The Twenty-Year Journey: Flavia Steno’s La Chiosa and the French Daily Newspaper La Fronde

The first issue of the Genoese weekly La Chiosa (Annotations) was published on November 20, 1919. The magazine was presented by its director Flavia Steno as an instrument of political and social “literacy” for its readers, whose entry into the political sphere appeared after World War I to be imminent and certain. This chapter looks at the magazine’s reinterpretation of nineteenth-century emancipation movements and focuses on how La Chiosa crafted an identity for itself as heir to an earlier tradition of women’s journalism, La Fronde, founded in 1897 by Marguerite Durand. Thus, Steno attempted to trace a genealogical history that leads from Durand’s daily to her own weekly and to establish its relevance not only throughout Italy, but especially throughout Europe and internationally.