On February 13th, a million people, most of them female, demonstrated in cities across the country. Many of them carried signs that read “Se Non Ora, Quando?” (“If Not Now, When?”), the name of the organization that planned the protests. A hundred thousand people attended a rally in Naples, the heart of southern-Italian conservatism and a bastion of mammismo, or mother worship. The event in Rome was giddy and charged; as hundreds of thousands of people filled the vast Piazza del Popolo, disgust gave way to determined optimism. “We needed the Ruby case, because suddenly I’ve seen many people, many women, who’ve decided they can no longer be silent,” the right-wing deputy Giulia Bongiorno, who defected from Berlusconi’s P.D.L. last July, told the cheering crowd. “Do you know the only area in which I see women protagonists, in which women play a central role?” Bongiorno yelled. “Jokes. We’ve had enough of being the butt of jokes!”
Protesters danced and conducted a group scream, and eight popular young actresses performed excerpts from e-mails that came to the Se Non Ora Quando? Web site. “We’re not happy to be a second-rate country or an ugly television soap opera,” Susanna Camusso, the first female leader of the country’s largest labor union, said, to applause. “We want a country in which it’s possible for women to live in dignity!” Camusso put a finer point on it when I spoke with her later: “If you make the dental hygienist of the Prime Minister a regional councillor in Lombardy, you are creating a culture problem.”
Cristina and Francesca Comencini, the sisters who formed Se Non Ora Quando?, were astonished by the success of the demonstration. “We organized this in twenty-five days,” Francesca said, when I visited her apartment in Rome, a place filled with sunlight and cigarette smoke. Francesca, who is forty-nine, has reddish hair and freckles, and was glamorous even in sweatpants. “We did everything without knowing very well how,” she said. “We created the blog in one night, and in the morning we opened it and we had two thousand answers.” The protest was arranged entirely by e-mail, and the sisters didn’t know how to turn on their auto reply. “So we’re sitting here, the two of us answered personally five hundred people.”
The Comencinis are adept storytellers and marketers of ideas: Francesca has directed fourteen films, and Cristina is a novelist, a director, and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. Their ability to make an idea seem exciting—traditionally one of Berlusconi’s great strengths—helped make the demonstrations a success. They enlisted celebrities; in a short video that Francesca made to announce the rallies on YouTube, the movie star Angela Finocchiaro implored the country’s “dear men” to “tell the world that you don’t want to live in a bad fifties movie.” They invited a diverse group of speakers, including a nun and a Moroccan immigrant, and they chose music that was hip enough for teen-agers but nostalgic enough for their mothers—“everything from Aretha Franklin to Florence and the Machine, everything giving a feeling of what we are,” Francesca said. And, crucially, they crafted a message that would appeal to people of varying political persuasions, billing the rallies as an unobjectionable “call for women’s dignity.”
“They are very scared by us, because Berlusconi is a very good communicator, and he recognizes very, very well that this organization was different,” Francesca said.
“Even the rally was very friendly, cool,” Cristina, who is fifty-five, said. “There was energy like a rock concert and—”
“We were attractive!” Francesca burst in. “Berlusconi has always said, ‘I am more attractive than the left,’ and in a way he was right! Because they are sad. We tried to be more attractive. And in fact we are—more modern, more happy.”
The Comencini sisters are proud that “we never pronounced his name” during the speeches, but of course Berlusconi was everywhere that day: pictured on posters above the word Basta!, cursed by housewives and Catholics who had voted for him because he promised to promote the family. Flavia Perina, a right-wing deputy who abandoned the P.D.L. in December, told me, “In the beginning, Berlusconi brought an idea of a liberal revolution for the masses—he would open up a freer economy, simplify the bureaucracies, bring greater well-being for families. But all these promises, in time, have not been fulfilled.”
Perina was on the organizing committee for the February 13th rally in Milan, “the capital of Berlusconismo.” Like many right-wing women, she had felt no kinship with the previous wave of Italian feminism, in the seventies, which was intertwined with the Communist Party. The feminists of the time mobilized around several core issues: the right to divorce, which was achieved in 1971; the right to abortion, which was legalized in 1978; and the end of “honor killing.” For Perina, their emphasis on “the absolute value of emancipation through work” was alienating. “There is a sentence by Camille Paglia: ‘My Italian grandmothers had more power in their families for the role that they exercised than young women have today in the new generation,’ ” Perina said. “We were convinced that was the direction in which we’d find the solution to the role of women: in the family, not in the workforce.” She laughed. “In the seventies, we thought this. Now, no. We all realized that this traditional family model could function only in an imaginary world, like Middle-earth.”
For one thing, a culture in which motherhood is a prerequisite for women who seek a measure of power or respect is not a culture that understands women as fully human. You can have an intense case of mammismo and still fail to grasp why sexual assault, or gender discrimination in the workplace, or the relentless depiction of women as bimbos on television is a problem. Silvio Berlusconi worshipped his mother. What’s more, women who become mothers in a society where child care and housekeeping are still considered women’s work find that they have time to do little else. (The average Italian woman does twenty-one hours of housework a week, while the average man does four.) Consequently, fewer Italian women are having children—“They are doing their own private rebellion,” Bonino said. In the next four decades, Italy’s population is expected to shrink by as much as twenty per cent; the Liguria region has the highest ratio of old people to young people in Europe. “The social services in my country are nonexistent in terms of children, old people, sick people,” Bonino said. “All this, they say, rests on the family. But that is not the family. It is the women in the family.”
Francesca Comencini, a mother of three, said, “I don’t know what the situation is in America, but here women are doing everything. This problem, which is really the problem of modern times, is not solved anywhere.”
“Well, Scandinavia,” Cristina said. “But it’s cold.”
