Historicized, mythologized, who were the feminists of the Seventies?
Who were the women who risked to help others, often unknown?
Exploring their story has become almost an obsession for Marta Stella, 36, who recounted the journey made in those incredible years in 'Clandestine.
The novel of women' (BOMPIANI, PP 378, EURO 20), a choral novel, published by Bompiani, in which the voice of the protagonist, a sixty-eight-year-old, merges with that of many other women including Gigliola Pierobon, Carla Lonzi, Emma Bonino, Adele Faccio and also the current minister for equal opportunities and the family Eugenia Maria Roccella.
"The protagonist I created lives from historical truth - everything that happens in the book really happened - and from an act of imagination that has many women within it. It's truly a choral story. While I identified with this girl from the '68 I was also in it, my mother, my grandmother. It's a bit of a universal character that has within it the women who really existed, our mothers and also a girl of today. When in the minibus the protagonist says 'now it's our turn' can echo in the present of a girl today", Marta Stella tells ANSA.
The common thread is abortion and the battles for law 194 on the interruption of pregnancy, but this is above all a novel "about the choice and self-determination of the woman's body which has many similarities with today", says Stella del book with which he made his debut in fiction.
An original work in its ability to blend the intimate and the collective in a novel.
It all started, says the author who lives in Milan, "from the meeting with a woman who gave me a fragment of her story" she explains, recalling that trip on a minibus with other girls who slipped away in the night from Milan to go to a unknown place to abort with which the book opens.
"It was a pregnancy interruption followed by professionals who, like a human chain of solidarity, decided to defy the law to ensure that these girls did not risk their lives.
Even if that event didn't happen to you, it's kind of everyone's story.
A few years later the protagonist offers her apartment and this too is true.
These 23 year old girls offered their home and risked prison to strangers.
But who today at 23 years old would do it?", says the author. Then came the interview with Annie Ernaux, before her Nobel Prize, when The event that tells of her clandestine abortion was published in Italy. "There I felt the urgency to write", underlines Stella who for two years documented herself, discovered and recovered books from those years that were now unavailable in street markets and old libraries. "Feminism reached my generation of girls in the nineties with an acronym 'the feminists of the seventies' as if it were a homogeneous agglomeration of women all the same who fought for the same rights.
However, they didn't agree on everything.
On the day law 194 was proclaimed, not all of the movement agreed.
There was a part that thought that the woman's body should not fall under any legislation", underlines Stella who is a professional journalist.
"I handled the lives of these women with care and respect, without prejudice.
Indeed, it is in their dark folds that I found their truth.
I wondered, but who were these women when they were girls?
The novel is woven with their words and cries that entered inside me to make it not a new language but the language of the time." And what do we discover? "That they had already said everything.
I think of the 'We are the tide' pronounced by the Nemesiache, a group of Neapolitan feminists forgotten by everyone.
We find the words of the 70s today.
We find in feminicides the same narrative that wants to strip away the victim who then becomes guilty", he underlines. The French Parliament has just approved the inclusion of the right to abortion in the Constitution. What do you think of this event? "It is a truly epochal turning point, but we should remember what came before.
We have a moral debt to women who have suffered in their flesh and in their spirit, sometimes to the point of losing their lives.
They are the illegal immigrants" says Stella and hopes that "in the future we will truly practice sisterhood which means reaching out to a person who is not your friend, to a woman who perhaps has a vision diametrically opposed to yours".
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