La Librería de mujeres de Milán en el presente

The Milan Women’s Bookstore opened on the fifteenth of October, 1975, and continues open. To speak about it is to speak about something that arose in a very different world but that lives in the world of today. Because of this it is important to ask ourselves about its meaning in the present, which cannot be a repetition of the meaning that it had then, because the world has changed also thanks to it. The Bookstore, from its beginnings, has been as much a shop as a workshop of political practice, a group of relationships and a place of production, a personal opportunity and a commitment shared with other women. The women who inhabit it today and who participate in its initiatives continue to be above all women of the generation of the feminist movement of then. Some of them are the same, amongst them are the founders; others of us have come afterwards but come from the same wave, and there are very few of 40-30 years old or less. This confirms that it responds to demands of the past, although it continues to respond to the present-day demands of the founding women and other older women. What is clear is that it does not appear to respond to (conscious) needs of the younger women who live in today’s world, although there are some women between 30 and 40 who do work and use the Bookstore for their politics. However, although they are few, these women make up a significant presence in the Bookstore, which means that they do not just follow on with what we were already doing, but that they act as protagonists. I see this as a sign that the little presence of this generation – not only in the Bookstore but in general in (Italian) political life – does not indicate a lack of transmission, as may have been thought, but rather something else: the need to find political forms and terrains that are adequate for today. One change led by these women who are around thirty years old has been the most important change that has taken place in the Bookstore’s activities since its beginning, a change that has given new life also to the traditional activities of the Bookstore: the opening of the web page (libreriadelledonne.it). This shows that the question is made not only or prevalently in generational terms –of relationship between generations – but in terms of relationship with the world as it is today, because the Internet constitutes an important difference of the world of today. I think that it is the younger women who will be able to and will have to find their forms, places and directions of political fight. We cannot know what they will be. A place where there is a glimpse that something is moving is the workplace. In the journal Via Dogana some women aged between 30 and 40 have written to express their unhappiness in today’s work, and this might be an indication: an indication that work might today represent the area of conflict that for the women of my generation was family and politics itself.