ABSTRACT

Women's access to writing implies a double transgression: their entrance into history and

the recognition of a desire to know and to tell, especially to know and to tell about oneself.

Marisa Volpi asserts that the woman who writes find herself paradoxically at an advantage

today in relation to men, because for her the world has always been forbidding and closed;

only in exceptional circumstances was she permitted adventures and transgressions to

express the individuality of her self.1 The circumscribed space of a woman's world reflected

only indirectly the History of the world. Family affections, love and feminine activity were,

so to speak, an inner experience on which outer experience had an effect which was not

attributable to time, facts and ideologies, but rather to the relatively static nature of the

female role. Thus women were forced to explore the subjective rather than the objective. In

her early writing, Fabrizia Ramondino2 examines the separation between public and private

experience, and, in particular, inscribes her personal experiences as political activist in her

first book, Napoli: i disoccupati organizzati (1977). In this sociological essay, she explores in

depth what is 'subjective' and what is 'objective', creating vibrant portraits of contemporary

reality which transcend the regional context in which they are located. The recreation of

historical facts parallels the creation of a female authorial point of view that experiences

history in both personal and general terms.