The role that women have had during the Partisans’s Resistance isn’t known to everyone, yet still the memory of their deeds can’t help but ignite several reflections that are still valid to this day.
Yours truly has the pleasure and the underserved honor of being part of the «Bella Ciao, Milano!» work group, a project issued by the milanese branch of the Italian Democratic Party (PD) and created in preparation for the 70th anniversary of the Liberation.
This project has a political connotation, yet we’ll put that on hold, here, to underline instead the cultural and social value that the whole idea can have and is having – the organizers have prepared a calendar busy with public events in which the whole Resistance theme is re-evaluated under different point of views, unveiling aspects of those years that have often and guiltily passed under silence. A new take on the Liberation that includes the minorities of that period, minorities that are still, sadly, the same of today.
March 9th was the moment to remember the bravery of the women who fought first hand against the nazi-fascist occupation, and with that the teachings of some of the most important international personalities of this century, all through a series of public readings.
Next to the experience of Tina Anselmi, who recounts to her grand-daughter of how at the age of seventeen she took up being a courier for the Partisans with all the recklessness and courage of a teenage girl, so much that she managed to ask and obtain a car ride from German soldiers, or the cunning of Lina Merlin who was able to reveal an undercover policeman in a quick exchange of words, Lea Garofalo’s heart-moving letter to President Giorgio Napolitano appears, a letter she wrote a few days before being killed by her husband’s mafia clan. Other testimonies add up to the courage of this woman who sacrificed herself in the fight against the mafias, like the ones of Anna Politvoskaja and Malala Yousafzay – the first one a victim of an obscurantist regime, the second a young heroine whose voice in favor of easy access to school and instruction was louder and stronger than taliban bullets.
And even though the actions of women like Lia, killed in Niguarda right on the spot where now rises a huge commemorative murales, or Jenide Russo, arrested, deported and killed after months of torture in which she never gave up the names of her brothers in arms, are the ones searing themselves into our memories, what still echoes today is the intelligence and modernity of their words.
Words just like the brilliant analysis of Ossola Republic Provisional Government member Gisella Floreanini:
«The Republic of Ossola is the only one to include a woman in its Provisional Government Committee – to me, it’s an act of such novelty and originality in the whole of Italy that it has to be deeply explored in its significance, since there are governments now asking me why it has happened just in Ossola, why in no other of the free Areas?»
Or like the intervention made by Teresa Mattei, the youngest person to be elected to the Constituent Assembly, who declared, talking about Article Three of the Italian Constitution:
«The acknowledgement of achieved equality is now existing in the new Constitution. It’s a good place to start for Italian women, but in no way it’s the finish line. There will be trouble if we consider this the finish line.»
These women’s strength and determination, their words that talk so directly to today’s young girls, they all leave to us the heavy responsibility to keep woman’s role in society the focus of cultural and political discussion. The dare is for everyone to enjoy every day the dignity of mind that these heroines left us in heritage.
