Noi non abbiamo una storia nostra: idee e forme di lotta delle donne socialiste e comuniste, 1910-1925

This thesis examines the ideas, practices, and forms of organisation developed by socialist and communist women in Italy between 1910 and 1925. It focuses on two groups of activists: the Milanese socialist women’s group, which founded "La Difesa delle Lavoratrici" in 1912, and the group of communist women in Turin, who first edited the women’s column "La Tribuna delle donne" in "L’Ordine Nuovo" and later established "Compagna. Organo del Partito Comunista d’Italia per la propaganda fra le donne" in 1922. Through these two case studies, the thesis explores how women activists mediated between the needs of women, especially working-class women, and the political cultures of socialism and communism. It shows how individual trajectories, political networks, public-speaking and journalistic skills, and propaganda work converged in collective experiences that generated visibility, authority, and a specifically female political space within predominantly male parties. The group therefore serves as the main level of analysis, not as a homogeneous entity, but as a site of mutual recognition, coordination, and political production. The thesis first reconstructs the emergence of the Milanese socialist women’s group within the broader context of early Italian feminism, the labour movement, and the debates on the “woman question” within the Second International. It analyses the role of "La Difesa delle Lavoratrici" in developing and circulating an interpretation of women’s condition based on the intersection of sex, labour, and class. Embedded in national and international networks, these activists were not merely disseminators of ideas formulated elsewhere: they translated, reworked, and actively produced political ideas, practices, and languages of their own. The First World War is examined as a moment of rupture, politicisation, and intergenerational transmission. Socialist anti-war propaganda, state repression, and women’s protests against the conflict, especially those of 1916–1917 and the Turin uprising of August 1917, contributed to the political formation of younger women who later joined the communist movement. The thesis then turns to the formation of the Turin communist women’s group and to the ways in which its members redefined the woman question in light of the October Revolution, the Soviet experience, and the political line of the Third International. "La Tribuna delle donne" and later "Compagna" functioned both as instruments for the political education, organisation, and recruitment of working women and as spaces in which a communist understanding of women’s emancipation was developed. This vision linked women’s liberation to the overthrow of the capitalist order and the construction of a new society, until fascist repression forced the movement underground. Based primarily on the analysis of women’s political newspapers – "La Difesa delle Lavoratrici", the column "La Tribuna delle donne," and "Compagna" – and supplemented by personal and party archives, files from the Casellario politico centrale, autobiographical writings, and oral testimonies, the study adopts an approach situated between women’s prosopography and collective biography. It remains attentive to the silences, biases, and fragmentation of the surviving sources. The thesis identifies a discontinuous genealogy linking socialist and communist women: not a linear succession, but a partial circulation of themes, practices, and political languages. It argues that the groups, newspapers, and networks examined here functioned as laboratories in which women activists developed a class-based female political subjectivity and contributed fully to the labour movement’s broader project of social transformation.