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title="Who are these women?"
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has_items=["pillola.md", "7000donne.md", "quizamore.md"]
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# Patriarchy
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This section collects documents, fragments and insights that highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation.
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# The story from which we start: Who are these women?
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As the workers raised their voices denouncing the inhuman levels of exhaustion provoked by the new productivity levels required by MTM, the managers at Lebole attempted to downplay the health crisis on their hands (which would see between 17% and 24% of the workers on sick leave at the same time). Seeking to shift the blame onto other factors impacting the lives of their (nearly) all-female workforce of around 3000 women, they argued that nevrosis and hysterical reactions were not due to stress and excessive workloads, but by the fact that many workers were also mothers and spouses with domestic duties beyond their working hours at the factory.
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This line of reasoning was not the only front on which the Leboline had to intervene in order to challange mysoginist and patriarchal assumptions around their role as women. Within the trade unions and the communist party too, they were admired for their fierceness and yet at the same time seen with suspicion, as an anomaly to be kept in check.
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And so it would happen that, at political gatherings, Lebole workers would be greated with a sneary "Here come those (women) from Lebole...who do they think they are?"
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These exuberant groups of women and girls would appear fashionably dressed (many were capable seamstresses and would follow the latest trends), protesting loudly. Always on the brink of a wildecat strike, they would be capacle of blocking the streets of Arezzo bringing the city to a halt, wearing make-up and hiarstyles they could now afford thanks to their hard won salaries. Their attitudes and looks challenged the official views of the communist party, whose image of the 'new woman' was that of a model worker and mother, respectable and efficient in handling all of her responsibilities.
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Against this limited vision, the mounting feminist movement was in the same years beginning to roar its discontent.
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Many among Lebole workers went on to become expert trade unionists and party members often contributing to discussions around issues mainly impacting the lives of working class women. In the book *Quelle della Lebole. Frammenti di fabbrica tra interni e esterni*, for example, Patrizia Gabrielli highlights how the Leboline initiated important mobilizations demanding the city of Arezzo to provide kindergarten care for their children. But beyond the different topics thay tackled, there was something about the way in which Leboline practiced politics as a continuation of their private friendships that remains importantly gendered. The interstitial sociality that these women found at the factory was a source of political pleasure, breaking the solitudes of domestic lives. Birthday parties and gossips about relatioships intertwined with solidarity intiatives with other factories and the spontaneous strikes that punctuated these years.
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# The ecofeminist battles of Laura Conti
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On 10th July 1976, there was an accident at the ICMESA plant in Meda, which is now remembered as the “Seveso tragedy”. The accident caused the emission and dispersion of a poisonous cloud of TCDD dioxin, one of the most dangerous synthetic chemicals, on the surrounding municipalities of Lower Brianza, in particular Seveso.
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Activist doctor Laura Conti goes to Seveso to follow the developments of the impacted population. In her work, she denounced the risks to the environment from accidents related to industrial activities and shaped the so-called 'Seveso Directive' (Directive 82/501/EEC), the European law for the prevention of such accidents that offers parameters for the control of the over 12 000 industrial establishments in the European Union where dangerous substances are used or stored in large quantities, mainly in the chemical and petrochemical industry.
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Laura Conti, who was born in Udine in 1921 and died in Milan in 1993, was a member of the anti-fascist Resistance. She was detained in a camp in August 1944. Later freed, in 1949 she earned her medical degree. It is no accident that Ramazzini, a 17th-century physician regarded as the founder of occupational medicine, was the subject of her thesis in her second year of university, as Laura Conti’s militant practice focused on the protection of workers and the environment from the toxic logic of capital accumulation.
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She wrote 26 books, founded the environmentalist organization Legambiente and leading the environmentalist and feminist movements’ mobilizations for the closure of all nuclear plants in Italy following the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station in April 1986.
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In Seveso, Laura Conti’s work focused, among other things, on helping pregnant women to obtain a secure abortion, as dioxin provokes malformations in the foetus. At the time, the interruption of pregnancy was still only a possibility in case of malformations. The Seveso tragedy and the work of Laura Conti helped shape a tough conversation about therapeutic abortion and, more generally, about the notion that interrupting one’s pregancy may be a woman's free decision to begin with. It took Italy two years, or 1978, to pass a legislation on the matter.
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# Let's talk about women, by Franca Rame and Dario Fo (1977)
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In 1977, Franca Rame and Dario Fo, a couple of Italian dramagurgs and actors, stage for the first time the play in five one-acts *Parliamo di donne* (Let's talk about women). The third act, entitled 'Il pupazzo giapponese' (The Japanese puppet, jokingly deals with the rhythms of chainwork in factories and the psychological impact that such exploitation causes on the workforce - especially on women workers. The latter are forced to constantly take tranquillisers to maintain a minimum of efficiency carrying out exasperating tasks and to withstand the management's abuse. In the plot, one of the female workers, by dint of tranquillisers, has reduced herself to a form of insanity, for which she is teased by her colleagues. Their joke is to make her believe that in Japanese factories, in order to allow the employees to vent their repressed anger, there is a puppet with a silhouette identical to that of the manager; and that this puppet can be attacked whenever the anger reaches the limit of endurance. Faced with the girl's amazement, her colleagues assure her that this system, already popular in Japan, will soon be made available in Italian factories as well. As chance would have it, the manager, while attempting to repair a faulty piece of machinery, is temporarely paralysed by an electric shock, and so he is placed in an armchair while waiting for the doctor to arrive. As the other workers leave, the girl, seeing the manager in this frozen condition, mistakes him for the famous Japanese puppet and takes out her restrained rage on him.
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