FEMMINISMO (from French féminisme). — This is the complex of theories, issues, and struggles raised and conducted within the feminist sphere for the equalization of women with men on the civil, social, and political plane and, implicitly, for their emancipation. This emancipation, whose fundamental postulates had already matured especially through the work of Christianity, according to which physiological differences constitute no barrier to moral equality, although arrested or slowed over the centuries, from Latin antiquity through the whole of the eighteenth century, led to the emergence of the specifically feminist problem only in very recent times, so that the feminist movement is a typically modern phenomenon: its most decisive moments and its most advanced progress are modern and, indeed, for the most part contemporary. One cannot, in fact, attribute a feminist spirit to the certain political or cultural emancipation enjoyed by women in Roman, Renaissance, or eighteenth-century society; for those were, so to speak, occasional parentheses of a relative social influence and prominence, but not stages in a genuine campaign of claims such as that which is now specifically called f.
F. is a product of the evolution of society, of its structure, and of its changed economic and juridical conditions and conceptions. It therefore, too, goes back to the French Revolution, that is, to the movement which, with its many defenses of the rights of man, also revolutionized the ideological structure of the old anti-feminist conservatism. The Declaration of the Rights of Woman which Olympe de Gauges presented to the Constituent Assembly in 1791 is in fact regarded as the birth certificate of f. Her proposals, petitions, and protests, and the women’s clubs she organized, were the first audacious manifestations of the feminist idea, which was asserting itself as a movement and which subsequently gained support among French socialist theorists such as Ch. Fourier, E. Cabet, P.-J. Proudhon, and C.-H. Saint-Simon. Fourier was the first to use, with regard to women, the word “emancipation.” Shortly afterward, in 1792, England too saw the publication of the first feminist work, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of the Women,” which called for women to receive an education equal to that of men and advocated the coeducational state school. Also dating from 1792, in Germany, is the work Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Welter by Th. von Hippel.
Thus constituted, the feminist question stood in Europe on the threshold of the nineteenth century. The novelty and development of the European economy in the early nineteenth century, and the ferment of social ideas on the national and international levels, facilitated during the course of the century the consolidation of feminist theories and their gradual social recognition. Effective supporters of this f., initially essentially theoretical, were intellectuals and writers of democratic-socialist tendencies, such as George Sand, or economists such as Stuart Mill, strengthened by their liberal individualism in the most comprehensive defense of the human personality. The fact that this movement was promoted by leading figures of socialism and liberalism, and still more the exaggerations to which they gave themselves over, initially caused Catholics to regard the movement with suspicion (cf. N. Marini, Il valore scientifico delle moderne teorie intorno alla donna, Rome 1887), but eventually they came to distinguish sound claims, fully consonant with Christian thought, from doctrinal and practical exaggerations.
Stuart Mill’s book, The Subjection of Women (London 1869; Italian trans., Lanciano 1926), is regarded as the foundational text of feminist doctrine and contains the theoretical and popularizing premises of its modern development. Accordingly, the first feminist claims were made precisely in England: admission of women to voting in municipal councils (1869) and county councils (1880), abolition of marital authorization (1882), freedom of organization, such as the Social and Political Union of suffragettes (directed in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst), and freedom of public meetings and demonstrations.
The feminist associations of other nations were fighting simultaneously for the same claims, until the world war of 1915–18, owing to the urgent exigencies of wartime, marked an imposing turning point in the history of f. and assured its more rapid success. The obligatory employment of women in all public and private offices, which did not cease but rather intensified in the postwar period, was validated by the performance of female personnel in every form of activity (manual, professional, clerical), provided the test of the economic and productive equalization of the two sexes, and hastened their equalization on the juridical and social plane. As early as 1915–17, in Germany, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, the U.S.S.R., Spain, and the United States, women were electors and were elected as deputies, ministers, undersecretaries, and diplomats. From 1918 women were also electors and eligible for election in England; since 1946, they have been so in Italy as well. Here the feminist movement was never as organized and clamorous as in England and America, but it was no less deeply felt morally and economically, and achieved considerable results. A f. that was less socialistic and materialistic, more idealistic and spiritual; less theoretical and more practical.
The ancient prejudice concerning female inferiority and the exclusive hegemony of men having now fallen away, women have entered every form of activity: commercial, industrial, cultural, artisanal, political, and parliamentary; all university faculties, and almost all careers and professions, are now open to women.
Economic and ideal motives have worked together to produce these successes of f., which today, midway through the twentieth century, may be said to have reached the culminating point of its trajectory of achieved claims. It must also halt at this point, lest it degenerate harmfully by going too far. Some extremist currents of f. would, in fact, for example, have the family disappear as a moral, economic, and juridical institution.
“Various political movements,” as His Holiness Pius XII recently and authoritatively observed, “are turning toward women in order to win them to their cause. Some totalitarian system places before their eyes magnificent promises: equality of rights with men, protection for pregnant women and nursing mothers, communal kitchens and other services that free them from the burden of domestic care, public kindergartens and other institutions maintained and administered by the State and municipalities, which relieve them of their maternal obligations toward their own children, free schools, and assistance in the event of illness.” What S. Samiti observed on the same occasion can sum up the entire feminist movement: “We do not wish to deny the advantages that may be derived from one or another of these social measures, if applied in the proper manner ... The essential point of the question nevertheless remains ... has the condition of women thereby become better? Equality of rights with men has, through the abandonment of the home where she was queen, subjected women to the same burden and duration of work. Her true dignity and the solid foundation of all her rights have been disregarded, namely, the distinctive character of her feminine being and the intimate coordination of the two sexes; the purpose intended by the Creator for the good of human society and, above all, of the family has been lost from sight. In the concessions made to women, it is easy to discern, rather than respect for their dignity and mission, the aim of promoting the economic and military power of the totalitarian State, to which everything must be inexorably subordinated” (AAS, 37 [1945], p. 288).
However, as the authoritative voice still taught, in the present juridical, social, economic, and moral condition of women, under a regime of perfect equalization, although it is desirable to restore as much as possible the mission of women in the domestic hearth to honor, she must not show herself reluctant toward the movement that carries her, willingly or unwillingly, into the sphere of social and political life. She must cooperate with man for the good of the civitas, in which she is equal to him in dignity, and cooperate according to her nature, her characteristics, and her physical, intellectual, and moral aptitudes.
All this is a question not so much of distinct attributions as of the manner of judging and applying them in concrete circumstances.