From anti-fascism to the story of revolutionary passions: the ambiguous feminism of Maria Antonieta Macciocchi (1922-2007)

Abstract

Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, who sought to embody the figure of the committed intellectual, undertakes an action in three ways: an account of everyday life with all its minor details and intensity, commentaries on the events of cultural world and political history of the major world transformations with the advent of the parliamentary Europe and new communist ideologies. The emergence of radical movements and feminism in the 1970’s allowed this figure of postwar Italian communism to access the critical modernity permeated by a philosophical nomadism. She fought in every battle of her time. In Macciocchi’s eclecticism there is a willingness to invent, after Simone de Beauvoir, a new archetype of intellectual woman which was long lacking in the West.