The Italian translation of Maud Anne Bracke's volume on Italian feminism should be enthusiastically welcomed by Italian scholars as a further step towards a recuperation of feminism as one of the most important social, political and cultural movements to shape the history of postwar Italy for almost two decades. Bracke's long-awaited book was published in English in 2014 and it is still required reading for students and researchers working on feminism or on the history of Italy's social movements in English-speaking contexts. Its translation into Italian by Enrica Capussotti maintains the style and specificities of the original, with a slight change in the title, where the political becomes the subject and loses its reiterative quality (the original title is: Women and the Reinvention of the Political). The notes, introduction and conclusions are reproduced verbatim as in the original.

The book analyses the origins, characteristics, developments, and failures of the Italian feminist movement, using archival sources, oral interviews with women active in the movement at the time, and historical records. The goal of this inquiry is to acknowledge feminism's precise historical significance and its social and political impact by identifying the actions and the conditions which allowed it to develop from a group-based structure to a mass movement. The author argues, and then demonstrates, the centrality of the movement within the broader political developments of the ‘long 1970s’ in Italy, and proposes a rewriting and rethinking of the history of the period in the light of this centrality. Throughout the volume, the Italian feminist movement emerges as a diverse constellation of groups, collectives, and institutional organisations, with local specificities. The account of its development is detailed, well-documented, and balanced, giving the same importance to trade union groups, creative collectives and institutional organisations.

What marks a difference between this and other volumes on Italian feminism is, however, Bracke's honest, implacable emphasis on the crisis, disintegration, and failure of the movement registered during the 1980s and 1990s, discussed in Chapter 7. The book's chronological range, as signalled in the title, spans from 1968 to 1983. While 1968 appears as the natural starting point for an analysis of the feminist movement in Italy, 1983 seems a rather strange limit, especially because in most historical studies of the feminist movement the end point is 1978, the year when Moro was murdered by the Red Brigades. Bracke explains this choice with two points: in 1983, the pamphlet Più donne che uomini was published by the Libreria delle donne di Milano as a last disastrous attempt toward a redefinition of a feminism that seemed to be vanishing from politics, society, and culture. In the same year, Bettino Craxi, head of the Socialist Party, was elected prime minister, and an age of stabilisation began after the violent, chaotic late 1970s. The choice of 1983 as an end point is then clarified in Chapter 7, where Berlusconism is analysed with great accuracy, understood as a vast socio-cultural phenomenon encompassing the failure of Italian feminism.

The volume comprises seven chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. The structure alternates between four chapters of historical overview with a national focus and three chapters dedicated to local case studies, in Rome, Turin and Naples respectively. While the introduction sets goals, methodological premises, and chronological limits, Chapter 1 looks at ‘the political’ as a category of analysis specific to the Italian feminist project, broken down into four elements: the invention of new political practices (autocoscienza, self-help); the position of the woman as a political subject; the relation with other political actors (the autonomia movement, workerism); and the reinvention of the spaces in which the political takes place, with the prioritisation of the private and the collective over the public. Chapter 2 examines women's conditions in Italy from 1945 to 1968, with the aim of providing a theoretical and historical reference for the critical decade analysed in the following sections. What is missing from this early account of the women's movement is an emphasis on cultural change and on the role that the US played in the redefinition of an Italian national identity after the Second World War. Chapter 3 is the core of the volume: it gives us a detailed and exhaustive map of groups, collectives and of the differences between them, while highlighting key moments of the broader historical events. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 focus on Rome, Turin, and Naples respectively. Here Bracke presents material from archives and interviews and emphasises local specificities: she focuses on reproductive rights, sexual health clinics and self-help groups in Rome, trade-union feminism in Turin, and feminist creative forms of expression in Naples. Following these three chapters, the author includes another chapter of reflection in broader terms, focusing on Berlusconism and the crisis of 1980s feminism. The conclusion effectively summarises the outcomes of the volume's extensive inquiry.

While the goal of the book is fully achieved through an intelligent use of sources and a deep knowledge of Italy's intricate political and social history, there are some minor flaws, especially in relation to the goals and focuses declared in the introduction. The most evident weakness of this translated edition is the lack of a specific preface or epilogue addressing an Italian audience, and with it a discourse on the erasure of feminism as a political, social and cultural movement from the memory of Italy's past. Moreover, transnational connections between Italian feminism and feminists in other countries are not fully explored, and very little information is given, compared to the attention this topic receives in the first pages of the book. Finally, the lack of a table of contents creates confusion and frustration for the reader, and the lack of a specific methodological note and of detailed records on the use of archival sources and oral interviews leaves the scholar without the means to deepen and expand Bracke's inquiry.