The internet and activism for women's rights

The women’s movement in Italy started 40 years ago – in line with other movements born all over Europe at the beginning of the 1970s. Its moments of glory included the mobilisation around various civil liberties (such as the law that legalised abortion in Italy in 1978) and the protest against violence against women that brought millions of women onto the streets to claim their rights. The general decline of political action in the 1980s (characterised in Italy by the rise of terrorism) impacted on the women’s movement, which renounced mass street protests and preferred to concentrate on local action and on initiatives affecting daily life. The trend changed again in 2005, thanks to the use of the internet by the women’s movement. Myriad micro-initiatives have found ways of mobilising again using the internet, without the support of big organisations (such as unions and left-wing parties) and even without the support of the traditional media which, in Italy, seem to have totally forgotten civil rights campaigns and gender debates since the end of the 1990s.