ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the origins of the Italian women's movement beyond the hegemonic narrative of 1968, with the aim of challenging the idea that Italian second-wave feminism arose from the ashes of that iconic year. It offers an analysis of both the women's movement's 'debt' to the 1968 experience, and its development 'despite' the 1968 protests. The Italian women's movement was initiated 'after' 1968, but its origins must be traced to the felt need to denounce the limitations of emancipationist feminism as much to the '68 movement itself. In the words of Mariella Gramaglia, feminism was a 'revolutionary pedagogy for revolutionaries'. The chapter briefly discusses the role 1968 played in the development of the women's movement in the early 1970s, and concludes that experiences of revolutionary agency in the late 1960s and 1970s were more gendered than is usually admitted.
