello, who selected the extracts and provide the written commentaries on the original texts. The Catalogue, in which we find collective discussions, pages of personal diaries and, overall, the enterprise of a group of women debating over their literary symbolic mothers (who to read? And why?), is an fascinating example of the collective work of feminist groups of women, the themes they addressed and their methodology. In particular, the debate on the literary “mothers,” on the female authors that can contribute to the formation of a feminine symbolic, shows the kind of concerns of difference feminism in Italy (especially during the Seventies). The text offers, in other words, the opportunity to enter a world that nowadays – with the new, varied streams of feminism and the battles over the neutralization of sexual identity – is less frequent, and nevertheless we find it important in order to understand the social, political and cultural power of feminism.

Keywords:

• Literature
• female authors
• Italian difference feminism
• Milan Women’s Bookstore
• symbolic order

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The present paper, Paper No. 1 (In search of the feminine symbolic) is the first in a series of three texts, alongside Paper No. 2 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part I), and Paper No. 3 (From novels to figures: themes and strategies of a political practice – Part II; Sexual difference: an occasion for being). The three papers constitute a whole composed of translated extracts from the “Catalogo n. 2 – Le madri di tutte noi,” which appear below in italics, and published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore in 1982. Commentaries and introductions all appear in standard font. The idea for the project was conceived by Silvia Niccolai and Angela Condello, who selected the extracts and provide the written commentaries on the original texts. The underlined words in the translations reflect the choice to underline them in the original Italian text, written by the women collectively. The original texts were translated from Italian by Edward Fortes and Angela Condello.

More specifically, Angela Condello wrote the commentaries for all the extracts contained in this Paper, No. 1; Silvia Niccolai commented on all the extracts contained in Paper No. 2; and both Angela Condello and Silvia Niccolai commented on Paper No. 3. The comments provided on the translated originals are both philological and exegetical: on the one hand, the authors have tried to respect the unique style of the text, and focussed on the use of the women’s words by putting them in context, considering the specificity of Italian feminism. Especially relevant here is the notion of difference feminism, and its peculiarities in terms of its themes (symbolic dimension, sexuality, language and meaning, psychical order, the figure of the mother, etc.) and methodologies. Given our desire to value the unique way of working and meaning-making within this strand of feminism, the Catalogue works as a paradigm: it is, indeed, the result of shared work (no specific authorial signature is present, and indeed authorship is everywhere avoided except for the few random “diaries” written by several women who joined the group). Similarly, the names of the central figures in the collective and the bookstore such as Lia Cigarini never appear, although they undoubtedly played a leading role in the group’s activities and had a crucial function in the collective’s work.

2 Luisa Muraro, Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale e altri scritti, ed. by Riccardo Fanciullacci (Napoli: Orthotes, 2011), 50. Muraro underlines that such an enterprise – the search and definition of feminine genealogies – is carried on through the Catalogue entitled Le madri di tutte noi, and also in Più donne che uomini (the so-called Sottosopra verde, 1983) and in the famous text Non credere di avere dei diritti, 1987.

3 Luisa Muraro, Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale e altri scritti, cit., p. 51.

4 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

5 “The personal is political,” also termed “The private is political,” is a slogan with which Carol Hanish is credited. I am reading the Yellow Catalogue through such slogan, because in my opinion the work on literature is profoundly related to the work on themselves and on the models of women they want to create. This often becomes clear in passages such as “dunque è di noi che si tratta” (“hence, it is us we are here talking about”).

6 The words underlined appear as such in the original text, perhaps because they wanted to foreground those concepts.

7 Luisa Muraro, L’ordine simbolico della madre (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1991).

8 Italian difference feminism shows both elements of continuity and elements of discontinuity with feminism elsewhere. Consciousness raising as political practice (“personal is political”) is central in American feminism (e.g. in the experience of the New York Collective). The concept of difference and the gendering of language are present also in French authors, like Irigaray and Cixous. Yet, the difference to which Italian feminism refers is both familiar and extraneous to that theorized by Saussure, Deleuze, Derrida, or Lacan (thinkers in which French difference feminis is rooted). As we shall see in Paper No. 2, Italian difference feminism values the “differenza” among women first and foremost: the younger and the elder, the most and the least experienced, and in such differenza it sees the possibility of individual growth through consciousness raising and other practices. Hence the importance of the focus on motherhood. The discussion of the lineage of female authors can also be found in feminist literary critics of the 1980s like Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic.

9 Luisa Muraro, Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale e altri scritti, cit., p. 53.

10 Caspoggio is a village situated in the Alps, close to Sondrio, in Northern Italy. In the Yellow Catalogue, the authors refer to a meeting organized there in a mountain retreat in October 1980. There, they have long discussions at night about how to work within the collective, and on this occasion the central theme of the mother emerges. It is only some months later, in Milan, that they return to such topics and think about working collectively on some writers that they will elect as “mothers.” Caspoggio is therefore a central moment in the history of the Collective and of the Yellow Catalogue.

11 Yellow Catalogue, p. 11.

12 The word is also underlined in the Italian original.

13 On rhetoric and its capacity to connect the “materiality” of the terms with the “abstraction” of the concepts, see Luisa Muraro, Maglia o uncinetto. Racconto linguistico-politico sulla inimicizia tra metafora e metonimia (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2004).

14 As per Marcel Proust’s remark in Jean Santeuil (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). If we analyze literature as a mere ornamentation of society, we risk using it improperly, i.e. merely for utilitarian purposes.

15 As it is made abundantly clear by the Manifesto di rivolta femminile published by a Collective born in Rome (1970). The Manifesto has been translated into English and can be accessed online: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/feminism/manifesto.pdf.

16 Adriana Cavarero, Il pensiero femminista. Un approccio teoretico, in Le filosofie femministe (Mondadori, 1999), 78.

17 As well as New York Radical Women, and the New York Radical Feminists. Among the main figures in the US, Anne Koedt.

18 Freedom has been considered as a supreme value by many thinkers, especially during the XX century: Agnes Heller, Freiheit ist für mich der höchste Wert, in “Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie,” 4, 2013, pp. 593–603.

19 In the Manifesto, the attention towards language and its uses was made clear – the leaflet circulated starting from 1970 in Rome and was made by a group founded by Carla Lonzi with painted Carla Accardi and activist Elvira Banotti (“man has interpreted woman according to an image of femininity which is his own invention… Man has always spoken in the name of the human race… we consider history incomplete because it was written, always, without regarding woman as an active subject of it”).

20 Annie Ernaux and Pierre Bras, La littérature, c’est la mise en forme d’un désir. Entretien avec Annie Ernaux réalisé par Pierre Bras, in LittéRATURES & Sciences sociales en quête du réel, 148–149 (2017), 93–115.

21 Lonzi was one of the authors of the aforementioned Manifesto di rivolta femminile, which includes the remark mentioned above: “We wish to rise to be equal to an answerless universe.”

22 The practice was also widespread in the US and France around the same time (Mouvement liberation des femmes, Politique et psychoanalyse). In Italy it was first taken up by Rivolta femminile. The task of this practice is to unveil the unbalanced relationships between women and men, women and society, mothers and daughters.

23 See Teresa De Lauretis, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Among the first to join the bookstore was a group of artists – Accardi, Mirella Bentivoglio, Valentina Berardinone, Tomaso Binga, Nilde Carabba, Dadamaino, Amalia Del Ponte, Grazia Varisco and Nanda Vigo – who donated their work, introduced by the art critic Lea Vergine. The first books to fill the shelves were retrieved from the unsold stock of publishing houses unwilling or unable to promote female writers.

24 The work on the Yellow Catalogue stems from “a need to search for a feminine symbolic,” a need that also generated the Green Catalogue (Catalogo Verde, Catalogo di testi di teoria e pratica politica, 1978) and a pamphlet entitled A zig zag. Scritti non scritti.

25 The bookstore tapped into a new spirit of radical feminist publishing in Italy. Rivolta Femminile printed a regular series of ‘green books’ edited (and often written) by Carla Lonzi, including the patriarchy-smashing Let’s Spit on Hegel (1970) and The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman (1971), which reflected on psychoanalysis and sexual revolution. 

26 The Bookstore had its own economic model: the space (with a large shopfront overlooking the street) was obtained for a low rent granted by the municipality of Milan. The work of all the members was (and still is) voluntary and arranged in half-day shifts in order to avoid hierarchies and class-based divisions of labor.

27 Ibidem, 127–128.

28 Ibidem, 128.

29 Ibidem.

30 The groups who practiced autocoscienza (consciousness-raising, apractice also widely present in American and French collectives) during the early 1970s were also the first to organize self-help associations and independent pro-choice clinics. Divorce was legalized in Italy in 1970, after hundreds of demonstrations. Four years later, a referendum to recriminalize it was unsuccessful. Reforms – especially on fundamental rights and family law (divorce, abortion) – took place in Italy basically during the same years (1975–1978).

31 Luisa Muraro, Tre lezioni sulla differenza sessuale e altri scritti, cit. p. 51.

32 The prefix ‘katà’ is usually opposed to ‘anà’ (indicating a movement upwards) and indicates a descent into a dimension (katabasis, usually towards the underworld). The katalogon is thus a very interesting object because it classifies a variety of items according to one or more criteria. I want to underline that the choice of the term by the authors of the Catalogue is quite original – they could have written a collective essay or edited a volume. But the Catalogue contains diverse genres and styles: commentary, diary, essays. And yet the variety does have its consistency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Condello

Angela Condello is Tenure-track Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy (Rtd B) in the Law Department, University of Messina. She held a Jean Monnet Module on human rights and critical legal thinking within the European legal culture (2017–2020) at the University of Torino.

Silvia Niccolai

Silvia Niccolai is Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Cagliari, Italy.