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 betweenvisual culture and feminist movements through representationsof maternity made by women. The thesis considers a period thatruns from the foundation of the Consiglio Nazionale delle DonneItaliane, in 1903, to the year following the 1981 referendums on theLaw 194, which disciplines the modalities of access to abortion.Over this period, the representation of maternity was a battlefieldwhere different models of womanhood fought each other.The specific focus of the thesis is not on images made bywomen qua women, but rather on images that activists, understoodas women involved with feminist movements in the 20th century,produced and disseminated. Hence, the research aims atexploring which role images played in the process of redefinitionof maternity as a specifically female experience to be explored onthe level of self-representations and transformation.The thesis includes four chapters, each one correspondingto a different historical period: the beginning of the century, theFascist period, the post-war period and the ‘long 1970s’ (1968-1983). Speaking of feminism throughout such a long time span isto embrace a richness and diversity of dissent, including historicalmoments during which the feminist movement was weaker ornon-existent. In these instances, the focus has been widened inorder to research spaces of women organization. The questionwhether these could be considered truly autonomous is one of theissues that this research addresses. In conclusion, the thesis aimsat bringing forth continuities and discontinuities, repetition anddifference of Italian feminist visual culture in the 20th century.