Feminist Health Activism in Italy since the 1970s : The Ambivalent Legacies of Institutionalization

This book traces the history of feminist health centers in Italy from the 1970s to the 2010s, analyzing the ambivalent legacies of institutionalization for later waves of activism.

This book traces the history of feminist health centers in Italy from the 1970s to the 2010s, analyzing the ambivalent legacies of institutionalization for later waves of activism. While institutionalization is often seen as marking the end of a protest cycle, this book adopts a different perspective, examining how it shapes new cycles of mobilization. It traces feminist health centers from their origins as grassroots, self-managed initiatives in the 1970s, through their transformation into public services, to their re-emergence in the recent transfeminist wave of the 2010s. Drawing on four years of fieldwork in Rome and Milan—including interviews with activists from different generations, archival research, and participant observation—the book offers the first in-depth account of feminist health activism in Italy. At a time when reproductive rights and gender equality are increasingly under pressure, it sheds light on how past struggles continue to shape present forms of activism. Feminist Health Activism in Italy since the 1970s is of interest to scholars and students of social movements, gender studies, political science, political sociology, and the sociology of health.