WOMEN’S LIB. IN ITALY

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33106, 22 December 1972, Page 5

WOMEN’S LIB. IN ITALY

(Reprinted by arrangement with The Christian Science Monitor)

ROME. Liliana Merlini is a singer who once wanted to be a journalist. She was discouraged from this pursuit because such a career is not considered appropriate for an Italian woman.

“In the middle class the few women who study at a university still tend to go into feminine," dependent professions,” she says. “If a girl studies medicine, she becomes a pediatrician. It always comes down to children.” Miss Merlini’s parents might have felt more receptive to the idea of journalism had they foreseen her alternative.

This youthful, vibrant, and witty woman was one of the founders in 1970 of the Movimento di Liberazione della Donna (M.L.D.), the women’s liberation movement, Italian style. Although she is married, she refuses to have children in protest against the institutionalised maternity that she feels oppresses Italian women. “But,” she adds with a wry shake of the head, “I am hot really making a free choice because I am reacting against the system rather than from my own volition.” There are other feminist groups in Rome, all of which are small and struggling like the movement itself and which differ on ideological points. PHILOSOPHY The M.L.D. considers itself part of the radical party that also espouses the causes of homosexuals and draft resisters. The essence of the M.L.D. philosophy is that men per se are not the enemy but, like women, are victims of a calcified social and political system that must change.

There were in fact more men than typewriters on hand in the penurious offices of the M.L.D., which inhabit the same shaky structure in a Roman alley as the other radical-party factions.

“The law’s main instrument of oppression is maternity,” states Miss Merlini. “In marriage the mother bears the burden of the children but has no decisive power over their lives, even as to where they should go to school. She also has no economic independence. The husband can forbid her to work if he thinks it is incompatible with the well-being of the family. “If he does allow her to work he gets all the earnings. He even has the power of life and death over her, for if she is having a baby and is in danger for her life, the husband has the right to decide whether she or the baby should live.” NO RIGHTS According to the divorce

law that was passed as recently as 1970 and may be repealed because of Vatican disapproval, the wife has no proprietary rights, but the husband does have to payalimony and child support. Miss Merlini feels, however, that divorce should not involve economics. If a wife were allowed to work and be self-sufficient from the start, the question of alimony would never arise.

She blames the State for these inequities and concludes that it, rather than the husband, should have to pay alimony until it corrects the situation.

M.L.D. members are trying to collect the 50,000 signatures necessary to present a petition to Parliament —in this instance on abortion. The M.L.D. works directly with the people, going into neighbourhoods in order to convert women to the cause.

“We have to depend on the popular force because we cannot count on the political parties or the press to support us,” explains Miss Merlini. “We are fighting all the authorities of society: capitalist, clerical, fascist, and patriarchal, so there is much more at stake than equality for the sexes. ACTIVIST STAGE “The difference between : M.L.D. and other feminist movements is that the others emphasise consciousness raising and haven’t yet reached the activist phase. M.L.D. concentrates on action because we live in such an oppressive structure that we cannot take the time to free ourselves on a personal level. In this respect we are closer to the American movements.”