American Girl in Italy

I’ve been a faithful reader of Feministing for about two years now, but this is my first community blog post. A little bit of background about me: I graduated in May 2010 from Barnard College in New York City. At Barnard, I majored in Italian and was also part of the Education Program on the Secondary track. Upon graduation, I received my New York State Teacher Certification in Italian 7-12. I love teaching and I love Italian, so I also applied to the Fulbright Program for an English Teaching Assistant position in Italy. Shortly before graduation, I was accepted to the program and placed in Naples, Italy. Fast forward to now and here I am in Naples, where I’ve been since October, teaching English to high schoolers at two different public schools.

Throughout my time in Italy, I’ve been struck by how women are treated, thought of and expected to behave. Compared to the United States (and we all know it is far from perfect there), Italy has a much more traditional view towards women- especially in Southern Italy (Naples is part of the South). Even if women have jobs outside the home, they are still considered responsible for most, if not all, of the housework, cooking and child raising. This is very deeply ingrained in Italian culture and it’s really, really rare- to the point where it is almost considered unacceptable or strange- to find a woman who does not take charge of these duties or to find a man who is a stay at home dad. Aside from my own personal experience (I’m trying really hard not to make sweeping, uninformed and observational generalizations) the statistics alone are a testament to the situation for women in Italy: In 2010, in the World Forum’s Global Gender Gap Rankings, Italy ranked number 74 out of 134 total countries in its treatment of women. This was one of the largest gender gaps in Europe, ranking Italy behind many Eastern European and South American countries. According to Newsweek, only 45% of Italian women work outside the home – the lowest rate in the European Union- and when they do they earn 20% less than their male counterparts (on a somewhat related side note, Newsweek also reports that 95% of Italian men have never used a washing machine while 70% have never used a stove. (Um, what?). On top of this, or rather, directly related to it, we also have Berlusconi’s misogynistic, inappropriate, and generally creepy, escapades with (often times much younger) women. Not exactly a good role model for gender equality.

And of course, High School is a particularly rough time for everyone, but especially for girls. At this age, kids are usually not yet aware of how deeply sexism penetrates our behavior and forms our attitudes and opinions (although, to be fair, many adults aren’t either). Consequently, teenage girls are usually the victims of some pretty harsh standards coming from both their male and female peers. In Italian High Schools, I constantly feel at a complete loss for how to handle the blatant sexism I see around me all the time. In the past, I have tried to do a few lessons on male privilege, what “feminism” means and how sexism can shape our daily lives. I even brought in a news article about a particular episode in which Prime Minister Berlusconi insulted a female politician of the opposing party, Rosy Bindi, on national television by saying that she was “increasingly more beautiful than intelligent” (basically, you are both stupid and ugly). I also had students do research for themselves on the statistics addressing Italian women today, which I have already mentioned above. While these lessons had some resonance with the female students in my classes, I could tell that they were neither truly engaged in the topic nor outraged by the injustice of it all. As for the male students, they recognized that it was mostly wrong, but did not see it as a problem worth spending time fixing. To all of these students, sexism was simply a fact of life meant to be accepted and impossible, if not unnecessary, to erase.

I realize that this situation may not be as simple as it seems to me right now. I realize also that this may be true for teenagers, or people, from all countries. However, given the statistics and the general attitude towards women that I see in daily life here, I can’t help but wonder how much of it comes from Italy and Italian culture itself. Aside from our lessons about sexism and class discussion, a particular event in class today struck me and inspired this blog post. However, I think I’ll leave it here for now, as an introduction to a series of entries on sexism in Italy and continue on with further explanation of today’s class in a later entry.