Trade Union Feminism across borders: a comparative perspective of 1970s Italian and French experiences

This proposal stems from my PhD research that aims at establishing a fruitful comparison between Italy and France with regard to the development of so-called ‘trade union feminism’ during the crucial turn of ‘the long 1970s’.

In both countries a strong tradition of working-class commitment for women’s rights empowerment was, indeed, carried out by the workers’ organizations; however the international spring of second-wave women’s movement questioned the value of this approach and encouraged new critical reflections on the complex women-work relationship and on the falsely neutral but on the contrary deeply gendered nature of trade unions’ structures and policies. In this period women unionists in both countries, although adopting different tools (both conceptual and organizational), began to elaborate critically on all this and to develop alternative practices.

Despite being at the intersection of major international phenomena such as the working-class movement and the second-wave women’s movement, trade union feminism has been largely overlooked by historiography; it proves to be, indeed, a sort of borderline object of study and to address it in the most effective way, I interweave various sources: archival as well as oral ones.

I adopt a trans-local approach focusing on some particular cities:  Turin, Milan, Genoa, Paris, Lyon. By looking at major unions – both communist and catholic – I delineate the birth and growth of the peculiar experience of trade union feminism, analysing its main features and thus contributing to better articulate our understanding of second-wave feminist movement in connection with the issue of class.