Documentazione in archivio MAD: Luisa Rizzo, M.A.D. Movimento Autunomo delle Donne, 2024

The text describes and documents the personal and political context of the rupture that feminism, unexpectedly global and almost planetary, activates in the 1970s with widespread practices of women’s relationships and politics. In the case of MAD these are very young women, together, united by desire and practice for Women’s Freedom put, necessarily and for the first time, in the foreground.

“It was 1975 when feminism exploded onto the media scene and became the subject of journalistic information. At the end of that year a huge number of women take to the streets. They demand free and free abortion. On December 6, the day that will go down in history as the date of the first national demonstration of the Feminist Movement, 40,000 women march in Rome from Piazza della Repubblica to Trastevere. It is the route of the movements’ processions. A cordon of women bounds the procession, hugging each other tightly and preventing men from entering. A militant from Lotta Continua demands to enter to challenge this “novelty.” He is repulsed with a slap. It is this demonstration that marks the first visible expression of separatism, which has been a political practice for years, and a symbol of the no-longer-composable rupture between the feminist movement and the political organizations of the left. The next day, even though there were no clashes, all the newspapers talk about it. […]
After taking back the word in the squares, shouting out their private until it became public, women are taking back the written word. The search for this language that does not erase diversity takes place through a proliferation of publications and magazines throughout the 1970s.”
Rossella Marchini