L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, MARCH 8, 2018 www.italoamericano.org 6 FRANCESCA BEZZONE I talian celebrations for Inter- national Women's Day are, usually, rather cliché: jour- nalists and TV hosts become experts of women history and sociology, bringing out their customary speeches for the occa- sion, only to forget it all the fol- lowing day, when they focus once again on this or that starlet's sur- gically enhanced décolleté, or introducing with nonchalance scantily clad dancers on prime time TV. On the morning of the 8th of March, women all over the coun- try wake up feeling, all of a sud- den, the urge to delve into the depths of an ancestral sisterhood they had probably forgotten all about since the previous year: it's time to bunch up and hit the town, get tipsy and stick 5 euro notes in some random male strip- per's thong, all in name of femi- nism. Alas, these scenes are not peculiar to Italy only. They are mirror to the commercialisation, marketing and vulgarisation of a day originally conceived to cele- brate women's struggle to reach equality. To be honest, as in the case of Father's Day, Mother's Day and all the likes, I do wonder how right really is to have dedi- cated days for people or achieve- ments we should remember every hour, every day, every year. A pretty thorny matter, if you ask me, so let's leave it aside. International Women's Day, then: we have it in Italy, as we have it in the US and I really think we all celebrate it the same way. I am not sure you have the habit to gift mimosa flowers to your sisters, mothers and wives, but I'm pretty sure that, if it's not them, it's some other pretty, fra- grant Spring flower. In the US, however, there is more than one day to think about women and their achievements, there is whole month. March has been, since 1987, Women History Month, the time of the year when we should all stop and focus on what it means being a woman and what it meant throughout history. If you ask me, this is certainly a much more significant initiative than a 24-hour-long surge of often misguided interest in women's struggles, and I wish Italy had something like this, too. Of course, I could shell words as peas off their pod about the great female figures in modern and contemporary history who became symbols of Italian wom- anhood, but I wouldn't say any- thing you don't know: let's cele- brate all the Montalcinis, Cristoforettis and Lorens of the country, but let's not linger on them, not today. If you allow me, I'd like to borrow the next minute or two to tell you about the other women of Italy, those who haven't made it on history books by name, but built the country nevertheless, through their daily struggles, deci- sions and resilience. I think about the women of World War Two, who found themselves alone, husbands and brothers sent to the front. Some- times with fields and animals to tend to, sometimes with their hus- band's businesses to run, always with the duty to feed a family with nothing and hide the fear and terror of loosing their beloved from the eyes of their children. Women who lost it all when they were little more than teenagers, alone with children and an MIA husband who would never return from the Eastern Front, but whom they were to wait for until old age, the door of their apartment always unlocked for him. Women who, on that 2nd of June 1946, put on their best shoes and Spring coat to go down the local Elementary School and vote for the first in their lives, to choose whether our country was to become a Republic or remain a Monarchy, to decide who was to govern Italy democratically after more than 20 years of dictator- ship. Many of these women had barely known democracy, all of them had vividly in mind the hor- ror of the war, and knew what praying while feeling hunger pangs under daily bombings meant. They made history, each and every one of them, in a way no other woman before and after them managed to do, and they did so with the joy, composure and strength typical of their genera- tion. Women upon whose shoulders and sturdy legs the Italian econo- my thrived, often trampling on their rights and dignity. Le Mon- dine, the women of the rice fields of Northern Piedmont, who would travel from Veneto, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna to work in strenuous conditions for 15 hours a day, under the sun, their legs into the water, perennially pestered by insects biting their faces. Most of them barely went to school, but oh did they fight to get better working conditions and some more lire to better support their families back home. And then, our mothers, who got full time jobs straight after graduation, in male dominated fields: women who, for decades, were the only "she" in their office, who juggled to perfection a family and their career. Because a career they were to have, thanks to their hard work, intelligence and strength, eventually opening up the way for other women to get jobs like theirs, to get their desks in those once male-only offices. Simple women, just like many others in Italy and, indeed many also in the US and the rest of the world, who silently, with dignity, kindness and immense, inconceiv- able strength allowed us today to enjoy more freedom and more equality. It's about them we should think this month, because we, women of today's Italy, are their children and grandchildren. We enjoyed their company, we were nurtured by their love, we learned how to stand straight and proud by looking at them. They, too, made the history of women in Italy. Le Mondine: they, too, should be seen as a symbol of Italian women's strength and perseverance Women History Month: let's not forget the real face and heart of Italian women LA VITA ITALIANA TRADITIONS HISTORY CULTURE

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