"Con tutto da ricominciare": Vannina's spiritual journey in Dacia Maraini's Donna in guerra

Abstract

I am the proud owner of a 1975 copy of Dacia Maraini's Donna ill guerra. The now out-of-print Einaudi edition has followed me around half-way the world in the last thirty years and has marked several major stages of my own process of growth. Buying this explicitly feminist novel when it first came out was already a "rebellious" gesture for the teenage girl that I was. At its publication in 1975, in fact, Donna in guerra was marketed and received mainly on the basis of its feminist content. Maraini herself defined it in an interview as "il mio romanzo piu coscientemente femminista" (Ruffilli). The book's back cover, however, also indicated a sociological context in the novel: the crude picture of the problems taking place in Italy in the 1970s, from the slavery of home labor and the degradation of institutional sites to the violence and excitement of revolutionary political factions. In fact, it is the encounter with an extremist left-wing group that was presented as the most significant event of the summer of 1970 for the development of the protagonist Vannina.