[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_25

From one room to another, Grazia Livi, 1984

This is a book of rare finesse.

In 1984, it was a publishing success, and almost inexplicably, it was no longer reprinted for a long time. The author herself is rarely mentioned. Like a star, this book illuminated everything before disappearing. “From One Room to Another” is a walk that brings us into contact with women writers, passing through their rooms, the ones that the author invents for them: Each is presented with a place that distinguishes it: Emily Dickinson's “upstairs room,” Jane Austen's “passage room,” and Caterina Percoto's “walled room.”

It's impressive how much literature there is about women and how many incredible female personalities were written and then were forgotten, how much documentation there is about it, but then, when you open an Italian school textbook, what you find is a profoundly different landscape: as I said in Sara’s story, in hundreds of male names, only a couple are female. A few lines appear on the Fight for the Vote, usually inserted in a box at the bottom of the page or a separate unit at the end of the chapter. It's humiliating, as well as incredible and unfair. But it is also instructive: this is how discrimination is taught and institutionalized. I want to report the result of a brainstorming with my last Italian class. I asked them what ideas they had of women based on what the book had shown and told them.

The following points are the ideas collected:

1. Women who have tried to do something good are strange (unfeminine, with something unnatural like not wanting children and a husband);

2. few women have tried to do something good;

3. Women who tried to do something good didn't do it as well as men;

4. There have been no female geniuses;

5. Women should not be treated like men (they don't even put them on the same page in the book);

6. Women must be taken into consideration as unique. It's a bit like how a Koala is considered unique compared to a cat. Aren't these the same beliefs and clichés most people share?