ABSTRACT
The association of the 1970s with militant feminism is problematic in relation to another fundamental experience of Italian women in those years. Feminist groups played a crucial part in shattering conventional cultural horizons and putting on the agenda for national debate issues and points of views which were not only new, but revolutionary. The women in the student movement were discovering that, if they had ceased to be angeli del focolare, they were now being relegated to the role of angeli del ciclostile, to use the witty and somewhat caustic phrase coined at the time. The years of the so-called femminismo diffusa, starting in 1974-75, were rich in social changes as well as in theoretical developments. 1974 saw the referendum on the proposal to repeal the divorce law. The civil and penal Codes retained laws and regulations dating back to fascism and even to the nineteenth-century liberal state, which clashed dramatically with the newly affirmed principles of equality and citizenship.
