Donne contro la guerra: le manifestazioni per la pace

Abstract

This contribution intends to analyse the period of the Great War by focusing on the pacifist demonstrations that multiplied throughout Italy and had their most remarkable development in the winter of 1916-1917 and their peak in the summer of 1917 with the Turin Riots. Attention is also drawn to the socio-economic conditions that led to the development and proliferation of these phenomena without losing sight of one of the most interesting features that characterised them: the female matrix that more often than not decreed their birth and development. We reflect, therefore, on the role played by the female figure in those events, a figure who, thanks to the matu- ration of a renewed sense of citizenship and the awareness of her own rights, emancipated herself from the role of mere subordinate in the family nucleus to find the strength to take on not only the duties that the wartime situation imposed, but also the struggles that the affirmation of her own rights required.