ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have discussed Black women's experiences in Italy and considered their position in relation to the wider gender debate within Italy. This chapter is concerned with the development of political relationships between Italian women and ethnic minority women and the ways in which this represented an attempt to establish a more inclusive gender politics in the country. The chapter begins by briefly examining the recent history of political feminists' relationship to questions of 'race and ethnicity' and then proceeds to a discussion of a major initiative promoted by women activists within the Pds. This stands as one of the first attempts, in the early 1990s, to incorporate the question of ethnicity into the gendered political practice of progressive women activists and it took the form of a mixed women's association called Libere, lnsieme .1 I shall be arguing that the attempt to address ethnicity within the framework of progressive feminist thought exposed some weaknesses in the theoretical underpinnings of the practice of a gendered politics.
