Maria, Medea e le altre: i volti ambivalenti della madre. Feminist re-articulations of the representation of maternity in the 20th century Italy.

This research project investigates the connections between visual culture and feminist movements through representations of maternity made by women. The thesis considers a period that runs from the foundation of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane, in 1903, to the year following the 1981 referendums on the Law 194, which disciplines the modalities of access to abortion. Over this period, the representation of maternity was a battlefield where different models of womanhood fought each other. The specific focus of the thesis is not on images made by women qua women, but rather on images that activists, understood as women involved with feminist movements in the 20th century, produced and disseminated. Hence, the research aims at exploring which role images played in the process of redefinition of maternity as a specifically female experience to be explored on the level of self-representations and transformation. The thesis includes four chapters, each one corresponding to a different historical period: the beginning of the century, the Fascist period, the post-war period and the ‘long 1970s’ (1968- 1983). Speaking of feminism throughout such a long time span is to embrace a richness and diversity of dissent, including historical moments during which the feminist movement was weaker or non-existent. In these instances, the focus has been widened in order to research spaces of women organization. The question whether these could be considered truly autonomous is one of the issues that this research addresses. In conclusion, the thesis aims at bringing forth continuities and discontinuities, repetition and difference of Italian feminist visual culture in the 20th century.