MARINA TESORO

Ghisleri e la questione femminile

N. 148

Summary - Arcangelo Ghisleri was one among the few political men and intellectuals of democratic-republican views to actively occupy himself with the woman question. He opposed the dominant opinion of his time according to which the situation of the objective inferiority of the woman were to be ascribed to motives of a natural and physiological kind. On the contrary he maintained that the woman possessed the same capacity as man and like the man could operate positively within the society. The fact that in the reality of the nineteenth century’s end women were on the contrary and in great majority passive and uninterested in political events stems from political and cultural reasons: first of all the influence of the Catholic religion; the impossibility of access to higher educational levels as men did; the prevailing mentality that attributed to the woman a rôle exclusively within her home. Ghisleri always fought against the discriminating prejudice, being often on the side of the feminists, for example Anna Maria Mozzoni. In the end, the various contributions by Ghisleri to the subject, published in the reviews he founded and directed between 1870 and 1912 are analysed.