The Italians (23 page)

The Cold War years also saw improvements in the legal status of Italian women. But they were limited. In 1950, employers were forbidden from sacking mothers in the first twelve months of their first child’s life, and in 1963 they were banned from dismissing women on the grounds of their getting married. Arguably more important was the admission for the first time in Italy’s history of large numbers of girls to secondary education, following the introduction in 1962 of compulsory schooling to the age of fourteen.

More ambitious reforms had to wait until after the 1968 student revolts and the social earthquake they detonated throughout Europe. One of the effects was to generate an exceptionally vigorous feminist movement in Italy. Initially, campaigners for women’s rights identified themselves closely with the New Left. But they soon discovered that a lot of young male revolutionary Socialists were as
maschilista
^*
as their fathers and grandfathers. Many of Italy’s feminists began to form a view that Marxism and its philosophical underpinnings were, if not irrelevant, then certainly inadequate to the realization of their aims. As early as 1970, the
Manifesto di rivolta femminile
was proclaiming, “We question Socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The same year, one of the authors of the
Manifesto,
Carla Lonzi, published a pamphlet titled
Sputiamo su Hegel
(“We Spit on Hegel”).

Looking at the Italy of today, it is hard to credit that this is the same country that once gave rise to such a pugnacious brand of feminism. The public debate on gender and language that took place years ago in other societies has scarcely begun in Italy. Married Italian women have always kept their surnames, it is true. But most of the words for jobs or professions that carry with them power and authority still exist only in the masculine. A woman lawyer, who would be an
abogada
in Spain, for example, remains an
avvocato
in Italy. The same is true of several other professions: there are no widely used feminine equivalents for
notaio
(“notary”),
ingegnere
or
architetto.
One of the few exceptions is
dottoressa,
which is applied to female graduates and is also used by women who become medical doctors. The term
avvocatessa
also exists, but most women lawyers eschew it, perhaps because they feel that the specifically female version has the same, arguably diminutive connotations as the English word “actress.”

The situation, in other words, is a muddle. And nowhere is this truer than in politics. Until recently, the few women who made it into the cabinet were always known as
ministri
and were written and spoken about as such. On occasion, people would try to square the circle by referring to a female minister as a
ministro
. But since the arrival of a more numerous female contingent in government, the word
ministra
has begun to crop up, both in print and speech. Even so, at the time of writing the Italian government’s own Web site continues to use
ministro
to describe those who head the foreign affairs, defense, economic development, education and health ministries, even though all five are women.

Turn on the television and you will sooner or later find yourself watching a variety or quiz show in which women are used in ways that have been considered unacceptable in many other countries since the 1970s. If there is a female presenter, then she will almost certainly have big hair, glossy lipstick and an outfit that reveals more than it conceals. But in many cases the only women on the set will be so-called
vallette
or
veline,
whose role is almost entirely decorative. At most, they will be required to do a few dance steps or hold up a placard that shows, say, the answer to a quiz question or the amount won by a contestant. Often their job will be just to stand to one side looking pretty and smiling vacantly. The first
veline
appeared in 1988 in
Striscia la notizia,
a satirical and investigative program on one of Silvio Berlusconi’s channels. Their duties involved bringing in the news items (
veline,
in journalistic slang) around which the program revolved and draping themselves alluringly over the (male) presenters’ desk.
^*
Striscia la notizia
is still a mainstay of Mediaset programming, and the extended competition to choose a set of
veline
—one has to be blonde and the other brunette—for each new season is pivotal to the calendar of every aspiring Italian showgirl.
^*

In the same way, advertisements on billboards and in the written media often use women in various degrees of undress to advertise products that have no connection with sex, beauty or the female body. One of the few that aroused genuine controversy appeared in 2008. Commissioned by a ferry company to advertise a new and faster connection between Naples and Catania, it showed a woman’s hands clasped over her abundant breasts and was accompanied by the caption “Vesuvius and Etna—Never This Close.” Unabashed by the row over their ad, the ferry company ran another the following year featuring a long line of young women heading toward the open rear doors of one of their ferries. They were wearing shorts that, in some cases, barely covered their bottoms. This time, the slogan was “We Have Italy’s Most Famous Sterns.”

Each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes its
Global Gender Gap Report,
which aims to assess women’s status in each country according to a variety of criteria, including economic participation, political empowerment, educational attainment and various health-related indicators. In recent years, Italy has bobbed up and down in the rankings, but its position as of 2013 was close to the mean: the WEF put it at seventy-first place. That was twenty-six places below France and, perhaps more surprisingly, forty-one places below Spain. Women in Italy were reckoned to be getting a worse deal than those in Romania and eleven African states.

The area in which Italy scored worst was economic participation. Recent EU and OECD figures have put the number of women in employment at around half the total female population—the lowest proportion in any large EU state. Inevitably, that also means a much higher proportion of housewives. But since there are twice as many women as men who say they are keen to work but have given up looking for a job, it is clear that many of the five million women who work only in the home in Italy do so reluctantly. A survey carried out in 2011 indicated that Italian housewives were not just reluctant but desperate: their level of dissatisfaction was significantly higher than in either Spain or France.

Unsurprisingly, very few women are to be found in Italy’s boardrooms. By 2013, they accounted for only about 8 percent of the directors of leading Italian firms—once again the lowest share in any big European economy. In Spain the figure was 10 percent, in France 18 percent, and in the UK and United States it was 17 percent. A detailed illustration of how women are squeezed out of the labor market as their careers advance emerged the same year in a study of higher education.
³
By then, well over half of the graduates being turned out by Italian universities were women. But the proportion of associate professors was barely a third and the share of full professors one in five.

Those figures, doubtless, owe something to the age profile in academia and to a higher “dropout” rate among women. The full professors tend to be older and belong to generations in which female graduates were less common and in which it was more unusual for women to pursue a career outside the home.

But universities also feature repeatedly in allegations of what is known as
ricatto sessuale,
or sexual extortion.

This is a difficult phenomenon to gauge with any precision. And it is certainly not one confined to Italy. But the anecdotal evidence—the frequency with which cases come to light in the media or are alluded to in private conversations—gives an impression that it is relatively widespread. The cases that surface in the media usually involve university teachers alleged to have asked a student or Ph.D. researcher for sex in return for a pass or high marks. It is reasonable to infer that a lot of
ricatto sessuale
goes unreported and indeed unmentioned: in the cases in which the blackmail succeeds, neither party has much interest afterward in drawing attention to what has happened. To judge by the accounts of foreigners who have worked in higher education in Italy, the exchange of academic favors for sex may not be typical, nor is it uncommon.

Not that all the
ricatto sessuale
takes place in academia. In 2010, according to a study by Istat, 3.4 percent of the women interviewed said they had been asked for sex in connection with their work, either as a condition of being hired or in return for promotion or—in the worst cases—as an alternative to being dismissed. So is
ricatto sessuale
any more prevalent in Italy than in other countries? If that figure is accurate, then perhaps not.

But my subjective impression—backed up by just a shred of objective evidence—is that
ricatto sessuale
has come to be regarded by quite a few Italian women as a regrettable but unavoidable fact of life. The shred of evidence is a poll—with a sample that was less than statistically significant—commissioned by a women’s association, Donne e Qualità della Vita (“Women and Quality of Life”).
⁴
It involved asking 540 women university students if they would be ready to give sexual favors to advance their careers. Only one in five gave an outright no. Almost 20 percent said yes, with the remainder—roughly three out of every five—giving a coy “Don’t Know.”

How has a country that once had a dynamic and assertive feminist movement fallen so far behind? To some extent, what happened in Italy after the heyday of feminism is what happened throughout the world. A generation came of age in which the women no longer wanted to minimize the differences with men. Glamour came back into fashion and street demonstrations in support of women’s rights began to seem outmoded. That, however, was partly because women in the 1970s had secured, if not all of their aims, then enough of them to satisfy a large percentage of the female population. Italy stood out inasmuch as the outstanding conquest of the legalization of abortion was so unexpected and complete. Maybe, having won such a resounding victory, the warriors on the female side in Italy’s battle of the sexes were all the more disposed to rest on their laurels.

The verdict of some Italian feminists, however, is less charitable. They feel that the movement took a disastrously wrong turn. Partly because of their disillusion with the men of the New Left, Italy’s leading feminist thinkers shifted the emphasis—to a greater extent than in most other countries—away from the demand for equal rights and toward the analysis of gender differences and the exaltation of female qualities. According to this interpretation, women’s liberation was sacrificed on the altar of what might be called women’s pride. Certainly, that explanation would help explain the ease with which Silvio Berlusconi was able to use his growing influence in the media to spread a very different view of female sexuality beginning in the 1980s: he was like a general marching onto a battlefield that had been deserted by his enemies.

What is incontestable is that the Berlusconi years saw very little resistance to the imposition of the values that the media tycoon represented—and indeed lived out in his own life, both public and private. Though the onetime prime minister has always insisted that he “loves women,” his attitude toward them has often been condescending and sometimes downright contemptuous. When Spain’s Socialist leader José Luis Zapatero appointed a cabinet in which half the ministers were women, Berlusconi called it “too pink.” His own idea of bringing on women was made abundantly clear when he appointed Mara Carfagna, a former showgirl who had posed as a topless model, to be his minister for equal opportunities. It was only when the scandal over his Bunga Bunga parties reached its height in 2011 that Italian women finally reacted with demonstrations that eventually spread to more than 250 Italian and foreign cities under a slogan inspired by the title of Primo Levi’s novel of wartime resistance,
If Not Now, When?

Plans for the revival of a broader women’s movement on the back of those demonstrations fizzled out. But in retrospect it can be seen that the “If Not Now, When?” demonstrations marked a turning point. At the time, only a fifth of Italy’s lawmakers were women. According to a study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, that was a lower proportion than in either Iraq or Afghanistan. At the next general election, in 2013, most of the leading parties made a serious effort to promote female candidates. In the lists submitted by Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement, which selected its candidates in an online poll of its members, almost four in every ten were women. When the results of the election came in, it could be seen that female representation in the new legislature was going to be close to one-third. The government that emerged from that election also had an unprecedentedly strong female component. And when Matteo Renzi ousted Enrico Letta the following year, he formed a cabinet in which women occupied half the seats.

Other changes have been taking place, but without attracting the type of publicity that Renzi’s women ministers received. While the figures given earlier for the proportion of female board members may seem paltry, they nevertheless represent a considerable increase during a brief period. This is doubtless because of legislation introduced in 2011 that made it compulsory for at least one in every five of the nominees put forward for a place on a board to be a woman.

There is also a growing awareness of the violence suffered by women and increasing censure of the men who perpetrate it. In 2013 the campaign to promote that awareness and censure received a huge boost from an unlikely quarter: a monologue delivered on Valentine’s Day by a comedian during the Sanremo song festival. The comedian, Luciana Littizzetto, is herself a symbol of changing attitudes. Stand-up comedy was until quite recently an exclusively masculine preserve in Italy. And the diminutive, impish Littizzetto has used humor to get across feminist messages that her many male fans might otherwise find hard to accept. Her discourse at the Sanremo song festival was not funny at all. But it is worth quoting at length, not just because it was a wonderfully eloquent speech, but because of the huge impact it had on public opinion.