Women and the Reinvention of the Political by Maud Anne Bracke

Author:Maud Anne Bracke [Bracke, Maud Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Europe, Italy, Western
ISBN: 9781317674122
Google: A-wABAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-11T16:05:42+00:00

5

Work, or the Question That Never Went Away

Trade Union Feminism in Turin

1. Challenging the ‘Ideology of Labour’

During the ‘economic miracle,’ Turin was transformed from a somewhat peripheral city to a pillar of the national economy. It was home to one of Europe’s largest industrial complexes and Italy’s main private employer: Fiat car manufacturing. In the mid-1970s, Mirafiori alone, the largest of the Fiat plants, employed more than sixty thousand workers, making it the single largest factory in Western Europe at the time. Immigration to Turin was larger than to any other Italian city, as its number of inhabitants rose from 753,000 in 1953 to around one million in 1961.1 Initially, the ‘Detroit of Italy’ was ill equipped to host the thousands of southern Italian immigrants disembarking daily from the Treno del sole, or those arriving from Istria or the Piedmontese countryside. More so than the other major cities, Turin had to reinvent itself, facing a new set of social problems, including housing shortages and inadequate social services. There was, in addition, systematic discrimination against southerners in education and housing, and widespread prejudice against them that amounted to a form of racialisation.2 As a result of social tensions, Turin was an epicentre of the Hot Autumn of 1969. Although not entirely a ‘southerners’ revolt,’ southern workers were central to the specifically Torinese workplace radicalism, which was, at least initially, unorganised and uncontrolled by the unions. The extra-parliamentary groups, influential here in the factories, interpreted and celebrated the factory revolt not only as a return to the city’s historical radicalism (the factory council movement of the early twentieth century) but also as a signal of the end of the Torinese working class’s obedience to the parties of the traditional Left (the PCI and the PSI) and the major trade unions (the CGIL, the CISL and the UIL). Such obedience was contrasted with the radicalism of the male southern worker, presented as the new revolutionary.3 His supposedly innate, spontaneous radicalism was romanticised, in an image that was explicitly gendered. It was a particular embodiment of the new male heroism discussed in Chapter 2. Such discourses contributed to a hypermasculine politics emerging in the context of 1969 in industrial cities such as Turin, creating specific challenges for feminists.

There was an element of truth in the image of the disciplined Torinese working class. Here, the allegiance to the workers’ movement felt among industrial workers was a deeply instilled one, as was a collective identity based on waged industrial work. In Fascism in Popular Memory, Luisa Passerini traces elements of working-class culture in Turin and Piedmont from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and identifies the place of work in women’s and men’s subjectivity. While elements such as craftsman-ship, pride and the ability to ‘make do’ were characteristic of traditional Piedmontese male work identity, such elements after 1945 lived in tension with rebellion and the refusal to work. Women’s work identities, Passerini proposes, underwent an opposite development, from the non-centrality of work to women’s sense

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