Feminist Circulations: Towards a Translocal and Transnational History of the Women’s Health Movement in 1970’s Italy

For the very first time, this chapter offers a translocal and transnational history of a crucial but hitherto neglected part of Italian feminisms: the national branch of the Women’s Health Movement, which consisted of a multitude of small collectives and was the protagonist of an extraordinary struggle for reproductive rights and sexual health. Based on printed, oral, audiovisual and archival sources from Italy, France and the United States, the chapter highlights how those collectives—despite different positions and various disagreements—were not isolated groups but expressions of a translocal and transnational movement. Including the Italian case in the Women’s Health Movement history and putting it in dialogue with other national cases reveals that these feminisms were not so much a structure composed of an Anglophone centre and a non-Anglophone periphery but a complex polycentric structure in which practices, ideals, solidarity and knowledge circulated and changed, constantly adapting to the various national and local contexts.