Peace or Women’s Rights? Italian and International Communist Women’s Movements, 1945–63

In 1963, Carmen Zanti, Luciana Viviani, and other representatives of the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) swiftly exited from the Moscow convention room where Madame Eugénie Cotton, President of the Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes (FDIF), had just delivered the welcome address to the International Women’s Congress.  Frustrated that their attempts to redirect the FDIF’s program toward women’s emancipation and away from Cold War politics had not been fruitful, the Italian women simply walked away from the Congress.  Some members of the Italian press reported that a deep schism in the communist world was sure to follow and delighted in relaying the tensions that had surfaced between the women’s organizations. 
This paper will examine the relationship between the Unione Donne Italiane and the Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes as it developed in the immediate postwar period until this dramatic moment in 1963.  It will analyze the UDI and the FDIF in light of the goals of the Italian Communist Party and the influence of Cold War politics. The FDIF’s agenda of peace and women’s rights initially appealed to the women of the UDI.  However, they soon came to view the FDIF as entrenched in the discourse of the Cold War, promoting a worldwide communist agenda over women’s emancipation.  Meanwhile, in Italy, the UDI was carefully defining its ties to the Italian Left and focusing on the specific gender-based interests of women.  
Because of its emphasis on the connections between the national and international political participation of Italian women, this paper will attempt to “globalize” the postwar Italian women’s movement.  It will consider the significance of the “gendered internationalism” discussed by Leila Rupp in order to connect the multiple facets of women’s associational lives for a more complex understanding of women’s history in the European and world contexts.