Roses, too

“We want bread, but we want roses, too!," their signs read.

The march was made mostly of women, who had organized the strike and asked for decorous salaries, but wanted poetry, too.

It was 1912 and a three-month textile strike was taking place in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with dozens of immigrant communities demonstrating to obtain decent wages, shorter working hours, freedom of strike.

The slogan was borrowed from James Oppenheim’s poem, “Bread and Roses," written a year before.

As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!

Photo Courtesy: Kheel Center, Cornell University, All Rights Reserved

Almost a century later, Italian documentarist Alina Marazzi borrowed the slogan once again, to make it the title of her beautiful documentary “We Want Roses Too”, which has come out in March 2007 and has been awarded in the most popular international festivals.

Mixing archival footage, advertisements and film clips with interviews and first-person narrations, the documentary provides an intelligent look at the history and development of Italian organized feminism. Beautiful visual techniques, bright colours and a smart editing make the film sparkling and keep viewers glued to their chairs, while on the screen director Alina Marazzi goes over all the stages of ‘60s and ‘70s sexual revolution and feminist movement in Italy.

1960s-Italy is a country of recent affluence, where factories, industries and any other economic sector work at full rate, to supply an ever-growing demand, and where cities grow, surrounded by mushrooming working-class neighbourhoods. For the first time in Italy, everyone has now money enough to buy washing machines, TV sets, cars, refrigerators, to go on vacation and send kids to school. People start looking at the rest of the world, young girls and boys soon become far more educated than their parents; everything seems progressing, but social rules and traditions are the hardest to change. Strictly dominated by Catholicism and conservative political parties, imbued with patriarchy and with a deep-rooted moralism, typical of rural and tightly knit societies, in this epoch Italy hardly keeps pace with other European countries.

Photo Courtesy:galanet.be

This burden weighs heavily on young people, mostly on girls. Rules about their place within society, in fact, seem to be irremovable. Since they are babies, girls are taught about their fate, everything and everyone – family, TV, school, radio, magazines, toys, books, movies – spread the same message: every girl is to become a polite young woman, whose only target is finding a good match, and thus be a perfect wife, mother and housekeeper.

  Mass education is the fuse that starts the fire: from universities, factories, leftist parties’ offices and private homes, girls and women come out into the streets, entering that social and political space that had always been a male dominion.

They are furious, because they’ve been reduced to silence for centuries, during an unjust history that seemed endless: but now they know it was not, and they set out to reverse it.

Their slogans are oozing with exasperation and anger: “Tremble, tremble, witches are back!”, “Woman, woman, don’t stop fighting, the whole life must change!”, “This uterus is mine and I’ll handle it!”, “Let’s break down the barriers of marginalization!”, “Whose is this woman’s belly?”. They struggle for basic rights, the highest being the power to speak and decide for themselves about their social role, their body, their feelings, their aspirations and choices.

This piece of Italian political and social history unwinds through the voices of three young women, whose diaries Marazzi discovered in an archive. First, Anita, who is struggling with an oppressive father, with strict traditional rules, with a destiny imposed on her by her gender, with a society imbued of Catholic moralism.

Then, Teresa. Even if she does not bear the weight of insecurity and sexual problems, like Anita, Teresa – who is in her early 20s – finds herself obliged to resort to a heartbreaking illicit abortion. Italian law of her time does not provide for termination of pregnancy, and Teresa’s father would never accept his daughter being an unmarried mother. Teresa confides her diary that she would like to die. And it is a sort of death, what she has to face after her abortion: an intimate, terrifying death made of solitude, silence, pain, guilt, nightmares and abandonment.

Last, Valentina, a militant feminist who reflects on her being caught between her love and her commitment to the movement.

They told me
I smile prettier with my mouth closed.
They said –
better cut your hair –
long it’s all frizzy,
looks Jewish.
They hushed me in restaurants
looking around them
while the mirrors above the table
jeered infinite reflections
of a row, square face.
They questioned me
when I sang in the street.
They taller at tea
smoothly explaining
my eyes on the saucers,
trying to hide the hand grenade
in my pants pocket,
or crouched behind the piano.
They mocked me with magazines
full of breast and lace,
published their triumph
when the doctor’s oldest son
married a nice sweet girl.
They told me tweed-suit stories
of various careers of ladies
I woke up at night
afraid of dying.
They built screens and room dividers
to hide unsightly desire
sixteen years hold
raw and hopeless
they buttoned me into dresses
covered with pink flowers.
They waited for me to finish
then continued the conversation.
I have been invisible,
weird and supernatural.
I want my black dress.
I want my hair
curling wild around me.
I want my broomstick
from the closet where I hid it.
Tonight I meet my sisters
in the graveyard.
Around midnight
if you stop at a red light
in the wet city traffic,
watch for us against the moon.
We are screaming,
we are flying,
laughing and won’t stop.
(Jean Tepperman, Witch¹, 1969)

Forty years later, what has this powerful, sacrosanct movement become?

“Feminism” sounds to some ears like a vintage word, describing some folkloric curiosity of a time when eccentricity was a rule; others talk about it with a smile, and the F-word seems to remind them of an illusory, naïve epoch when people dared dreaming about a better world.

A rapid look at the status of women within Italian (or Western?) society actually dampens all enthusiasm.

The media convey messages as horrifying as they used to be in the 60s, even if they look different. Young women are no more invited to dream about becoming wives, mothers and housekeepers (not only, at least): what is sold like female success now passes through TV shows, humiliating outfits and scripts, disfiguring plastic surgeries, scandalmongering papers, starvation diets, advertising campaigns with women looking like dolls, now even ministerial posts… and, to keep up with tradition, countless beds.

Female success passes, in a word, through men. Today, just like yesterday.

Imitating the style of 1960s commercials and fashion magazines, filmmaker Therese Shechter – director of the documentary “I Was a Teenage Feminist” – has ironically pointed out how the ideal of “Womanly Perfection” has invariably remained a male product, which enormously stresses the importance of external beauty, while it considers brain a useless tool to get rid of.

Lorella Zanardo and Marco Malfi Chindemi have dedicated a documentary to this subject, too, investigating the way women are portrayed by Italian public TV.

“Women Bodies” gathers clips from popular TV shows, broadcasted every day, at any hour, on Italian TV networks. Reduced to sex toys, who do not need to be able to think or speak, women are endlessly encouraged to worry about their physical appearance, to subject themselves to ridiculous tricks in order to improve it, to engage in pathetic races against the clock and to consider their (sexual) appeal as their only possible means to obtain anything.

Thus, day after day, snap after snap, show after show, women learn to think, plan and act according to men’s criterions, imposed on them by a male-dominated society.

The way TV and commercials portray women and girls of course affects the way they perceive themselves and the way they are perceived by their male counterparts, since the media have an impressive power on people’s minds.

 Photo Courtesy : Elena Borghi

Thanks to the media’s power, countless women now side with the humiliation their genre is exposed to, taking advantage of this trend to reach a sort of popularity, enter scandalmongering magazines and cheap TV shows; they’re so busy rejoicing at their smart success, that they do not realize they are imprisoned in an unjust system, they don’t see how they humble themselves, playing into sexism’s hands, becoming the artificers of their own oppression.

It is the case of the author of “The young hooker handbook” (“MGM – Il manuale delle giovani mignotte”), Debora Ferretti, who takes 263 pages to claim that “being a hooker is moral, legitimate, dutiful indeed!."

“Every woman is sitting on her fortune”, reads the subtitle of this “sweeping guide for apprentice sluts”, coming out on June 4th in Italy, a hymn to the seductive power women are said to possess as a congenital gift.

While the common sense of decency hates women who use their “femininity” to reach a goal - the official blog reads -, the book is “happily in favour of seduction as a means to get whatever one wants to, be it a fashionable super car to zip to a Cote d’Azur villa, a bunch of gardenias, a man for the rest of life, a hundred grams of ham, or a Parliament post.”²

These seem to be the results of  the thousands of battles, marches, screams and pains that have filled 1960s and 70s decades.

Photo Courtesy : Elena Borghi

Where are the witches hiding?

Can they possibly have given birth to dolls who can only wink and smile with their full lips, and whose only dreams are richness and popularity?

Western societies, which have witnessed the rise of feminist movements and the toughest battles for gender equality some decades ago, are now facing a different type of sexism. It is even more dangerous than before, with its insidious, slippery character, which keeps fooling women with its promises of equality, while it progressively destroys their public image, their self-confidence, their social role.

Beside women who do not realise this and elbow their way to success, there are those who do not surrender and have been modifying the term “feminism”. Their work, often silent, aims at nourishing this current of thought, which today does not preach equality on the barricades, but stresses its exact contrary: diversity. No more shouted slogans, hate and marches,   but intimate, close examinations and philosophical studies, whose goal is to identify a feminine way of representation, agency, relation, thought, faith, politics… life.

The witches used to want to be equal, now they ask for the possibility of being different; they wanted to be powerful, strong, manly, now they believe femininity to be an alternative to men’s super power; they wanted emancipation, now they aim at freedom.

An important contribution to this type of feminism comes from the thousands and thousands of women coming from South America, the Caribbean, South and South-East Asia, Africa, the Balkans; they come to work in Europe as housekeepers, babysitters, maids, nurses, and bring over different values, a type of agency that teaches Europe determination, patience, strength combined with sweetness and slowness.

In their help western women should confide.

 

Thanks to the media’s power, countless women now side with the humiliation their genre is exposed to, taking advantage of this trend to reach a sort of popularity, enter scandalmongering magazines and cheap TV shows; they’re so busy rejoicing at their smart success, that they do not realize they are imprisoned in an unjust system, they don’t see how they humble themselves, playing into sexism’s hands, becoming the artificers of their own oppression.

 

Citation:

        1 Fusini, N. e M. Gramaglia (eds.), La poesia femminista, Savelli, Rome 1977.

          2  http://www.mgm.ilcannocchiale.it