She is remembered for a single book, On the side of the little girls, which was also his first, published in France in 1974 by Éditions des femmes, which printed 250,000 copies. Her work as a writer, partially translated, was however much broader, sometimes abandoning the essay for the story. Disappeared on December 24, 2022, at the age of 93, Elena Gianini Belotti remains largely to be discovered.
The work published in Italy in 1973 by Feltrinelli sold 600,000 copies in the peninsula. Translated into fifteen languages, it was also a great success in French, “ maybeexplained its author forty years later, because the living conditions of women in the two countries are quite similar “. Above all, its tone was so new that its title became the name of a pioneering Italian publishing house at the end of the 1970s and that of a collection of Éditions des femmes.
Drawing on her experience as a teacher in Rome, in a public school which prepared early childhood professionals, and as director of the Montessori Birth Center in Rome, where women prepared for childbirth, Elena Gianini Belotti showed how , from breastfeeding, girls and boys benefited from a great disparity in treatment and consideration which came to condition their gender, and hence their future and their place in society.
No one truly benefits from a system of oppression
“ What I wrote seemed disconcertingly banal; I was very surprised that nobody realized it and revolted “, she will say much later, without having yet taken the measure of the novelty of her approach – which some feminists have qualified as misogynistic, in particular because she described the traditional role of women and mothers as essential. for the survival of the patriarchy. His approach to gender based not on coherent innate structures linked to a sexual identity, but on social constructions seemed just as disconcerting, even if it followed paths now marked out by research and the militant milieu.
Finally, she showed how a system of oppression does not satisfy anyone, neither of course those who find themselves in the role of the oppressed nor, just as precisely, in those assigned to the role of the oppressor. ” What good can a boy gain from the arrogant presumption of belonging to an upper caste?she asked, just because he was born a boy? The mutilation that he undergoes is just as catastrophic as that of the little girl, convinced of his inferiority… and his own development as an individual is deformed, his personality impoverished, which makes relations between the two sexes difficult. »
On the side of immigrants
She wrote about the American dream of Italian emigrants, retracing her father’s journey, dedicating a novel to the shattered destiny of Italia Donati, a young schoolteacher at the end of the 19th century who was pushed to suicide by unfounded rumors, retracing the journey of immigrants who transformed the face of an Italy more than reluctant to accept its new role as a land of welcome. She showed in this way how much race, like gender, imposes a fictitious social identity that promotes alienation. His discourse can easily be compared on this point to what American sociology has called intersectionality.
If other of his works have since been translated into French, this famous unknown remains largely to be discovered. Perhaps we should start by re-reading his flagship book and seeing what it still painfully echoes today. “ On the one handshe confided in 2014, I’m glad my book is still relevant. On the other hand, I regret it, because it may mean that there are hardly any changes in the childhood of little girls. “Those who are wise go to heaven, it is customary to say, the others go where they want. Almost fifty years ago, Elena Gianini Belotti blessed their insolence.
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