Abstract
This research aims to analyse the vision of women within the Italian positivist culture, a vision certainly not homogeneous, which ended up seeing the contrast between two different perspectives. On the one hand—as evidenced in the essay of Anna Rossi-Doria, Antisemitismo e antifemminismo nella cultura positivistica (Anti-semitism and Anti-feminism in the Positivist Culture)—there were those who claimed, on the basis of alleged scientific doctrines, the natural female biological inferiority and, therefore, believed that the subordination of women, socially, economically and above all spiritually, was necessary. On the other hand, however, there were those who advocated equality between men and women, biologically, socially and economically: the work of the positivist Lodovico Frati, La donna moderna secondo i più recenti studi (The Modern Woman According to the Latest Studies), was inserted, for example, in this perspective.
Although there are significant writings on the topic (see, e.g. Garin, E. (1962). La questione femminile. Firenze: Olschki (The Female Question); Soldani, S. (1989). L’educazione delle donne. In Scuole e modelli di vita femminile nell’Italia dell’Ottocento. Milano: FrancoAngeli (The Education of Women. In Schools and Models of Women’s Life in Italy in the Nineteenth Century), the originality of the research lies in the discussion of a topic not much investigated, especially in a comparative perspective, and, as a result, on the ability to focus the attention on secondary issues of the historiography on the Italian positivism. Not intended to be exhaustive, the analysis will aim to highlight the role that the two positivist perspectives gave to the woman in the Italy of the late nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
“The volume of the cranium of men and women, even when compared to subjects of the same age, of equal size and weight, shows significant differences in favour of men, and this inequality increases with civilization, so from the point of view of the mass of the brain, and therefore of intelligence, women gradually differ from men. The difference there is, for example, between the average crania of contemporary Parisian men and that of Parisian women, is almost twice as much as male and female crania in ancient Egypt”.
- 2.
“Regarding all kinds of strength, not only that of the body but also that of the spirit and the character, men clearly surpass women, according to the normal law of the animal kingdom. Now, practical life is necessarily dominated by strength, not by affection, since it requires a tedious activity. If loving was enough […] women would be sovereign. However, above all, it is necessary to act and think, in order to fight against the rigor of our true destiny; therefore, men must command”.
- 3.
“In the positivist regime, the social purpose of women is the consequence of their nature”.
- 4.
“To make sociability prevail over personality”.
- 5.
“The main inferiority of female intelligence as compared with male intelligence is the lack of creative power [...]. In women, ideas are less clear, paler conscious states [...], such as peripheral sensitivity and morality, so intellectual sensitivity is lower”.
- 6.
“An antagonism between reproduction and intellectual functions”.
- 7.
“The female brain weighs less than the male brain. According to Manouvrier, the weight of the female brain would be, as compared with the male brain, 89.0–100”.
- 8.
“is completely imbued, from hair to toenails, with motherhood, and is even more perfect when she is a mother [...]. Motherhood is the first honorary title for women, and when she renounces it, she undermines human society and ceases to be a woman”.
- 9.
“Women [...] are placed in the field of the heart, and they need to rise to the brain, as the world is now positivist, and positivism can only be understood with the brain”.
- 10.
“The female nervous system seems to be more developed in the periphery and in the ganglia that preside over vegetative and psychic life and less developed in the centres that more properly preside over intellectual life”.
- 11.
“Women have an organ, a pivot-shaped muscle pouch, which has a tyrannical influence on her body and on the peculiar conditions of her state of being. That is the uterus. It is called women’s second brain; and in fact in the pathological conditions and also in the physiological ones, it deeply influences women’s sensations, feelings and actions. Foemina est id, quod est propter uterum. And this is all due to the intimate relationship of this organ with the brain, with which it has a double nervous connection, the superior hypogastric sympathetic plexus”.
- 12.
“It is in pain that women show evidence of better sensitivity. From this point of view, men are more selfish, more distracted by external concerns; women, who feel a special reverence for their affection, focusing it on a few people, feel the strength and variety of pain much more, especially when severe misfortunes strike the people they mostly care for; and there are certain kinds of supreme pain that people have always perceived as embodied in a woman”.
- 13.
“This fact of the lesser development of intellectual faculties in women is attested to by history and everyday experience. In the sciences that demand reasoning, says Le Bon, there is no mention of a remarkable work produced by a woman, and many of them have received full scientific education”.
- 14.
“The woman who has social life loses the qualities of her sex, and gets easily corrupted, and once corrupted she gets to excesses of infamy and libido to which men have never arrived”.
- 15.
“Lack of a sense of justice, which is too often paired with morbid piety or with hysterical altruism that appear as conscious or unconscious falsehood, and sometimes also as true and complicated wickedness, so that the most deplorable scams are so often dealt with good faith and the superficial judgment of men”.
- 16.
“A normal woman has many characters that keep her close to the brute, to a child, and hence to a criminal (anger, revenge, jealousy, vanity), and others that are diametrically opposed, which neutralize the former ones, but prevent her from approaching as much as men, with her behaviour, to that balance between rights and duties, selfishness and altruism, which represents the completion of moral evolution”.
- 17.
“in fact, women are different from men, which does not mean they are inferior: they are different, but equal, and as necessary as men are. Therefore, they should not go through any reduction of their rights”.
- 18.
“This novel, which is undoubtedly one of the best written by a woman in Italy, is just the story of a soul, a diary of a moral battle fought by a wife that is too intelligent, against an intellectually mediocre environment. And people liked it because of the sincerity and boldness with which the authoress had bared a woman’s heart”.
- 19.
“Women are neither superior nor inferior to men: they are different. They are different and unparalleled and equally necessary, since men and women are the two atoms that form the molecule of social life, if one of them is missing, there is no life. It is from this difference—which is psychologically as physiologically deep—that not only the adorable delirium called love is born, but also all the reasons why women must not have equal, but equivalent rights to men become very clear. Not equal, because they are different; not less, because they are not inferior; but equivalent, because their place in the world, according to the law of nature, is at the same level as that of men”.
- 20.
“Women equal or exceed men in the epistolary spirit; because women’s conversation is often wittier and smarter than men’s, and their wit is also conveyed in the letters they write with great ease. Even when doing business women often succeed quite well, precisely because they are cautious, distrustful, thrifty; virtues that are all necessary to deal with business”.
- 21.
“Women are the pivot of the family, and of society. And now that women occupy such an important place in society, we must make it possible for them to compete with men in everything”.
- 22.
“In motherhood, which does not require the fleeting moment of pleasure that men give from women, but the physical and psychological sacrifice of pregnancy, childbirth, puerperium and breastfeeding it is explained why women get stuck in their personal development between the child and the adult man, even though they are somehow superior to men, especially from the psychological point of view, like the spirit of sacrifice and altruism, which are still and always a reflection of motherhood”.
- 23.
“Positivist, anti-romantic, I know what one can reasonably look for in a woman: a man of thoughts who truly wants a woman, not a monster in her skirt by his side, should not expect the woman to follow him in his ideas”.
- 24.
“Your concern [Ghisleri’s concern about Ms. Veneziani] is interesting, despite the assertion that can be made on a woman’s brain regarding philosophical production”.
- 25.
“Music, like women is so holy in its prospects and purification, that men, even when involving it with prostitution, cannot completely erase the rainbow of promise that crowns it [...]. Perhaps women and music are meant for the broader resurrection ministry in the future that others cannot even think of”.
- 26.
“Confined between home-care and maternal care, a daughter repeats her mother’s actions for an incomprehensible series of centuries, while the man, by pushing his business to different horizons, got to be in contact with new and unknown stimuli, which improved from generation to generation, emphasizing that difference, which already exists in nature, even more, then distinguishing and dividing the two elements of the human couple with a deep and extraordinary cut. Creative power remains defective as the result of a lesser differentiation in brain functions, which also leads to lack of originality and monotony”.
- 27.
“The doctrines [...] clearly say a woman not only has a smaller cranium and brain when her body is smaller than that of the other sex, but also when her height and weight are the same”.
- 28.
“The nature of women wants them to work on household chores, to which not only her structure and her autonomy appeal, but also the historical and literary precedents”.
- 29.
“In this way, in all societies, public life belongs to men, while women are bound to home life. Without meaning to diminish this natural difference, progress increasingly develops and implements it”.
- 30.
“A woman with a book, in the imagination of many people, is no longer a woman, or at least she is a woman who no longer does what she ought to, and instead, carries out what she should not, and conveys the same image that a man who winds up a ball of yarn, spins the linen or makes socks would convey”.
- 31.
“The concept of educating women [...] to make them intellectually and morally better is [...] a relatively new concept [...]. Even a few years ago, the number of men in primary schools was by far higher than that of girls; now they tend to be even, and in some States, for example in France and in Bavaria, the number of women exceeds the number of men”.
- 32.
“naturalized the position of women in their differences from men, with the attribution of a great, grand mission in the assigned scope, and a determined aversion to deviations from that field, considered inconsistent and improper to some extent, and degenerative”.
- 33.
“Brilliant women often have male characters, their female genius could be explained the way Darwin explained the discolouring of females and males in certain bird species, due to a confusion between secondary sexual characteristics produced by crosses between paternal and maternal heritage”.
- 34.
“The 1908 Roman Congress was cramped; with its noble women and its size, it gives the impression of a setback”.
- 35.
“[...] at the end of the century and at the beginning of the new century, the general atmosphere was not even propitious to feminist battles also because the authority of zoologists, physiologists, and anthropologists was used to justify the natural inferiority of women”.
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Berardi, S. (2018). The Italian Positivist Culture: From Anti-Feminism to Social Emancipation of Women. In: Paoloni, P., Lombardi, R. (eds) Gender Issues in Business and Economics. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65193-4_7
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