A Woman’s Work: Female Intellectual and Artistic Labor in Modern Italy

The Italian Studies Program presents an open discussion with some of the authors of the volume Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy: Literature, Art and Intellectual History, edited by Sharon Hecker and Catherine Ramsey-Portolano and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.

The volume analyzes issues of gender, nationality, and race in the lives and works of women writers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, and poets in modern Italy, many of whom are little known today outside Italy.

Making different forms of art and cultural production in modern Italy was far more than a pastime for many women, most of whom faced challenges in producing their work and having it recognized.