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Feminism in Europe

By Elizabeth Pond

Women in Europe are alive and well-and like their American sisters have been turning from wiles to assertion during the past decade to claim equal status with men. But the feminist movement is no coherent whole in Europe. It varies widely, in keeping with national character and traditions.

In Sweden, feminism-like every other social experiment has gone the furthest. In orderly, pragmatic England the women's movement hardly exists in the sense of any organized campaign; instead, it's a matter of laws on the one hand and isolated victories (and defeats) by individual women on the other.

In France, feminism has been begrudged entry into the mainstream. In West Germany, feminism is stil! made the brunt of jokes.

So far, so predictable. But there's one surprise: Italy. In this nation with its double weight of Latin macho reinforced by the resolutely male Roman Catholic Church, the rise of a feminist movement in the 1970's shocked almost everyone.

Italy

"It's the biggest social change in Italy in the past 10 years," asserts one foreigner, a woman.

"It doesn't go anywhere. It's just upper middle class, with a lot of radical chic," disagrees another.

"In these latest years it has spread enormously; it's probably even too big," comments a longtime Italian feminist.

"The feminist movement?" ask a half dozen young Italian women in the Rome YWCA uncomprehendingly. They refer a questioner to the Woman's House on the Via del Governo Vecchio as if it were some foreign embassy.

It's hard to find a consensus on the women's movement here. Virtually everyone does agree, however, that it began a decade ago with the campaign for a new divorce law in Italy. Fledgling feminists, including many political radicals to the left of the Italian Communist Party, and some Fulbright scholarship returnees from feminist-conscious America, pressed for a change in the country's maledominated society. They drafted a law giving Italian women equal rights with men in getting divorce for the first time in history.

The feminists shamed the well-organized wing of the Communist Party (and the smaller, less important Socialist Party) into supporting them. And they persuaded the perennially dominant and traditionminded Christian Democrats to vote for the divorce law on the condition that a popular referendum be held after passage. The firm expectation was that the conservative Italians would then defeat the divorce law in this first use of the referendum in postwar Italy.

The firm expectation was wrong. The Christian Democrats were shocked and the feminists astounded by the lopsided 60 percent of the electorate that approved the law in 1974. Village women in oldfashioned southern Italy, it turned out, wanted the right to get divorced-or at least to legalize five-yearold de facto separations, as the cautious new law authorized-just as much as their middle-class urban sisters in Rome and Milan. So did the poor women in Rome's outlying slums, which produced one of the heaviest turnouts for the vote.

The explanation of this surprising support for divorce offered by Alma Sabatini, one of the early feminist leaders, is simple: "The less subtle male superiority is, the clearer it is. Consciousness-raising among women is easier, once it gets started. They see things more clearly for themselves. I think in other societies it's more concealed."

Concurring in this judgment, one foreign reporter cites examples of illiterate peasant women who have

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developed a strong feminist outlook after brutal beatings by their husbands.

Whatever the process of "consciousness-raising," its momentum carried through to the second big feminist issue, abortion. Despite the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Italy passed a law in 1978 that, on paper at least, legalized abortion. As with the divorce law, this seemed to be a case of legalizing existing practice. Even the most conservative estimates calculate one abortion for every live birth in Italy.

Looking back on the 1970's, Rome University sociologist Franco Ferrarotti sees the following feminist gains: Beyond divorce and abortion, Italian women have attained legal equality in employment, a fair share in family decisions, and nondiscrimination for illegitimate children. The woman is no longer the sole guilty party in cases of adultery. The sociologist points out that "crimes of passion" in which a man kills a wife or sister who has had sexual relations out of wedlock are now fully punishable as murder and are not to be dismissed with a light prison sentence.

Furthermore, women have gained unprecedented access to higher education in the past decade. Half of today's university students are women. Women have also entered professional fields that formerly were closed to them. To be sure, their numbers are still tiny in news media and law offices. Those who become doctors tend to get channeled to specialties such as gynecology. Those who move into university teaching tend to get channeled to "feminine" subjects such as pedagogy or family sociology. But the numbers are increasing.

In addition, in the past decade more husbands have begun to help push the baby carriages.

Daniela Colombo, a former teacher and the current rotating chief editor of the feminist magazine

Effe, agrees that women have made legal gains. She calls the Italian abortion law one of the best in Europe, and she describes Italy's cqual pay, nondiscrimination, maternity leave, and child day center laws as advances. She points out that Italian women did not have to fight for an equal rights amendment as American women are doing because equality is already guaranteed to women in the Italian Constitution.

The unfortunate thing, however, is that "laws are not observed in this country-not just laws about women but laws as a whole," says the Effe editor. Despite flowery guarantees, women have suffered much more than men from the recession of the past five years, from unemployment, from the housing

shortage, she says. Compulsory maternity benefits now mean that many companies avoid hiring young women altogether. Many doctors and hospitals refuse to perform legal abortions. Construction of childcare centers has come to a halt for lack of money.

At the no-men-allowed Casa della Donna on the Via del Governo Vecchio, some women have therefore taken it into their own hands to try to im-, prove women's lot. In the formerly empty Roman palazzo that they have been squatting in for the past three years (the Rome government, a partial owner of the building, no longer tries to evict them), they provide legal and psychological help for abused women and counseling on contraception and abortion.

The women of Casa della Donna also sponsor discussion groups among housewives, mothers, photographers, Alitalia stewardesses, craftswomen and others. The rundown but roomy palazzo, currently being whitewashed and renovated by volunteers, also has space for theatre performances and for such activities as violin and guitar lessons.

By far the main current concern of the house is violence against women, including rape and wife beating. The feminist focus on this issue has already brought much hidden family violence into the open, and the hope is that this increased public awareness of the problem will be the first step in diminishing it. Eventually the casa may become a home for battered women and children who need a temporary place to stay.

The Italian feminists have made enormous headway in a notoriously male chauvinist society. They have experienced enormous disappointments-including a stinging backlash from some men. The feminists now are at the uncomfortable stage where they have aroused a lot of feminine expectations, but have not yet roused much masculine willingness to meet these expectations.

It's a question of attitudes and education, Daniela Colombo. maintains. "The education of girls has changed radically in the past decade," she explains, while the education of boys has changed hardly at all."Girls. now go to school. They are taught that they should be independent, have a job, be brave and courageous. But the boys haven't changed. They are afraid of being feminized." It is this attitude that Effe editor Colombo sees as the next challenge of the Italian women's movement.

France

In France, the biggest current issue for feminists is abortion. Five years ago abortion became legal during the first ten weeks of pregnancy. Many women who want to terminate pregnancies, however, still can't find a doctor who will. handle their cases. Numerous French women therefore go to the Netherlands or England for abortions.

The existing, provisional law governing abortion comes up for review this month, and signs point to a fierce battle over it. Various women's groups want to eliminate the present roadblocks to abortion and also want to have abortions paid for by social security. The critics, on the other hand-with powerful backing from the longstanding Roman Catholic opposition to abortion-want to get rid of the law altogether.

In a way it's a rerun of the beginning of the feminist movement a decade ago when various groups coalesced to fight for legalized abortion and later for better care for rape victims.

Other issues have engaged small groups of feminists at different times. A survey in the spring of 1978 by F (the initial for "woman" in French) magazinc indicated that some 68 percent of the journal's readers feel content with their position, and 58 percent say they have not been handicapped as women in the work world. Yet 43 percent of those who work outside the home and have small children cannot find adequate care for their children.

F magazine's reporting also shows higher unemployment among women than among men-