Female Biographies and Family History: An Approach to Social and Political History

In this chapter, the author Anna Lucia Denitto analyses women’s history from the perspective of family stories and social and political history. She deals with different historical methods to approach the history of women, and indicates the most productive and useful ones both for the interpretation of the stories reconstructed in this book, and for studying women’s political history in general. By examining the internal analysis of the family and its relations with civil society, she shows that the relationships between women and men can be reinterpreted in the sense of complicity and/or otherness. Through the stories of the women reconstructed in this volume, she highlights the groundlessness of the separation between the public/political sphere on the one hand and the private sphere on the other. She also applies to this book’s research the perspective of world history, which brings together the multiple interconnections between the different worlds in which our protagonists acted for promoting emancipation, work and the support for the weak. Moreover, the author notices that the results of this book help to overcome the stereotypes linked to the dualism backwardness/development: in fact, all the women dealt with in this volume operated in poor rural areas; nevertheless, they promoted innovative initiatives for the economic development of their regions. They also overcame the cliché linked to the tradition/modernity dichotomy, as our female elite gave a pre-modern activity like embroidery the new meaning of a means for emancipation. The relation between history and memory is finally reconsidered in the light of the crucial importance of archives, testimonies and interviews for the reconstruction of the history of women.