Beyond the double blind spot: Relocating communist women as transgressive subjects in contemporary historiography

This article identifies a specific historiographical gap obfuscating communist women, namely, a ‘double blind spot’ rooted in the combined effect of the scant consideration of women in histories of communism and of communist activists in accounts of the women's movement. It traces this pattern of invisibilisation back to the paradigm of communist women's ‘instrumentalisation’ and to the resulting paradox of an ‘activism without agency’. The article then provides a critique of this received image; first, through an analysis of emerging scholarship on the female communist experience; second, through recourse to actors’ own perspective on the rapport between communism and feminism and the possibilities of ‘double militancy’, drawn from sources of the post‐1968 Italian context. It closes with an argument for relocating communist women as an unexpectedly transgressive subject of twentieth‐century history.


Introduction: the unexpectedly transgressive subject
A double blind spot burdens communist women as a collective subject of twentiethcentury history: on the one hand, the scant consideration of women in histories of communism; on the other, the missing role of communist activists in most histories of the women's movement.The combined result of these omissions has been the gross underrepresentation of this particular actor, in all its plurality, in historical scholarship across national contexts over the last three decades.As the chronology of this historiographical silence suggests, the status of communist women as research subjects stands in direct connection to the fate of communism as a movement.The latter, in turn, is hard to disentangle from the legacy of state socialism.Yet, if both its collapse in Europe in the early 1990s and the global crisis of left-wing politics that came in its wake represented tectonic shifts in the terrain of historical narrative as such, they reserved a peculiar fortune for communist women. 1 They were not only 'left out' of historical accounts; such omissions encompass, of course, many other non-male and otherwise subaltern subjects.Approached primarily 'from the standpoint of [their]  instrumentalisation by either communist states or parties', they have had to contend with a challenge to their status as historical agents. 2ore surprisingly, perhaps, is the fact that this gesture has given communist women a contested role even in histories of feminism and the women's movement.The place of communist women's trajectories in these efforts and, indeed, whether they should be part of them at all have been a persistent source of controversy.As a result, any effort to approach the history of the female communist experience has unavoidably had to assert the legitimacy of this scholarly pursuit in the first place.Not only in light of conservative historiographical traditions more or less indiscriminate in their disregard of subaltern subjects but also in the eyes of feminist historians.This article's first section aims to characterise the peculiar historiographical gap enveloping communist women's trajectories.I chose to term it the 'double blind spot' in reference to its roots in two separate yet converging instances of invisibilisation.This process of scholarly oversight deserves a more detailed analysis because it points to enduring stereotypes and unresolved issues regarding gender in Cold War and twentieth-century history that are both wide-ranging and difficult to detect.The 'gender gap' in question cuts across specialist fields whose overlaps are, in fact, seldom explored: from communism studies and Cold War history at one end of the spectrum, to the history of the women's movement and global feminist struggles, on the other.Starting in the late 2000s, the literature on communist women and their organisations has, however, expanded significantly, gradually counteracting the previous logic of invisibilisation. 3I will attempt to draw broader historiographical insights from these studies -and the controversy that has accompanied them.
In the second part of this article, I draw from my own research on the dialogue between the communist and feminist movements in 1970s Italy to highlight how the call to problematise gender relations in communist politics did not originate in the debates of contemporary historians but had been historically raised by communist women themselves.Indeed, attempts at conjugating the struggle for social and gender equality, communism and feminism abound in twentieth-century history, in a spectrum ranging from complete amalgamation to the postulation of their radical antithesis.
While she was no doubt closer to the latter stance, Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), one of the most incisive and prophetic voices of 1970s Italian feminism, provides the first stepping stone in a characterisation of communist women beyond the 'double blind spot'. 4In her seminal Let's Spit on Hegel (Sputiamo su Hegel), published in 1970, Lonzi aimed to spur a consciousness-gaining process to recast women as the Soggetto Imprevisto or 'Unexpected Subject' of a 'total transformation of life'. 5A founding figure of Italian 'neo-feminism' in the 1970s, Lonzi was sharply critical of left-wing stances on the 'women's question', whose 'dialectics of class' she characterised as 'internal to the patriarchal system'.'Communist revolution', she stressed in Sputiamo, 'had arisen on male political-cultural foundations' and 'on the repression and instrumentalisation of feminism'. 6Notably, Lonzi had been a communist activist herself, even if for a brief interval, in the mid-1950s. 7While her experiences in the Italian Communist Party were rather a negative impulse in her pathway towards feminism, this rarely acknowledged element of her trajectory seems to, nevertheless, have a place in it, considering the references to Marx, Engels, Lenin and Luxemburg that dot her feminist writings.Her eager communist readers, in turn, suggest her thought was fruitful even for a brand of feminism whose terrain was the political party. 8Paraphrasing Lonzi through the prism of her interface with communist culture, this article will approach the communist woman as an unexpectedly transgressive subject of twentieth-century history; first, in the recent literature on the female communist experience, then, in the Italian case.Framed as such, this manifold 'she' can perhaps be a bearer of transformation in the field, acting as a guide in that 'quest for understanding that is never fully satisfied' which Joan Scott termed her 'fantasy of feminist history'. 9 From 'faulty' feminists to role models.Communist women's trajectories as conduits to new feminist genealogies The first element Scott suggests is constitutive of that quest is a 'critical reading [that] replaces the operations of classification'. 10In that regard, what de Haan has termed an 'explosion of new publications analysing the relationship between communism and feminism' since the late-2000s has only been possible, because the drive to 'classify' communist women -especially in terms of their feminist 'credentials' or lack thereofhas lost ground to a greater willingness by scholars to engage these militant trajectories on their own terms. 11In a forum discussion in the Aspasia journal's inaugural issue, de Haan had herself sought to frame the issue in less binary, more ambivalent terms: 'Is "communist feminism" a contradictio in terminis?'.
In a critical summary of the responses, Brigitte Studer noted that while the introductory contribution by Mihaely Miroiu, a Romanian feminist and political theorist, asserted the impossibility of 'combining communism and feminism, because communism [was] nothing other than "state patriarchy"', the remaining interventions by 'seven other female contributors … contradict[ed] and/or qualif[ied] Miroiu's radical assertions'. 12They did so mainly by a reference to the plurality and context-specific nature of the female communist experience and by questioning the underlying presuppositions of Miroiu's understanding of both communism and feminism. 13Along these lines, Studer concluded that it was not only necessary to 'define those terms carefully', but that if 'the (ambiguous) historical ties between communism and feminism' are to be reconstructed, then 'both of those items must themselves be historicised'. 14This assessment converged with de Haan's, who stressed that 'women activists and feminists worldwide in recent years [had] come to see that "feminism" must always be contextualised and can take many forms'. 15ence, if scholars had previously 'locked' communist women into a 'model/counter-model' binary that unilaterally emphasised their 'emancipation or constraints', a new wave of research was now seeking to understand -rather than adjudicate and compartmentalise -these actors' political choices and manner of struggle for women's rights. 16This meant adopting lines of inquiry centred on how communist women practiced 'their' feminism and, in the same breath, how they lived 'communist lives'.
While opening up the field, this approach has brought its own complexities.Because many communist women had an ambivalent relationship with the feminist movement of their time and/or did not regard themselves as feminists, historians have had to contend with the issue of whether they can choose to see the matter differently than their subjects.In other words, if they can frame communist women as feminists even if the latter actively disputed that label.This issue raises difficult questions for the historian.On the one hand, the refusal to give credence to communist women's manner of struggle for women's rights because it does not conform to one's understanding of feminism is arguably akin to re-enacting these actors' social and political marginalisation in the plane of historical narrative.On the other, an account of those actors that is overly reliant on their own disavowal of feminism is not necessarily a more accurate or representative one.
Referencing the Bolshevik revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), Studer argued that, while 'she did not identify herself as feminist', considering the term's 'negative connotation for the communists, … her views were most definitely feminist'.Studer bases this conclusion on the fact that Kollontai not only 'share [d] the idea of female subjects' right to autonomy', but 'also believed that women were fundamentally strong'. 17The ability to account for militant women such as Kollontai serves, in fact, as a kind of litmus test for historians' understanding of how communism and feminism relate.While scholars have stressed that Kollontai 'very explicitly dissociated herself from the feminist movement of her time', it is undeniable that the ebbs and flows of interest in her trajectory correlate with the trajectory of the contemporary feminist movement. 18Writing in 1980, Cathy Porter highlighted how it was 'the political resurgence of the late-1960s' that, 'despite her disavowals', led to Kollontai's rediscovery 'as a feminist of enormous historical and inspirational value and extraordinary originality'. 19The recent global re-emergence of feminist struggles has had a similar effect, with Kristen Ghodsee's popular podcast series with contextualised readings of the Bolshevik revolutionary -titled 'AK-47'-a salient indicator of renewed interest in her trajectory and thought. 20uch evocations of Kollontai point to a broader effort in the research to leverage communist biographies -whether 'iconic' or all but unknown -as conduits to renewed genealogies of feminism.Chiara Bonfiglioli, for instance, frames her work on Yugoslav communist women as part of the effort to transcend a narrative of the women's movement 'rooted in the developments of white, middle class, radical feminism, and to account instead for other forms of working class, socialist, and Black feminist activism'. 21In that regard, beyond simply overcoming the received image of the 'loyal party woman' with a 'faulty emancipatory politics', the new scholarship has raised the question of whether the female communist experience did not actually prefigure contemporary efforts to recast perceptions on who 'counts' as a feminist subject and what political aims fall under feminist goals. 22Referencing the work of Carole Boyce Davies and Erik McDuffie on Black communist women in the USA, de Haan, argued that 'even if these women did not use the label feminism themselves -from an analytical perspective [theirs] can be understood as an intersectional, "left feminism."'. 23In other words, these historical actors might provide a reference point not only for an expanded horizon of research, but for a changing landscape of feminist activism as well.
This effort at redressing feminist genealogies in resonance with developments outside the research arena proper is not new.In her 1981 essay collection Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis returned to the communist movement in the USA of the 1930s and 1940s to highlight the key role played by women (and by Black women in particular) with a clear view towards the present.In a chapter titled simply 'Communist women', Davis emphasised communist activists' early recognition that 'Black women were generally caught in a threefold bond of oppression', that is, due to class, race and gender.In Davis' perspective, evoking Black communist women clearly meant drawing a connection to the struggles of her time: 'This same "triple jeopardy" analysis', she remarked, 'was later proposed by Black women who sought to influence the early stages of the contemporary Women's Liberation movement'. 24long these lines, Bonfiglioli has stressed how the 'second wave, notably, was more "intersectional" and multiracial than it is usually portrayed in its canonical, hegemonic representations'. 25Scholars working on the communist women's movement in contexts as diverse as Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia and Brazil have, in fact, added to the growing contestation of the notion of successive feminist 'waves' by stressing, for instance, that some of the most relevant peaks of women's struggles took place 'between the waves', namely, from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s/early 1960s. 26Referencing the Italian context, Molly Tambor even employed the notion of a 'lost wave' of women's activism, in reference to the erasure of women's role -whether communist or not -in securing constitutional and democratic achievements in that country. 27ence, if the ambiguities and tensions inherent in communist women's lives once detracted from scholars' willingness to engage with them -as feminists or otherwise -, these traits have arguably aided in their recent (re-)conversion into compelling (and contemporary) subjects for scholarship.That communist women are not your 'ordinary feminists' fits well with a period that has seen definitions of feminism be challenged and expanded; as Ghodsee has stressed in a reference to the rediscovery of communist women as feminist subjects, 'in the 21 st century, feminist inquiry must make room for the notion that there exist multiple feminisms'. 28he reduction of the relationship between communist and feminist militancy to an 'either/or' dilemma has, therefore, faded in light of studies approaching their coexistence in many women's trajectories in the non-binary terms of 'living with contradictions'.This is the suggestive title of the final segment of Studer's 2015 essay 'Communism and feminism' centred on the tensions, but also the potentialities implied in the conjugation of these terms. 29reaking the communism-feminism rapport out from its binary framing means, moreover, accepting that contradictions emerge not only from these movements' historical overlap, but also from scholars' own relationship to and understanding of feminism and communism as historical phenomena.As in Scott's 'fantasy of feminist history', it is the 'relationship between past and present' that emerges as the 'problem to be explored' in the confrontation with communist women's trajectories, alongside the 'thinking of the historian', which becomes 'an object of inquiry along with that of her subjects'. 30he twin self-reflective ramifications of Scott's intimation to historians also provide the framework for a case study in what I argue are the specific patterns of invisibilisation that envelop communist women as historical actors: the paradigm of 'instrumentalisation' and of the consequent paradox of a female communist 'activism without agency'.In a reference to the Italian context that applies to scholarship on communist women more generally, Eloisa Betti has stressed how 'some authors described them as "puppets" in men's hands while others addressed them as "not feminist" … mainly because of their belonging to political parties and mixed organisations'. 31This form of obfuscation is peculiar, because it rests on the premise that, despite the difficulties and perils of joining a communist organisation, the women who did so nevertheless lacked agency, because their militancy was subject to the goals of the authoritarian and male-centred power structure of the communist party and/or socialist state.Nanette Funk's intervention is, in this regard, worth a closer look, considering she attempts to theorise the supposed limits of female communist militancy within the key of 'instrumentalisation'.Framing her interventions as an open challenge to the recent wave of scholarship on communist women, Funk has called for 'a more nuanced account' of '"women's agency"' in the framework of socialist societies.Funk stresses, for instance, that 'promoting women's employment' in those contexts if done only because of Party directives, makes one an instrument, not an agent or feminist.When women's organisations acted as the state wanted, one needs further evidence that they did not act only because of the will of the state. 32ong these lines, Funk proposes a conceptualisation that does not deny women's engagement in state socialism, but articulates it as structurally suspect.She suggests differentiating between 'proactive' agency, that is, 'acting because of one's own will, policies, commitments or initiatives', and its 'reactive' polar opposite, namely, 'acting because of the will of another, including authorities' directives'; she concludes that 'only proactive agency, not just being active … realises the goal of a search for women as subjects and not just objects of emancipation' and provides a series of examples of that objectification in the framework of Eastern European socialist states. 33hile the article goes on to make valid points on the need for scholars to account for the constraints communist women faced under state socialism, Funk's contribution ultimately comes off the rails as a blanket condemnation of the new literature -termed 'revisionist' -, based on overgeneralising statements and ad hominem attacks.In its questionable tone and normative thrust, Funk's contribution is, nevertheless, telling.Her paper ultimately delivers a philosophically distilled version of the widely held, yet mostly unspoken prejudices and misconceptions around communist women as subjects.
The article received a measured response from Ghodsee, a representative of the new scholarship, who centred her efforts in deconstructing Funk's conceptualisation of agency and the normative assumptions she derived from it (more specifically the claim that 'state socialist women's organisations did not have agency, or at least did not have the right kind of agency'). 34de Haan's response, in turn, can be summed up in the assertion that '[t]here is simply no space in Funk's universe for Alexandra Kollontai'. 35As de Haan had stressed in 2007, that is, several years before Funk's intervention, it is precisely the one-sided insistence on women's 'lack of autonomy' in state socialist contexts -or, analogously, in the ranks of communist parties -that constitutes the most effective 'denying of their agency'. 36qually telling was Funk's insinuation that the true reason an (unnamed) 'revisionist' scholar had 'not adequately contextualised claims made in interviews' was 'perhaps due to sympathies with those interviewed'. 37Ghodsee's response in this regard actually stresses the fact that many activists in state socialist women's organisations were openly and consciously 'ideological adherents to the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism'.
They truly believed (many of them still believe) that the abolition of private property and state ownership of the means of production would produce societies more conducive to sexual equality than capitalist free markets. 38odsee's evocation of the present tense in her response provides an important key to the controversy over the status of communist women as historical agents.The subtle, yet significant grammatical cue does not seem fortuitous; a case in point, the title of Ghoodsee's attention-grabbing book first published in 2018, Why women have better sex under socialism: and other arguments for economic independence, is also conjugated in the present ('have' better sex, not 'had' as in the title of the New York Times op-ed piece that preceded the book). 39In other words, not only had it been possible for women to genuinely uphold those socialist tenets, but doing so remains viable today.Ghodsee's willingness to engage with this assumption emerges as a decisive factor in the broader effort to redraw the terrain of analysis regarding the question of how communism and feminism historically relate.
Put differently, the unsettling nature of this specific form of agency -that is, female communist militancy -appears, at least in part, to be connected to the difficulty of contemporary mainstream debate to accommodate a confrontation with socialism as something more than an antediluvial relic, as something other than an experience inherently 'left behind'.Arguably then, communist women's agency makes the most convincing argument for its effectiveness through its re-emergence as a marker for our own (un)settled accounts with the socialist past.
That this contested legacy has returned to the agenda, and that it did so with the female communist experience as a conduit, are phenomena deeply rooted in the crises of the present time.As de Haan has stressed, the global economic crisis of 2007/2008 and its aftershocks have greatly amplified 'the harsh realities of neoliberal policies' and their negative ramifications to women's livelihoods worldwide (a phenomenon the COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted further). 40In other words, this crisis landscape has played the role of a contextual unlocking of the research field, leading to a range of substantive new studies on women and communism, 'particularly on the role of state-socialist women's organisations'.In her introduction to a second iteration of the Aspasia forum entitled 'Ten years later: communism and feminism revisited', de Haan could, hence, look back on a number of recent publications that, while 'reach[ing] different conclusions', 'have tended to evaluate state-socialist policies for women somewhat more positively than scholars did in the first decade after the change from socialism to capitalism'. 41The notion of women 'as dupes and victims of communism', which had been instrumental to the marginalisation of scholarship on Eastern European women's trajectories and to the gross underestimation of their impact on the global level, has since been diagnosed as a remnant of 'Cold War imagination'. 42imicking (the blindness of) the past: the problem of 'historical mimetism' in communism studies I term the obfuscation of communist women a 'double blind spot' because it is not only feminist theory scholars and women's movement historians -as in the cases of Miroiu and Funk -that reproduce the 'instrumentalisation' paradigm and the consequent invisibilisation of these actors.As de Haan has stressed as recently as 2020, 'the current historiography of communism … is extremely androcentric.There is an enormous dearth of serious scholarship on the lives of women communists and the ways in which they -as activists, scholars, parliamentarians, artists, political migrants, and much more -contributed to building a more just world'. 43f feminist critics have overlooked communist women due to their supposed status as 'agents without agency', the (mostly male) historians of communism have obfuscated them for different, if converging factors.One attempt to tease out a deep-rooted trend in communism historiography partly responsible for women's invisibilisation in that field is provided by Studer in her recent book-length study on the lives of the professional revolutionaries that made up the Communist International. 44Beyond filling a gap in the literature through an entangled, world-spanning history of these peculiar historical actors, the work also dispels long-held stereotypes about the role of female Comintern activists; most notably, the marginalisation of their trajectories as that of the mere 'partners' of the real -that is, male -revolutionaries.Studer's research shows how, despite their declared role as 'secretaries' or 'aids' to their male comrades, many of these travelling female revolutionaries were, in fact, high-level political operatives.
What is striking in terms of the 'double blind spot' phenomenon is Studer's conclusion that female Comintern operatives had been overlooked in the research because most historians had been just as credulous about women's intrinsically accessory and purely 'administrative' role as the authorities of the time.Far from devaluing administrative work -which is, of course, essential -Studer highlights the problematic logic driving historians' previous omission.They had, she concludes, mimicked the biases prevalent in their historical matter (reinforcing them in the process): A gendered historical perspective emerges, therefore, as absolutely necessary so that historians (male and female) do not simply incorporate the stance and viewpoint of historical actors.Otherwise, they run the risk of reproducing, in the manner of a historical mimetism, the past's genderbased topography of relevance within their own object of historical analysis, consequently duplicating the exclusion of women! 45e pervasiveness of the problem of 'historical mimetism' -or mimicry -diagnosed by Studer within communism history, while by no means exclusive to this field, is confirmed by the insights of Adriana Valobra and Mercedes Yusta.They converge on the issue diagnosed by Studer, despite working on the trajectories of communist women in another context altogether, namely, the Iberoamerican space: The lack of interest … not only on the female communist subject … but on the creation and evolution of communist women's organisations … is nothing but the historiographical reflection of the profound androcentric bias of communist militancy itself. 46 response to this problematic trend, Valobra and Yusta also struck the theme of 'living with contradictions'.If communism historians want to avoid reproducing the biases embedded in their source material, they must be willing to negotiate the ambiguities inherent in the fact that, whereas 'communist parties and the Comintern itself' might have considered 'the organisation of women a subsidiary task', 'militancy in communist organisations represented a real form of emancipation for women, especially in times when they lacked civil rights in their respective countries'. 47om 'double invisibility' to 'double radicalism': setting off from the female communist experience to go beyond the double blind spot In a paper from 2013, Soma Marik retraced the narratives of communist women in colonial Bengal from the late 1930s to the early 1940s based on interviews with surviving activists and recourse to written memoirs.She framed her efforts as 'breaking [these actors] out of a double invisibility'.As Marik surmised, if 'much conventional historiography … ignored the role of women' and if 'even communist movement histories [had] blurred the distinctive attempts women members [had] made to create a gendered space for themselves', 'gender historiography' had equally failed to 'fill the gap'; it had, instead, been 'mostly concerned with nationalist women or women and the nationalist movement'. 48arik's research provides further evidence that the specific modes of invisibilisation responsible for the absence of communist women in historiography cut across a wide variety of contexts.Crucially, her work also offers valuable pathways beyond communist women's 'double invisibility'.In gathering the accounts of 'women themselves', the Kolkata-based scholar did not only address a case of dual historiographical omission; she recaptured, in fact, the 'double radicalism' of women who, in a 'colonial and communally charged Bengal', became communists by 'carving out a space as women even as they [fought] the class struggle together with their male comrades'. 49s Marik's findings indicated, 'many women turned to communism … because of gender injustice, and there is no reason to suppose that they put these issues aside after joining the CPI [Communist Party of India]'. 50he challenge for researchers, then, is to tease out how communist women enacted this 'double radicalism', that is, how they leveraged their awareness of the interplay between class oppression and gender-based asymmetries -in society, but also within the party -into unexpected modes of political intervention and self-liberation.In the following sections of this article, my aim is to contribute to these efforts by approaching a few instances of communist women's transgressive agency, drawn from the source material of my research on the female communist experience in the Italian context.
A case in point is what I term the strategic use of gendered perceptions of limited agency, that is, female communist actors' instrumental appropriation of women's supposed apolitical and passive character with a view to their political goals.A notable case of these tactics of 'gender-nonconforming' political intervention is recounted by Camilla Ravera (1889-1988), whose century-long trajectory intertwines with and arguably embodies that of the Italian communist movement itself. 51Upon the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in January 1921, Ravera was entrusted by Antonio Gramsci with the 'Women's tribune' of Ordine Nuovo, the official party paper.She joined the paper's editorial board in July 1921, becoming a full-time communist activist in the process.By the following year, Ravera's militancy involved, among other activities, travelling to Moscow as part of the Italian delegation to the Comintern's Fourth Congress and doing grassroots agitation among women workers.The ascent of fascists to power in the aftermath of the 'March on Rome' of October 1922 meant, however, that the party was forced to go underground.With much of the CP leadership either jailed or in exile by September 1923, Ravera chose to stay in Italy as part of the effort to hold the organisation together, adopting the alias of 'Silvia'.She eventually took over the party's highest post, that of secretary, in 1927.Ravera did so under a different codename, however, the more gender-neutral 'Micheli'.In her later years, Ravera enjoyed recounting the story of how most of her male comrades assumed 'Micheli' was a man: I still remember how the rank-and-file comrades, those, that is, that did not know the identities of the [underground] leadership … would often depart from meetings saying to me: 'We have told you everything.We recommend you relay to Micheli the information we gave you with utmost precision.And pay attention'.-No one could imagine the truth. 52e episode suggests communist women like Ravera were not only aware of gender hierarchies within and outside the party, but that they actively exploited the misconceptions resulting from them.As Ravera surmised in reference to her time as Micheli: 'for once my gender was both useful and helpful'. 53If her comrades only saw 'Silvia' when confronted with Ravera's diminutive figure -hence overlooking 'Micheli' -she also managed to elude fascist authorities for a time by the same means.Betrayed by an informant, Ravera was arrested in May 1930 and would spend more than thirteen years in various jails, at times in total isolation or in otherwise appalling conditions.As Ravera's case also illustrates, once repressive forces charged with maintaining the class and gender order become aware of such transgressive modes of agency, their reaction is often all the more vicious.
Ravera's life story is a testament to the peculiar dynamic of gender relations in communist politics since its emergence as a global phenomenon in the 1920s; if the role assigned to women implied components of marginalisation and subordination, it could also involve considerable access to power and responsibility.That this contradictory positionality was appropriated by communist women to fight for women's rights is only one argument for their inclusion in histories of feminism and the women's movement.Fast-forwarding to the 1970s, communist women would start openly raising the question of their status as feminists.Their 'dual presence' -in party and movement -also holds important clues for historians.

A double presence: Italian women reflect on being communists and feminists in 1977
Was communist feminism a contradiction in terms?The question posed in Aspasia was, to many Italian communist women, an immediately existendatial one in the feminist 1970s.A cover article of the magazine Noi Donne ["We women"] provides an illustrative example in this regard.While not strictly the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano)'s publication for women, it was undoubtedly part of the communist print landscape. 54The paper, first published in May 1944 with Italy still under Nazi occupation, became a cooperative in 1969, reaching a weekly circulation of 162,400 by the mid-1970s. 55In a sign that, by the late-1970s, the relationship between communism and feminism became growingly intertwined in the Italian context, communist women were prompted to ask: 'Are we too feminist or not feminist enough?'This was, namely, the title of Noi Donne's April 1977 cover story.It was proposed by the paper's chief editor, Giuliana Dal Pozzo (1922-2013), to address the comparable number of readers' letters complaining about the paper's editorial line for these diametrically opposite reasons.Dal Pozzo playfully remarked how the two corresponding piles of letters eventually soared over the humbler stacks on other topics in a manner akin to Bologna's Two Towers: The first pile, which we will call A, is the one accusing the paper of having become 'too feminist' … .The second pile, which we will call B, menacingly confronts its rival with entirely opposite arguments: the paper is overly tied to its past as one democratic voice among others, and while it does defend women, it does not embody their rage and their 'female' rebellion. 56l Pozzo stressed that, while it might be expected that the two stances demarcate a generational divide, belonging to one 'pile' or the other proved, in fact, a highly variable and contextual affair: the specific 'social terrain and the political climate' confronted by each individual was decisive.Hence, a younger reader from a 'little village in the South' might feel estranged by the paper's more combative stance against male privilege in convergence with feminist groups; on the other hand, an older subscriber from a more politicised environment or a large city in the North might think Noi Donne was not going far enough in that direction.
What such considerations point to, in turn, is just how broad and diverse the communist paper's readership was.This is what led to the constant fear by Noi Donne's editors of seeing their increasing commitment to feminism crystallise into an 'elitist' stance which they believed many readers would neither be able to engage with nor want to commit to.Hence, Dal Pozzo's emphasis on the paper's overarching goal of 'constituting a nexus, a terrain for the encounter of women with [other] women'.The April 1977 issue aimed to reflect this by providing a platform for a wide range of readers' voices and positions.She further stressed how this experience of 'finding ourselves so numerous, together' necessarily brought with it much 'effort, controversies [and] misunderstandings'.Dal Pozzo, nevertheless, warned against the temptation of 'speaking one sole language', not only because this would 'marginalise broad groups of women', but because it would mean 'repeating the male error of isolating someone because they are either less valuable or too slow to understand things'. 57n the follow-up article, titled 'What does being feminist mean to you?', the paper published the answers of thirteen women to that question, some of them active in the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI -Union of Italian Women) -a broad 'unitary' organisation gathering socialists, independents, but also many communist party activists -, the PCI, the extra-parliamentary left or in independent feminist collectives.Many of the responses converged on the refusal to reduce feminism to a 'label' or narrow definition, and on the notion that its realisation was in the actual relationship between women and in the consciousness of their shared oppression.
The need to experience feminism in everyday life and in personal relationships -especially with regards to partners and within the family -was mentioned across the board by those interviewed.In fact, many respondents equated feminism to their own personal experience of transformation.That is the case of Lidia Menapace, a former member of the resistance and erstwhile activist in the Catholic movement, who would eventually adhere to communism and the Il Manifesto group in the late-1960s (Menapace died of COVID-19 in late 2020): 58 Becoming a feminist meant for me setting numb limbs in motion, pushing aside an abstract language from my mind and recovering a taste for the image, the movement, the body; [it meant] no longer being ashamed to be a woman, nor considering myself a lesser person for being one. 59nese de Donato (1927-2017), a photographer and co-founder of the pioneering feminist monthly Effe (1973-1982), remarked 'feeling very feminist', but confessed she 'endures the known lacerations for [my] activism in the communist party'.To her, feminism was inseparable from 'the everyday confrontation with one's own partner and one's own comrade in a political sense', because 'no man wants to voluntarily renounce their own privileges'.Similarly to Menapace, she notes having once been 'anti-woman' -'I wanted to have the mind of man' -, only to, finally, 'rebel against myself'. 60 striking aspect of this source is how the voices it contains constantly evoke the peculiarity of the communist movement as a terrain for feminist politics and reflection.Not because it was especially hostile, but because it posed specific challengesboth in terms of limitations and opportunities -to female activists.In 1977, the PCI was, namely, at the height of its popularity under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, boasting 1.8 million members, of which over 438,000 (24 per cent) were women. 61t combined, namely, two facets: that of the moderate party that was not only loyal to, but had, in fact, played a major part in the genesis of the Republic's constitution and in the establishment of its democratic institutional order.The PCI provided, in that regard, a fundamental channel for various subaltern segments of Italian society to those institutions.On the other hand, joining the communists equally represented a contestation and refusal of the capitalist status quo and its multiple inequalities: as the 'Cold-War enemy within' the PCI was effectively barred from joining national governments.This dual role made it increasingly attractive to women who became politicised during 1968 events or in their aftermath, that is, as both a platform to challenge the establishment, but also a conduit to institutional politics and, more importantly, to working-class women (or other cross-class encounters).
Commenting on the surprising number of young feminists who had departed from organisations of the extra-parliamentary left and joined the PCI in the mid to late-1970s, Rossana Rossanda remarked that: 'One enters the PCI … as if boarding a train; to shorten the distance between oneself and the masses.Because it is the biggest instrument of socialisation.Because it is the super-institution'. 62Maud Bracke termed this the 'process of post-1968 reinstitutionalisation', whereby there was a 'transfer of political agency by social movements to the political parties and state institutions which they had previously contested, specifically the PCI'. 63e 'double militancy' of Italian communist women: 'fertile schizophrenia' or 'bifurcation' of the subject?
Many Italian women who joined the PCI in the 1970s were hence keenly aware of the tensions -and potentials -inherent in the interplay between party and movement, between a militancy that played out in an institutional environment and at the level of the neighbourhood feminist collective, between struggling for women's rights through the prism of social equality and of sexual difference.The bridging of communism and feminism was, in this sense, a lived experience in post-1968 Italy, one that was so commonplace that it even had a name: 'double militancy'.As such, it puts the question of the links between communist and feminist politics under a new light.Rather than adjudicating on their (in)compatibility, the researcher's task becomes more akin to catching up with historical subjects' own variegated attempts to merge the two.
PCI women activists were cognisant that these efforts and other achievements risked being erased from historical memory.The Archivio storico delle donne 'Camilla Ravera' -the PCI's women's archive -was established in 1987 precisely to counteract this looming invisibilisation.In an event dedicated to its opening, Nilde Iotti presciently remarked that a dedicated collection was necessary, because 'the contribution of women [to the PCI's history] risks being blurred into the background, fading into the general political history'. 64The practice of 'double militancy' is, in this regard, at the same time a document and an embodiment of this 'specific contribution'; the following brief reflection on how it relates to the 'double blind spot' will close this article.
In an intervention from 1979 titled 'Double militancy as existence', Laura Lilli  (1937-2014) remarked that, in its narrow definition, the term meant 'belonging, at the same time, to a party or a "group" that is organised politically (either in the "new left" or the historical left) and to a feminist collective'. 65In other words, it did not contemplate activists who were, on the one hand, party members or trade-unionists, while also active in the UDI; this condition had long been a reality for many communist women.Rather, it reflected the novel phenomenon of membership in these organisations alongside militancy in the non-institutional environment of the feminist group.
As such, 'double militancy' brought tensions that had long characterised female militancy in the communist party to a head.At least since Palmiro Togliatti posited a peculiarly 'Italian road to socialism' in the immediate aftermath of liberation, party activism had spelled a dual existence for women.The 'new party' envisioned by Togliatti for Italy's post-war democracy featured, namely, not only a specific policy on the 'women's question' anchored on a coordinating Sezione femminile [Women's Section] on the national scale, but encouraged the formation of workplace and territorial (nonmixed) women's cells. 66This political and organisational stress on the specificity of the 'women's question' was anchored on the insight that: women's emancipation, in fact, is not and cannot be the problem of a single party or a single class … the unity of all Italian women considered, in their entirety, as a mass bearing common interests must be achieved; because [as a mass] it is interested in its own emancipation, in the profound transformation of its own conditions of existence and hence in that renewal of the country as a whole without which this transformation is not possible. 67e organisational space meant to support this convergence of struggling women was the UDI, but Cold War imperatives quickly meant that an organisation with a decisive presence of communist militants in its ranks and leadership, even if autonomous from the PCI, would not be able to coalesce Italian (antifascist) women. 68While the UDI included socialists and independents throughout its history, most Catholic women chose to converge to their own umbrella organisation, the Centro Italiano Femminile (Italian Women's Centre), founded in 1944.Togliatti's positing of a 'women's question' that encompassed 'multiple classes and social segments' would, nevertheless, have an enduring impact in the PCI's stance towards 'women's emancipation'. 69Beyond the question of the merits and limits of this stance, it unwittingly created a dynamic that saw communist women have to fight a permanent two-front battle with their male comrades.Namely, the tenacious and courageous battle to counteract the marginalisation of the themes tied to women's emancipation in the 'general politics' of the PCI, to break free from the ghetto in which women felt they were enclosed … [At the same time,] the constant need for communist women to be legitimated as political cadres and leaders in their own right, compelling them to defend the value of the 'specific'. 70 this situation had been the historic offshoot of what Grazia Zuffa called the 'profound ambivalence of the PCI's politics of emancipation', the practice of 'double militancy' marked the peak of those contradictions.Its advent in the 1970s formalised, namely, the difference between a 'general' politics in the framework of institutions (alongside male comrades) and a 'specific' politics of the personal, which was mostly 'separatist' (i.e., encompassing only women).As a result, communist women gradually began pursuing these distinct forms of struggle in fully separate organisations with their own membership, statute and goals -a break with communist taboo that the party first tolerated, then openly accepted.
It is no coincidence that this practice emerged precisely in the mid-1970s.The period marked not only the high-tide of the feminist movement in Italy, but is framed by two key victories on women's rights on the legislative front: the 'no' vote in the referendum aimed to repel the 1970 divorce law (1974) and the legalisation of abortion (1978).'Double militance' was hence a direct by-product of the key role that both the UDI and the female membership of the PCI more generally played in terms of mediating between an increasingly mobilised feminist movement 'on the streets' and a tentative CP leadership 'in the institutions'.This bridge-building effort was crucial to the extent that PCI support was vital to pass major progressive legislation.While Italian feminists had other allies within parliamentary politics, such as socialists and liberals, the latter did not have the political weight of the communist party.
What complicated matters was the fact that the Berlinguer-led PCI was in the midst of an attempted alliance with the more progressive wing of Christian Democracy in that juncture.The 'historic compromise', as it was called, was predicated on assembling the widest possible coalition for a gradual, yet profound transformation of Italian society.Hence, communist leadership was weary of antagonising too broad a swath of Italy's Catholic masses through decided support for women's struggles that were increasingly informed by the demands of the feminist movement.On the other hand, if the PCI failed to commit to the pressing reforms that emerged from these struggles, it would not only be renouncing its own historic banner of 'women's emancipation'; it would also be disavowing a pillar of its current -so-called 'Eurocommunist' strategy -, namely, encompassing 'new subjects' as part of its broad alliance for social change.
It is in this context that communist women sprang into action.Overcoming the initial hesitation of PCI leadership, they were instrumental in eventually bringing the party's official stance -first on divorce, then on abortion legislation -decidedly closer to that of the movement.This coincided with a shift which, starting with the 'Sixth National Conference of Communist Women' of 1976, saw the party gradually break with a framing of 'women's emancipation' as a specific, yet clearly subaltern struggle, culminating in the official recognition, in its 17th Congress of 1987, of a 'man-woman contradiction' alongside class conflict. 71Double militancy', as the term suggests, did not resolve the tensions between 'being communist' and 'being feminist'; it only provided a form through which women activists that identified as both could negotiate these tensions.In this vein, Zuffa characterised 'double militancy' as 'a form of conscious expression of the "lived" contradiction of various spheres and practices'; a contradiction that, she stressed, 'did not want to be immediately resolved', because it 'recognises itself as a richness, as the sign of a complex identity'.72 Lilli reports having initially framed this condition of duality in a similar sense, that is, as a 'fertile schizophrenia or ambivalence' that was fundamentally 'a political phenomenon circumscribed to a specific historical moment'.73 Yet, after contacting a range of women practicing 'double militancy' for an oral history volume, she reached a different conclusion; the practice, namely, 'went far beyond a simple episode in the history of feminism'.74 It had, in fact, 'an existential dimension'.In other words, it encompassed 'the mode of affirming oneself -in confrontation with the world or themselves -of all "self-conscious" women'.Hence: For the [female] trade-unionist the true double militancy is not to be at the same time in the union and in the feminist collective, but 'how' to be in the union.For the communist woman, it is not how to reconcile party and group, but how to live within the party. 75t differently, it is only when activists worked to overcome the duality of being communist and feminist by being feminists in the communist party, that all the ramifications of this attempt at convergence became apparent.As Zuffa remarked, while so-called 'new subjects' (i.e., feminist women, politicised students etc.) were progressively embraced by the party, especially under Berlinguer's leadership, they 'quickly reveal themselves as not fated to integrate themselves painlessly into the traditional social bloc of the PCI as was expected of them, and even demand a redefinition of the contents, forms and strategy of its politics'. 76It is precisely because of this fundamental challenge, namely, that it is not enough for a party to encompass new actors and struggles if it is not willing to be fundamentally transformed by their presence, that some communist women desired 'double militancy' to no longer be necessary, for it to be transcended through a more unitary praxis.de Donato's testimony clearly externalised this longing.Her experience illustrates how 'double militants' could be an uncomfortable presence not only in the party, but in the feminist collective as well.As mentioned previously, de Donato was part of the independent feminist publication Effe.'Within it', she remarks, 'I was "the enemy", "the communist"'; in her local party cell, conversely, she was 'regarded with suspicion' as '"the feminist"'. 77While conscious of her own development as a result of this process, de Donato understandably reports wanting 'to be well, affectively and politically', in the form of an 'organic, well-sorted being'. 78Hence her assertion that: If double militancy was no longer necessary, the laceration would be at an end and I would finally be content.I want to be able to be a communist feminist; I want what the party gives me to fit well with me; I want to be a single person, not a bifurcated one. 79ercoming the double blind spot as historians is arguably to attend to this desire of subjects themselves to no longer be split apart.The challenge posed by figures such as Lilli and de Donato to those confronted with the reconstruction of their trajectories is, in other words, to enlarge our understanding of feminist practice to encompass female communist militancy, while also remaining aware that the former does not fully absorb the latter.

Conclusion: whose agency or whose history?
'The unexpected fate of the world lies in restarting the pathway to trail it with the woman as subject'.Lonzi's appeal at the end of Sputiamo su Hegel anticipated a key intimation behind the subsequent feminist turn in historiography, namely, that 'includ[ing] and account[ing] for women's experience' should culminate in a wideranging 'critical reexamination of the premises and standards of existing scholarly work'. 80In many ways, Scott's seminal essay still challenges historians to fulfil that fundamental task of transformation.In a balance sheet of what had been achieved in the twenty-five years since the essay's publication in 1986, Scott identified 'some progress toward these goals'; she also stressed, however, that there had been 'far more success in introducing women into the picture than in reconceiving of it in terms of gender'. 81n similar fashion, if a reconsideration of communist women as historical subjects evokes Lonzi's exhortation of a radical restart, only a sustained effort can enable the ensuing itinerary of transformation to fully run its course within the research landscape.Put differently, the affirmation of overlooked subjectivities by the historian can only go so far if the field's own topography is not reshaped through these vindicating gestures and the new presences they afford.Along the same lines, the dilemma behind the 'double blind spot' does not hinge on whether communist women are 'worthy' subjects of historical inquiry, but rather, on whether strict disciplinary boundaries in scholarship -as well as equally narrow conceptions of what being a communist and a feminist encompass -can be transgressed to accommodate their trajectories.In line with Scott's intimations, if historians truly overcome their estrangement from communist women as feminist subjects, not only will a gap have been closed, but the transformative possibilities of the confrontation with these actors for the field as a whole (and their operators) will also have been actualised.
In this regard, Lilli's broader definition of 'double militancy as existence', that is, as the condition of duality in the life of every woman 'who is confronted, day after day, with an institution', can speak to many other subjects -and here the category 'woman' is at its most relative and open. 82Because, in a wider frame, 'double militancy' refers to all those subaltern subjects who are engaged in transforming established structures, first, through their very (often unwanted) presence in them; second, by virtue of their smuggling in of new emancipatory 'forms, contents and strategies' to that environment; elements that they crucially had picked up and developed 'outside' these institutions, in their other lives.
Which brings us back to the questions on gender and historiography raised by Scott.In her stock-taking effort of a decade ago, she argued, in similar fashion, that 'academic feminism' first emerged as 'the knowledge-producing arm of a broad-based feminist movement devoted to radical social change' in the 1970s and 1980s; yet, as feminist scholarship 'gained institutional credibility', it seemed to 'lose its close connection to the political movement that inspired it', she concluded. 83The last few years have seen a global resurgence of feminist politics that is, once again, having a considerable impact in scholarship.How, then, will this latest wave of activism-inspired research relate to communist women as historical subjects?In terms of the fate of the 'double blind spot', that is no doubt a crucial question; one, however, that another of Lonzi's prophetic intimations suggests should be put on its head.After asserting that 'this [1970s] feminism shall also end one day, thanks to us', she remarked how: It makes me curious to imagine what the feminists of the future -or simply those women yet to come -will think … .There's a good interlocutor; an acceptable adjudicator if we cannot do without one. 84er sensitive to the political qualities of different temporalities, Lonzi evokes future feminists as a fail-safe against generational self-aggrandisement.This article has argued that there is, perhaps, a place for communist women alongside them as our fruitful interlocutors .For, if female communist activists finally shed the label of remote and imperfect 'precursors', emerging, instead, as our radical contemporaries, how is it that we appear in their eyes?Notes