Women’s Voices from La Proletaria: Work, Solidarity and Women’s Emancipation in a Post-World War II Italian Consumers’ Co-operative

Italy today is a country with many co-operative enterprises in goods production and services; however, most women workers are found in consumer co-operatives. This article analyses the role of women in one of Italy’s largest co-operative enterprises, UniCoop Tirreno, from its birth as La Proletaria in the immediate post-war period until the late 1990s. Findings are based upon archival evidence and an extensive series of interviews with the women who played key roles in La Proletaria. Very interesting results emerge, both in terms of women’s access to work and in their relationships with their husbands and families; how they balanced reproductive, domestic and care work with work at the co-operative. Women also reveal how they were affected by their environment, what it meant to belong to a “working-class city,” a milieu characterised by very strong, deep-rooted practices of solidarity, which sometimes ended up taking precedence over women’s emancipation.