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Symposium: A QuarterlyJournal in Modern LiteraturesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vsym20

Generations: Women'sTradition and the Handingdown of HistorySilvia Evangelisti, Monica Martinat, FrancescaMedioli, Cristina Papa & Carla ToniniPublished online: 02 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Silvia Evangelisti, Monica Martinat, Francesca Medioli, CristinaPapa & Carla Tonini (1995) Generations: Women's Tradition and the Handing down ofHistory, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 49:2, 130-135, DOI:10.1080/00397709.1995.10733800

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00397709.1995.10733800

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SILVIA EVANGELISTI, MONICA MARTINAT, FRANCESCA MEDIOLI,CRISTINA PAPA, AND CARLA TONINI

GENERATIONS: WOMEN'S TRADITION AND THEHANDING DOWN OF HISTORY

THE TERM "GENERATIONS" implies two kinds of relationships. I Horizontally, itrefers to persons of more or less the same age; vertically, it refers to older andyounger members of a society. In both cases, defining a generation involvesthe processes of including and differentiation among the members; implicitly,it is a more or less discriminating choice of meaningful and characterizing ele­ments. Constructing generations is similar to constructing historical divisions,establishing where, how, and why to place a boundary between periods. Nodivision is definite or rigid, as its edges are blurred and arbitrarily set.

In this article, our aim will be to define the expression "generations of his­torians" realizing that our definition indicates neither a bond nor a relation­ship dependent on biological fact. Instead, this definition points to a stronglink both within the profession we have chosen and to our awareness of beingwomen historians of one age group that notes a relationship between itselfand women historians of other age groups. Because we are members of thesame group, gender, age and profession, we evaluate our identity as "youngwomen historians" rather than merely as undefined, neutral "historians."

The writers of this article were all born in the early 1960s and have allbeen directly involved in politics, feminism, and academia, important ele­ments in defining ourselves as a generation of women historians. From thevery beginning, our political experience has been marked by the retreat of thehistoric Left. We witnessed only the final stages of the successes and hopesof extraparliamentary politics. Although only some of us were directlyinvolved in the last phase of the 1977 movement.? we all directly lived col­lective events such as terrorism and Moro's kidnapping and murder(March-May 1978), as well as the dimming-if not total eclipse-of analternation of power between the Left and the Right (if eompromesso stori­eo). We benefited from the political victories, such as the right to divorce(1974) and abortion (1978), won by women of previous generations. Thesehad already become recognized rights that conditioned our private and pub­lic experiences.

During our professional training, most of us did not feel that women'spossibilities were either limited or in any way different from those of ourmale peers. For us our public success and civic emancipation were real andfeasible, something embodied by our mothers or their friends.

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Our experience of feminism was garnered almost exclusively throughintellectual channels rather than through any direct experience of real and evi­dent discriminatory forces working against us. During our student years andfor the period immediately following, feminism was changing: feminism inItaly was no longer a question of equality with the other sex but rather one ofdifference between men and women. As with the Left in general, here alsowas a crisis of values. We feel it necessary to point out the parallels betweenwhat happened "outside" the movement and what happened within it, amongwomen who were creating theory and policy. The so-called "theory and prac­tice of differentiation'? was founded on the acknowledgment of a variety ofrelationships between women, and this accompanied an acknowledgment thatfurther struggle for any Leftist ideal would not have been successful. Onemight note that many terms in codified feminist jargon have come from eco­nomics-"exchange," "money," "earnings," "value," "debt," for example­and political practice was built around this terminology.

Feminism in Italy had to face a basic theoretical question: what is thenature of the thinking, seeking, and inquiring being? The quest for an answerto this question lead to the articulation of the meaning of gender, which someof us feel has provided a fertile perspective for tackling both personal andpublic questions.

In recent theory, proposed by the generation of women that preceded ours,we found a point that concerns us as well. In fact, we found this discussionuseful to and in congruence with contemporary historiography and humani­ties, where it often showed up as an increase in contradictions. Thus we ques­tioned ourselves about the meaning of history and the difficulty of mediatingbetween the past and the present, a practice that is the keystone of our pro­fession. As we were becoming aware of the elaboration of the theory of thedifferences between males and females, we had to face the questions it raised(and is still raising) on both the individual and the social level, and on our gen­der-oriented observation of and participation in the world.

In our discussions prior to writing this paper, we found that we had manydeep differences, especially on the issue of "separate practice." Given the factmentioned ·in the preceding paragraph, some of us consider separate practiceabsolutely necessary, whereas others find it quite alien. In particular, thenotion of "genealogy" raised many questions." Some of us advocate theimportance of retrieving the memory of women's past thought as a basic andnecessary step. Working out women's genealogy does not involve the legit­imization of our freedom of speech; nonetheless, we assert the right to use theword because other women before us have given priority to history, politics,and law to the detriment of their own particular interests. Others of us, in par­ticular Francesca and Monica, find it difficult to understand the meaning ofthe quest and the working out of women's genealogy. If, on the one hand, it isboth positive and useful to acknowledge important women of the past and to

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propose an image of the past that takes their traditionally denied existence'sinto account, it may, on the other hand, be of questionable value to determinea genealogy that legitimates the female lineage of how we have become whatwe are, how we have come to our intellectual positions, and how we havemade our contributions. There is a risk of a forced delegitimizing traditionthat, ironically, resembles some traditional male processes of marginalizingwomen from history.

We feel we have already been legitimated by our mothers' generation. Weneed look no further for a generation that legitimates ours. Our reason for thisconviction undoubtedly lies in the fact that our mothers, often positive andemancipated, were or are hard to get along with and sometimes even unbear­able. As we pursued our common goal of self-constitution, some of us had totake on for ourselves the good personalities of our mothers, whereas otherssimply had to free themselves from maternal models.

All of us, however, acknowledge that the previous generation has passedon to us the freedom to choose a life style free of a certain kind of toil. There­fore, we deny neither the work done by other women nor its usefulness to us:their invention of Women's Studies, their making this history visible, and theirstruggle to create new thought. Nonetheless, we would like to ask ourselvesquestions as to the vertical relationship underlying the term, "generations."

Building a tradition involves the acknowledgment of relationships with thepast as well as with the future; it involves recognizing, simultaneously,dynamics of ascendance and descendance. This is clear when we listened topapers delivered by women teachers at a conference of the Women HistoriansSociety tSocieta Italiana delle Storiche) in Orvieto recently; they were oftenfull of anxiety and dilemmas about how to be "unneutral models" for theirfemale students." All of us share this problem when we recognize the exis­tence of different generations in the common space of our profession. We areforced, by this simultaneity, to ask ourselves questions such as: what kinds ofrelationships could arise among three generations of women historians asdetermined by the different relations that women of different ages have andhave had with politics and feminism?

We must also remember that, as far as schools and universities are con­cerned, we are in a very unusual position, given that few-if not none-s-of uswill be able to enter the ranks of the teaching faculty because of the particu­lar situation in Italy. A logical outcome of our training is that it places us in apotentially ambiguous position with regard to other women historians. Wecannot ignore this problem. We cannot simply define the generation gapaccording to whether women's cultural and political positions are generallyaccepted or not. If we were to do so, there would be an insurmountable debtof awareness between the generation to which we belong and the older one,which only the very youngest among us would have the opportunity to repay.Such a definition, moreover, would reduce itself to a reproposal of the stock

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notion of a change of generations dependent on woman's changing role: fromdaughter to mother. This would cut out any possibility of recognizing the col­lective, rather than the individual, differences that mark the different genera­tions, from different political experiences, different experiences of feminism,and extremely different conditions of work. This is one of the risks found inthe "practice of entrustment,"? as it has been experienced by some groups andhighly criticized by others. Such criticism derives from the fact that entrust­ment implies an asymmetry between the aware woman and the unawarewoman without acknowledging that consciousness is manifold and both sex­ually and historically conditioned. From this perspective, being a member ofa generation is fundamental and inevitable, and not only for young women,because it is a parameter that determines placement in a specific place in andrelation to the world at large.

The theory of sexual difference had the epistemological merit of allowingus to conceive an interpretation of the world as a place where varying behav­iors, actions, and events coexist with differing value scales and differing rea­sonings. Today, however, the problem lies in creating an overall picture thattakes into account and reflects all differences and pluralities without leadingto an unicum where there is no longer any place for distinctions, but a picturethat still maintains the capacity to draw some general conclusions. This is bestarticulated in the argumentation in Carol Gilligan's work, InA Different Voice,where the author states the necessity of founding a more extensive theory ofpsychological development that includes, instead of excludes, the differencescoming from the "female voices." In other words, following Gilligan, thisinclusion becomes indispensable not only for the correct explanation offemale development, but also for understanding the characteristics and theexperiences of both men and women that lead to an adult and mature concep­tuality.

The possibility of unifying, based on their differences, two different worldsspares us from having to ask difficult questions. Skepticism-or evennihilism-may reappear nonetheless. It may in fact gush forth as the exces­sive subjectivity of any seeking scholar. In our profession, this tends to coin­cide with arenunciation of a search for the truth, and this takes us far beyondthe need to reflect on the limits of knowledge, knowability and history.

In our opinion, the Women Historians Society should be a place where it ispossible to arrive at political and cultural strategies based on an awareness andthe acknowledgment of individual and generational differences. It should be aplace where strictly traditional academic views are disregarded. We must keepin mind that not all of the members of S.LS. reached women's studies througha feminist experience. At the Orvieto symposium, where we reflected on theactive role of women, particularly in the handing down of history, we askedeach other, for instance, why such work (i.e. the analysis of the particular Ital­ian feminist movement of the seventies) was not carried on there. To us this is

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not simply an interesting question to study from a historical point of view butalso an urgent theoretical issue. In fact, those women historians who comefrom a "historic" feminist experience make use of a language, or rather a jar­gon, that is often cryptic, one alien to us because it implies the experiencelived by other women who are not like us; thus its very language ensures thatit remains unsharable.

Perhaps transmission, the handing down, begins with the separation ofexperience from language, or perhaps, on the contrary, it begins by bondingpresent and future experience.

Translated by Elisabetta Vacca, Thomas Kruse, and Francesca Medioli

1. This paper is the result of many conversations begun at the Symposium in Orvieto in April,1992, organized by the Societa Italiana delle Storiche [Italian association of women historians].It is also the expression of our individual thoughts. Along with points we hold in common, thereare also many differing opinions and experiences among us; this text only partially shows our dif­ferences.

We would like to thank Paola Di Cori, of the University of Urbino, who inspired us to writethis paper and published it in its Italian edition (see Evangelisti, et al., "Generazioni," in S.I.S.,Generazioni. Transmissione delle storie e tradizione delle donne (Turin: Rosenberge Sellier,1993, 157-18\). We also thank Beverly Allen of Syracuse University for her kind invitation topublish the English translation of our contribution.

2. The 1977 Movement (February-November) was a significant episode in Italian experienceand a kind of reappearance of the international movement of 1968. Starting up first within uni­versity communities, particularly in Rome and Bologna, its adherents included not only studentsand some marginal workers' groups but also people who were called l'altra classe [the otherclass]: emarginated persons from metropolitan centers throughout Italy. The aims of the move­ment were to relieve social discomfort. Its thinkers theorized both creativity and violence. On onehand, there were the indiani metropolitani [metropolitan indians], with their painted faces andtheir ironic, transgressive behavior. On the other, there was the Autonomia organization, whichflirted with terrorism and the Red Brigades. The movement ended quickly, brought to a close withthe riflusso, or generalized lack of interest in politics and activism that came to characterize Ital­ian youth.

3. The idea of difference is based on a material outcome, that of the body, and of the cominginto consciousness of the body as a particularity. In the early 1970s, Carla Lonzi critiqued thethen-current feminist approach that saw women's emancipation depending on a homologizationwith men. According to the thought of difference, belonging to a sex determines one's relationwith the world, and society itself must take this sexual division into account in all its social, eco­nomic and political dealings.

4. Separatism, derived partly from the practice of consciousness raising, was well establishedin Italy during the mid-1970s. The political impact of feminism in Italy is recognizeable in thefact that, in the early 1980s, the major opposition party, the Italian Communist Party, set up itsown "women's commission" to work for women's rights and interests and, in general, an eman­cipatory politics. Since a parallel commission structure had developed within the party, however,this phase came to an end when internal organs were disbanded in the early 1990s.

5. The allusion here is to the work of the French feminist, Luce Irigary, which was taken upin Italy by Luisa Muraro. According to this line of thinking, it is possible and acceptable to rebuilddescendance from a female line rather than from a male one. The aim of such a practice is, on theone hand, to give a positive value to one's own sex and, on the other, to underline the privilegedrelations that exist between mother and daughter, even though all persons are born from women.

6. The Orvieto Symposium was organized by the Didactic Commission of the S.I.S., whichis formed almost entirely by primary and secondary schoolteachers. This reflects the common

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lack of interest among Italian university professors towards students. The S.I.S., born in February1989, is a legal entity that at present counts about 300 members from both academic and nonaca­demic milieux. Three times a year, it publishes a review, Agenda, that reports the association'sactivities, information about history symposiums, seminars, editorial publications, and debatessuch as "Women's Studies And The Italian University." The Women Historians Association hasits central office at Corso di Porta Nuova 32, Milan, 20121, Italy.

7. The "practice of entrustment" [pratica dell'affidamento] was the theoretical product of thefeminist group at the Women's Bookstore in Milan during the early 1980s. It started from thepremise that the most significant relationship is that between mother and daughter, and that thisrelationship gave a positive value to female authority in opposition to male power. Because ofthestrong bond implicit in the mother-daughter relationship, the duplication of such a relationshipbetween two adult women was desirable, with one woman assuming the maternal role and theother, that of the daughter. The assignment of roles depended on external values, including class,age, and social entitlement. This meant that one of the women entrusted herself to the other andtook on her point of view. This "practice" was strongly criticized within the feminist movement.

WORKS CITED

Gilligan, Carol. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Boston:Harvard UP, 1982.

Libreria delle Donne di Milano. Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della liberta fern­minile nell'idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1990.(Translated in English as Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Bloom­ington, Indiana UP, 1990).

Martini, Manuela, Francesca Medioli, Raffaella Sarti, and Carla Tonini. "Generazioni: Qualchenuovo spunto di riflessione." Agenda, no. 9, 1993,8-20.

Muraro, Luisa. L'ordine simbolico della madre. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981.Societa Italiana delle Storiche. Generazioni: Transmissione della storia e tradizione delle donne.

Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1993.

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