september 2003
All Girl Line-Up
essay
Lives of the Artists #5
Spring 2003 – Chicks Issue
Edited & published by Elizabeth Pulie
[download full text pdf [48KB] or read below]
Italy has been spoken of as ‘the land that feminism forgot’. What the English speaking world knows as ‘International Women’s Day’ on the 8th of March, translates in the Bel Paese as ‘Festa della Donna’, which might translate back as something like ‘celebration of woman’. Note the lost collective and authoritative dimensions and you’ll come to appreciate the reality of a largely commercial appropriation that has more in common with the art of chivalry calendar dates of Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. Dragged out into a week-long occasion for men to buy specifically mass-marketed flowers and chocolates for the women in their lives. To all appearances, many Italian women find it a load of tokenistic rubbish. Younger women in particular aren’t falling for it, as a series of interviews with school students in the national newspaper La Repubblica for the event made clear; one saying simply that all she had to do was take a look around to see that no positions of authority in her society (read judges, lawyers, editors, politicians) were occupied by women. While comparatively this makes the role of women in public life in Australia look pretty progressive (though hardly as progressive as New Zealand), local indicators might otherwise be pointing some way towards ‘ a land that is forgetting feminism’. Continue Reading »