A Woman Persists: A Legacy of Italian Feminist Awakenings maps out a genealogy of writing by Italian women that all correspond in some way to a narrative of female awakening as established in Sibilla Aleramo’s 1906 text, Una donna.

Italian, media, and women’s studies expert Sole Anatrone incorporates works from the beginning of the twentieth century, through fascism, the student and worker movements of the late sixties, followed by second-wave feminism in the seventies and eighties, and the debates over migration and race in the first decades of the new millennium. Anatrone analyses a wide selection of textual materials including autobiographical and fictional novels, theatrical plays, historiographical texts, and social media hashtags. These are brought together through a critical multidisciplinary lens that considers the interconnected relationship between national and gendered identities, and between narrative expression and feminist praxis. By putting texts like Alba De Cespedes’s Dalla parte di lei in dialogue with Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s Una donna sola, and Espérance Hakuzwimana Ripanti’s E poi basta! Manifesto di una donna nera italiana, this book constructs an alternative archive that draws heavily on the work of feminist literary scholars and queer theorists to show the way Italian identity is both unchanging and always contested.

A Woman Persists demonstrates that Italian feminist consciousness, like Italian national identity, is textually constructed and depends on the repeated practice of textual self-expression.

A Woman Persists

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