This mid-length film, created at the order of the Italian Communist Party, analyzes the difficult position occupied by women in both the North and South of the country, contending with labour—industrial or traditional—and the patriarchy, with the goal of revealing the underlying mechanisms of Italy’s nascent capitalism and the social upheaval hidden behind the façade of an economic boom.

Cecilia Mangini chose real women of all ages and from all regions of Italy for her protagonists: labourers, farmers, home workers, emigrants, housewives. She shows us workers participating in union struggles to defend their jobs against layoffs, against exploitation in the factories and in the fields, against the abusive use of home labour—women workers engaged in progressive struggles for peace and the defense of liberty and democracy.

In 1965, the film won the Special Jury Prize—the jury being Joris Ivens, Jerzy Toepliz and John Grierson—at the International Leipzig Festival, but its distribution in Italy was hampered by the government’s decision to withhold approval under quality regulations.
 

Marina Mazzotti
Programmer (FIFF and FIDÉ) and friend of Cecilia