The Conceptualisation of Gender in Anna Banti, Natalia Ginzburg, and Elsa Morante. Feminist Narratives and Anti-feminist Consciences

This work aims to investigate the relationship between some of the most popular and significant women writers in twentieth-century Italy – Anna Banti, Natalia Ginzburg, and Elsa Morante – and feminism, focusing particularly on what can be perceived as a discrepancy between their narratives and their public and political stances. Indeed, I will argue that all authors are considerable feminists (or at least readable through a feminist lens) not despite their ‘anti-feminist’ statements but also in light of those. It will be doing so through a thematic analysis. This research will be structured into four macro-themes, shared by all the authors and aiming to shed light on the above-mentioned discrepancy – female subjectivity, motherhood, female friendship, and gender-based violence. These themes will demonstrate how and why these authors’ narratives are arguably feminist and will be juxtaposed to what I will define as ‘anti-feminism’. By doing so, this work will offer an investigation not only of these case studies but more generally of the conflictual relationships between women writers and feminism in twentieth-century Italy and how it evolved throughout the twenty-first century.