Materiale divulgativo, Oggetto 31

Editrice SCRITTI DI RIVOLTA FEMMINILE We began publishing Writings of Rivolta Femminile -the green books - in 1970 with Let's spit on Hegel and in 1971 with The clitoral woman and the vaginal woman by Carla Lonzi. Rivolta Femminile's publishing activities began thus with two booklets which we distributed by hand at feminist meetings or through those few bookshops that did not consider them a priori as low culture. We immediately realized that our task was difficult but not impossible and that the advantages of independence were incalculable. On the one hand, to refuse the backing of a publisher was to express symbolically, as well as practically, our detachment from culture and to make us responsible to ourselves; on the other, a series of our own publications spared us the risk of losing the thread of our nascent identity through the misunderstanding to which women's actions have always been subject. But the real novelty about our publishing house is that we publish our own writings about ourselves. For us the point is to become aware that discovering oneself takes place through writing. Publishing was never our concern: we did not have the torment of regularly having to turn out novelties; instead, we wanted our writings to contain something that was really new, an awareness, a conquest of an identity that springs from the resonance between women Even the part regarding research into women's history has never been conducted through conventional essays and methods of cultural retrieval, and the insistence in our research on preserving our own present-day subjectivity has permitted the gradual understanding of similar attempts made in the past by women who remained unheeded and uncomprehended precisely because of culture's continual reabsorption of any hint of autonomy. We realized that, then as now, this reabsorption is facilitated by women who, in leaving to others the task of a more profound and individual research with its tremendous burden of risk for the future of each woman involved, restate in obvious terms advances in thought which must remain instead in their original terms if they are to avoid becoming a futile embellishment of male ideology. Is it possible that the women who mediate in this way do not realize that they are providing and updating precious fodder for a culture that assimilates it as material for its customary rehash? The result is that the official and popular image of feminism no longer has much to do with feminism's profound motivations. One ends up being satisfied with a revolution in appearance instead of aiming for a change in civilization which allows the existential vision of women to match up to, yet remain distinct from, that of men.