Even the most secular of the Resistance parties, the Action Party, trod very carefully on the question of marriage. One of its most elaborate programmatic documents proposed the ‘restoration to the state of sovereignty in the matter of matrimonial legislation’, but was careful to add: ‘taking opportune measures to ensure that the religious wedding ceremony also is legally binding to all civil intents and purposes’114 – that is to say, marriage regulated by the 1929 Concordat was to be saved. During Badoglio’s forty-five days, La Voce Repubblicana, a newspaper which was to be on the margins of CLN policy, had written that ‘regeneration’ and the ‘re-consecration of the disrupted family, the truly essential nucleus of civil society’ was necessary.115
‘For the defence of the Italian family’ was an article by Togliatti published in L’Alba, the newspaper printed in the USSR for the Italian prisoners. In it appears the argument that Fascism only chattered about defending the family, seeking all the while to take possession of it.116 The reduction of divorce to a bourgeois luxury was not incompatible with an attitude which superimposed on ancient working-class traditions of scant attention paid to the ritual formalities of the union between the sexes the concern, once again, not to alarm the Catholics.117
Earlier we saw, in a stance taken by Secchia, how for relations between comrades the repudiation of the family model was the order of the day in the Communist Party, but how, at the same time, the metaphor of the party and/or the band as ‘like a family’ was widespread. Even at that time the ‘ambiguity of the very concept of working-class cultural autonomy’ appeared particularly difficult to resolve as far as social and moral conduct was concerned: ‘Was it a question of being capable of thinking independently what the borghesi thought or else of thinking differently from the borghesi and even in opposition to them?’118
Among the resistenti positions appear in which loyalty to the family and loyalty to the cause (whatever name one gave the latter) clashed frontally, and in conformity with classical tradition. ‘At certain moments of life’, wrote Moscatelli, in tune with Pajetta’s positions, already mentioned, ‘you cannot think of your family and your patria at the same time: either the one or the other. I have made my choice’. Moscatelli added that, although he had a sister who was arrested and ill-treated, ‘in the exchange of prisoners I never give her name because the Garibaldini come first’.119
The few explicit stands in favour of changes affecting the very institution of the family are found almost exclusively in minor newspapers. One of these, which claimed to be written by ‘well-informed borghesi’, denounced the way in which the ‘middle classes’ lived ‘the sense of the family, the real meaning of which – the cooperation of forces between blood-relations in the sphere of the affections and to a certain limited extent in the economic sphere – has been falsified, and is seen instead as an abstract entity dominating every member of the family from one generation to another’.120
Another newspaper, with a more powerful innovative drive, demands ‘a profound revision of the intimate and private way of conceiving the family, religion, the patria, the condition of women in society and the education of one’s children’.121 Giorgio Labò, who was to die fighting in the Resistance, wrote in his diary: ‘X has given me a strange definition of an enemy: “He who seeks and is able to kill my loved ones”. It remains to be seen whether these “loved ones” count more than any ideal!’122
Involved here certainly, and particularly in piccolo and medio borghese circles, was real intolerance for the relations between the generations, to which we shall have to return. This intolerance had also been expressed by Fascism. But the war and the catastrophe into which the regime had plunged Italy now provided a kind of objective confirmation of it, laying bare the two faces of Fascism – conformism and false anti-conformism.
This is how we should read Resistance invective against the political apathy of Italian women, enclosed within the horizons of their family and now weeping their hearts out: ‘Yet you raised no objection when your children in the schools were dressed up as balillas, armed with muskets, nor did you protest when they were sent to the campgrounds and trained for war. You did not rebel when the adolescents were sent to die in Africa.’123
In a similar spirit a woman harangued those women who were ‘guardians and vestals’ of the hearth: What are you safeguarding ‘in that closed circle of the kitchen and the saucepans imposed on us for centuries by the arrogance of men’, and what if the war should put an end to all that?124
A friend told Franco Calamandrei how his father ‘trapped’ him into enlisting into the RSI: ‘He’s mortified, exasperated – but doesn’t feel he can break with his family. And seeing that I consider this fact to be extremely grave makes him even more depressed.’125 Avanti! noted with regret: ‘There are a good number who, seeing their parents’ tears, have crossed the thresholds of the Fascist barracks.’126
The family, wrote another of the minor papers, was corroded by the same selfishness that was the ruin of society: the fact that what is involved was ‘dilated selfishness’ does not makes things essentially any different; on the contrary it means that the interest of the ruling classes springs from the coalition of this broader selfishness. If the revolutionary does not succeed in re-educating his own family (the ‘felicitous’ solution) or at least in being tolerated by them (the ‘peaceable’ solution), he has no choice but to ‘abandon his family and seek another family among his comrades of faith and struggle’ (the ‘hard’ solution). This declaration concludes with an argument that reinforces the invective recorded above:
It is strange that that affection which everybody talks about was not manifested to prevent the young from participating in an infinitely more murderous war than any political action: one is led to suspect that this is because it is more convenient to have a combatant and perhaps even a ‘fallen hero’ in the family than a deserter or a conspirator.127
This sarcasm, aimed at combating ‘the hypocrisy of social customs’, and what, in a different context, would be called ‘amoral familism’,128 could nevertheless end up, on the plane of proposals, in requests that were not really radical, such as ‘the abolition of prostitution, the protection of young women, the repression of adultery, the granting of divorce’.129
The shelving of programmes for restructuring the age-old institution of the family may be seen as the application of the ‘the two-stage policy’ – first let’s think about winning the war of liberation, and the reforms we’ll think about later – even to a field in which it was more than ever uncertain when the second stage would occur. But it is also true that a particular form of nostalgia for family life certainly helped encourage this postponement. Those who fought in the Fascist war had felt that ‘a gust of wind is taking us away from that family that we loved so much’.130 For the resistenti, being cut off from one’s family was more often than not experienced, with simplicity, as a sad unavoidable fact, as a parenthesis accepted, because of the exceptional circumstances, which left intact the nucleus, both real and ideal, of family ties. ‘In a situation of ferocious laceration’ the importance of the family could even assume towering proportions, and ‘the drama of the families … multiplied the dramas that each person had to live day by day’.131 ‘It’s incredible, but what torments them is fear of alarming their families. The fact that the Germans will very soon be returning fire bothers them less’, wrote Pesce of a group of young Gappists of the Olona valley out on their first action.132 The same ‘breadth of female solidarity around the partisan movement’133 was coloured by family solidarity, whose reality and warmth it evoked, as when in relations with the population there appeared the ‘ “maternal” figures of women’.134
At the same time, so great was the force of the family model that it bestowed reality on the mannered formula of the band as being ‘like a family’, which I have already mentioned. The solidarity and fraternity that were established between those who participated together in risky exploits became a sort of surrogate way of s
atisfying needs that are normally met by family life but that Fascism had frustrated, fostering fractures and distrust within the very bosom of families.135 ‘It’s the struggle that unites’, remarked a woman partisan about an elderly couple, comrades of hers, who resembled two young people in love. Still more significantly, another woman partisan lived the life of the band so intensely ‘like a family’ that, when a partisan fell in love with her but waited for the war to end before making ardent declarations, she started crying, ‘because they seemed like incest to me’.136
It was ‘partisan marriages’ that marked the re-establishment, within the bosom of the band and with its blessing, of what was well and truly a family nucleus, but one freed from the customary civil and ecclesiastical procedures. An episode recounted by Franco Calamandrei shows how timeworn, though ineluctable, the latter might appear. Comrade E. had got married in church in order to content his wife’s relations, and was ashamed to confess it: ‘But I thought – he told me – that the Fascist registrar would have been no better than the priest: he too would have represented a falsehood. And this comforted me in my decision … And what does it matter, anyhow! The important thing is that he’s happy, with a gleam of liberty on his face, and an unusual confidence.’137
The non-existence, for the time being, of morally valid positive laws was stated by a civil delegate of the 6th Langhe Garibaldi brigade who, celebrating a marriage in liberated Alba on 28 October 1944, reminded the newly-weds of ‘the duties deriving from the laws of nature and the customs of peoples fixed in the civil laws, and which in the case of Italy will be established in the laws that our people will give themselves when the patria is liberated from the foreign invader’.138 Another partisan official delivered the following address to all those present, ‘after having spoken separately with the couple’:
Not knowing what the partisan rite by which you want to marry involves (you are the first to make such a request to the Command), I believe that all this public ceremony need do is announce the fact that you are husband and wife, besides the fact, which is already known, that you love one another. Carry on as you are, and when this situation has changed, you can, if you want, legalise this union of yours which rests on your consent, on love and mutual esteem.139
And a GL partisan spoke of his marriage to a comrade as being ‘an enchanting ceremony’.140
If, then, few traces remain of how the resistenti conceived of family morality, still more tenuous and hard to interpret are those concerning sexual morality. One can just about seek to identify the poles between which not so much conduct as the few sufficiently explicit declarations move.
In the first place we find a rigoristic pole, which follows a well-known trend of the revolutionary tradition, and was made more demanding here by the promiscuity to which life in the bands often compelled one. An Italian soldier related how the men and women Slovene partisans generally slept in separate bunkers, and that in any case relations between them ‘never went beyond the limits of rigid “partisan correctness” ’.141 ‘My chiefs’, an Italian woman partisan recalls, ‘had an exaggerated puritan rigour, a truly extremist prudery’, so much so that they sent her fiancé into another, distant formation. As for herself, ‘I calmly accepted it when they said I was acting like a whore. But I have lived as a Catholic.’142
Demands for seriousness addressed to partisans of both sexes mirrored this.143 A male partisan was ‘tied to a stake for an hour in punishment for having spoken indecorously to a woman’.144 In the Communists this rigour was reinforced by the party ethic. ‘Communist women must set an example’, one female partisan recalled having heard Gramsci say to settle a question of morals.145 Another woman partisan, Anna Cinanni, narrates: ‘There was great respect, the maximum respect, between women and men: I can say that I slept together with partisans, he on one side, I on the other.’ This partisan based her conduct on words that her brother had said to her: ‘Remember that you’re not a woman: you’re a Communist, and you’re fighting in the Resistance.’ Years later, Cinanni remarked: ‘Perhaps, if I had felt the sentiment of love more than the fighting sentiment, my life would have been different.’146 It has been justly written, by way of comment on the declarations of a woman worker about her brothers’ severity towards her when she was young: ‘ “Severità” corresponds in the women’s accounts to workers’ “serietà” in the men’s accounts.’147
It is hard to make out how much conformism to ancient codes lay hidden in this puritan rigour. Eugenio Curiel guessed as much when he rebuked the Calabrese Paolo Cinanni, mentioned above, for seeing in Anna not so much a Communist as a sister, and not a woman.148 But sometimes it was simply a question of countering the vulgarity of certain clumsy attempts to be humorous, which used ‘the witty quips of pornographic rags or those of the humorous papers that come out under a Fascist regime’.149
Rigour motivated not by reasons of principle, but in the name of the needs for security imposed by clandestinity and the partisan struggle at once takes us onto a higher plane. Here, ancient fears could emerge, which saw women as being fragile to the point of betrayal, and made it seem in any case risky to have relations with them. There were those who felt ‘a sense of disgust at seeing certain goings-on of partisans with peasant wenches, which are dangerous’.150 Even where a more indulgent view was taken, concern often tempered the paternalism with which the gallant exploits of the partisans were looked upon. The ‘women who have too soft a spot for the Garibaldini’ and the women dispatch-riders who got tongues wagging were seen as a danger.151 In the view of some, ‘it is still thought that women are not to be trusted’152 or, worse, that women were more likely to become morally degenerate and be spies.153 The reproaches meted out to those who gave way to this way of seeing things are therefore important. Taking the use of weapons as a symbol of equality, the SAP Command’s reply to the above-mentioned report urged the abandonment of ‘preconceptions that women are weak creatures incapable of using weapons. Such preconceptions are the fruit of our social conventions and of our backwardness’.154
Nelia Benissone Costa, a Communist partisan, recognised that the GAPs often died ‘because however much prudence was recommended, they were young, possibly they got involved with some girl who talked, who was not serious’; but with proud firmness she asserted: ‘It is as well to say that of all the women who fell into the hands of the Fascists not one spoke. They were marvellous.’155
Many complaints emerge from the Communist sources about the fact that ‘thanks to the comrades who sabotage them’ the women are still badly organised and are absent from the governing organisms where they ought instead to be admitted, freeing them from ‘purely technical work’.156 Writing to Dr Anna Marengo (‘Fiamma’), who had been put in charge of the cultural section of the 12th division, the commander Moranino remarked: ‘Life among the men is so hard since it involves uprooting a whole baggage of prejudices that these lads still have about women.’157
In Bergamo ‘no one has ever given any thought to the work women should be doing, through the usual incomprehension’, and if anything the ceto medio had been approached, not the factories or country areas.158 In Padua, to support his appeal ‘to put a stop to bourgeois and Fascist prejudices’ against women, a party envoy felt compelled to recall that women are gifted with ‘admirable reserves of energy’ and constitute ‘50 percent of the human race’.159 Another leader urged: ‘Compagne, react against the Social Democratic tendencies of some of your comrades who still can’t conceive that Italian women are worth as much as the women of the Soviet Union and the Balkans.’160
‘I don’t do woman’s work’, was how a Communist answered a woman comrade who had asked him to wash the dishes: ‘Gina was saying to him, “From now on you can stop calling yourself commander because you don’t deserve it”, when I, a member of the ferocious bourgeoisie, turned up and did the job for her.’ Artom, who was there on the scene, declared his sympathy for Gina, even if he was keen to make it clear that ‘she has the fanatical mentality
common to women who busy themselves with politics’. Nevertheless, Artom was at least scrupulous enough to ask himself whether this view of his stemmed from misogyny or anti-Communism.161
Rarely then was there coherence between the solemn declarations of women’s rights162 and relations between the sexes as they were actually practised. At times a simple adjustment to common practice prevailed, which an Umbrian partisan has expressed in the following words: ‘What can you do, do you want to check every man? If one wants to go about nitpicking …’163 The old practice of transposing into play what rigour denied in principle could moreover show its face again. The rigid Tersilla Fenoglio tells of the game, played with the ‘boys’, of ‘rape trials. What wild laughter there was!’ Once, when, in the clutches of a ‘colossal Lombard’, she was screaming ‘he’s raping me!’, in came the political commissar, who, when informed about what was going on, ‘ruled omnia munda mundis [to the pure all things are pure] and went off like an old priest’.164
But there were also relations between men and women inspired by a higher morality which repudiated both asceticism and laxity, and gave a glimpse of the conquest of love as a choice freely made. Anna Cinanni has spoken of the discussions about free love made in the ‘Fronte della gioventù’ during the period of clandestinity.165 There is some indication of this in the letter in which ‘an Italian woman’ accuses Fascism of having reduced her to ‘an instrument of procreation’, and in the condemnation of ‘bourgeois prejudices that would have the woman either as a beast of burden or a lapdog’.166 A similar formula – woman as ‘an instrument of pleasure or an instrument of luxury’ – is stigmatised in the manifesto of one of the minor parties.167
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