The Italian Communist Party's peak of popularity in the mid-1970s, during its so-called ‘Eurocommunist’ turn, coincided with a surge of feminist struggles in Italy. While scholarship has treated Communist Party politics and feminism as unrelated historical phenomena, this article provides evidence for their multi-layered ‘interweaving’. The term was employed by PCI women themselves to conceptualise how struggles against social and gender inequalities interlock, but also to stress that overcoming women's oppression in Italian society (and beyond) presupposed a reckoning with male dominance – and the peripheral role of the ‘women's question’ – within their party. The ensuing intra-party debate, reconstructed through sources from the turning-point year of 1976, is a revealing instance of PCI activists’ reception of 1970s feminism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.