Derecho universal a la maternidad

: The idea of a universal right to motherhood is the result of the reflections carried out within the Italian feminist collective Diversamente Occupate (Differently employed), who started an analysis about motherhood. ‘Motherhood’ is here to be intended not just as being mothers but, in a broader sense, as a time out of the boundaries of production: a time for regeneration, for creativity, for politics. This paper aims to contribute to the large debate about changes in the labor market in Italy and in Europe. It is a political proposal which tries to act within the interstices of the labor market to basically refuse its organization, which is marked by fragmentation of work places, times and conditions and by the increasingly use of information technologies. As a political posture, it also refuses the common narrative around labor market, that is, the work-at-all-cost and the rhetoric of self-employment, which aims to compensate the inadequacy of a dismantled welfare.

Journal of Romance Studies, 2015

Trends and Rights' and held on 26 October 2012, explored, starting from literary texts, the interface of social, economic and political forces that have affected women's access to the labour market and experience of motherhood in Europe. Regrettably, it has not been possible to keep the cross-cultural, European focus of the original workshop. The Special Issue deals solely with the Italian case. In narrowing down the scope of the Issue, we have nevertheless kept faith with the ideas that animated the Network: first of all, the belief that only by adopting an interdisciplinary approach can we truly advance our understanding of the situation of mothers in today's societies, initiate change in current attitudes to motherhood, and work towards improving policies and provisions which will facilitate mothering; secondly, the vital role of literature, within this interdisciplinary approach, in the attainment of these goals. Literature can accomplish two things: first, it has the power to bring real-life situations to the attention of a wide public who would otherwise either have no experience of them or feel unmotivated to engage with them; secondly, in being able to delve deeply into

2015

Since the 80’s in Italy there has been a debate on job insecurity and on how women live this work condition. Some studies have dealt with the feminization of work to indicate the extension to men of working conditions generally reserved to women – such as precarious, underpaid and unprotected jobs –, but also the request that men should have skills generally associated with women, i.e., capacity of relationship, care, and empathy. The feminization of work “means not only the quantitative expansion of women on the labor

Journal of Romance Studies, 2015

This article deals with the changing relationship between work and motherhood during the first pregnancy among a group of twenty-one highly educated women living in Turin (Northern Italy), who were interviewed during the months before childbirth with their male partners, in 2010-2012. It aims to illustrate the tensions between the dominant ideas and ideals of motherhood (the 'intensive mothering' model) and the pressing demands of the changing labour market. The data shows that ideas, plans and decisions concerning childcare arrangements are highly gendered, being influenced by the expectations of partners, employers and colleagues and by a work culture which is not family friendly. Within this Italian social and political context, a mother-to-be faces a dilemma which is perceived as a private issue that concerns only herself. The new transition to parenthood forces women to redefine their identity and career in a highly gendered manner.

etd.ceu.hu

To grasp the meaning of fertility politics in an economic context, this research focuses on the shift to a postfordist mode of production through the analysis of the technologies enacted by biopower.

Based on interviews and social movement primary sources, this article critically analyzes the contributions of that current of Italian feminism which, while maintaining its distance, has both influenced and been influenced by the evolution from the neo-Marxist workerist movements of the 1960s to today’s global autonomist movements. Through the writings of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and other academics, and the activism of New Left-related feminists movements such as Lotta Feminista, one of the first transnational feminist movements, Wages for Housework, began to network in North America and Western Europe from the mid 1970s. In their campaign against sexual violence within the working class family as a disciplinary measure used by men to force unwaged housework from women, and their demands for waged housework, sex work and other forms of unwaged reproductive labour as part of an overall demand for a guaranteed social salary, these theoretician-activists have made links with grassroots, autonomous movements among mainly non-unionised women workers. They have critiqued the limits of both the liberal-feminist discourse on participation in the labour market as the prerequisite for equal opportunities, and the dependence of much socialist-feminist discourse on the centrality of the welfare state for female emancipation.

First published in 1983, Lise Vogel’s study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, has received renewed attention since its republication last year. Vogel makes a compelling argument that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate instances of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. I argue that Vogel’s work finds a complement in earlier analyses written by the Italian autonomist feminists, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. However, Vogel’s notion of value creation maintains a more traditional perspective. While she subscribes to Louis Althusser’s epistemological concepts, the Italians follow a reformulation according to the viewpoint of the worker’s experience and the notion of the “social factory”, advocated by Mario Tronti. While autonomist feminism and social reproduction theory share a commitment to understanding reproductive labor – including housework and care labor – as indispensable elements of the mode of production, they also depart from one another on questions of interpretation and practice, particularly regarding the application of the wage relation to domestic labor.

2006

Stato & Mercato, 2022

Changes in the family-work gendered arrangements occurred in all developed countries during the past forty years. They involve the changing balance between care needing and the availability of potential carers, on the one hand, changes in labour market opportunities and constraints on the other hand. Italy, within the EU, is the only country, together with Greece, not only with the lowest women’s employment rate but also with the largest gender gap. This is the result of the complex intertwining of the gender division of labour within the family, characteristics of the labour demand, which is itself structured by expectations concerning gender and age and welfare arrangements. This article focuses on changes in Italian work-family system and the role of welfare state, looking at those policies that directly or indirectly interfere with the work-family balance and its gendered dimensions. Comparing Italy with Continental countries, such as Germany as well as with a “familialist countries” such as, Spain, this article concludes that Italy is (still) characterized by a lower degree of de-familialization of care, with respect to both childcare and long term care and by a lower investment in family policies in general and in work-family policies in particular aimed at supporting women’s employment and at de-gendering family caregiving. Nevertheless, this article shows that four family policy paradigmatic shifts can be dectected, which suggest that the policy landscape in Italy is no longer “totally frozen”. The pandemic crisis, it is argued in the article, while worsening the already insufficient work-family conciliation policies and mothers’ labor force participation, also made them visible as an equity and policy issue, which entered partially in the political agenda.