by Viviana Pezzullo
Armanda Guiducci’s La donna non è gente (1977) is a volume collecting related autobiographical narratives in which collaboration is the result of the dialogic, polyphonic, and heteroglot relationship between Guiducci and the women narrators she interviews. Guiducci’s work proves how the notion of singular authorship and language of noi is inadequate to capture the diversity of women’s struggles across Italy. In La donna non è gente, the narrators–women from rural areas of north and of south Italy–embody through the alternance of Standard Italian and regional and local dialects the dialectics between urban and rural spaces. I argue that the power dynamic between urban and rural areas works as a more comprehensive marker that better describes the diversity of women’s conditions within the feminist movement than the mere Marxist concept of social class.