Between Public and Private. Sexuality and Maternity in Three ‘New Women’: Sibilla Aleramo, Maria Montessori and Linda Murri

Abstract

In Italy at the turn of the nineteenth century, the theme of sexual freedom, independent of procreation and starting a family, was virtually absent from the cultural and political debate. Only the anarchist movement alluded to it, along with the questions of free love and birth control, known at this period as neo-Malthusianism, though it tended to lay more stress on economic motives than on libertarian ones.1 At the dawn of the twentieth century, through the agency of the Italian Neo-Malthusian League (formally constituted in 1913),2 publications of a popular kind, produced by small publishing houses with anarchist sympathies, began to circulate. Providing information about the anatomy and physiology of the reproductive organs and about methods for avoiding conception, these writings also addressed the themes of ‘conscious procreation’ and ‘voluntary maternity’,3 and did much to promote a debate in Italy on the sexual question.4