In a photograph dated 1968, Carla Lonzi appears with a halo around her head, almost in the guise of a saint—though clearly one of the modern age. She's smiling and joyful, with a glowing structure in the background that seems to crown her like a Madonna in a medieval painting. Yet her smile bears none of the religious detachment typical of the holy women and virgins depicted in traditional art. Instead, it's the expression of a woman who, as she would later say about herself, has the ability to take charge of events and shape her own story.

The parallel between one of the leading feminists of our time and the women of religious tradition is not uncalled for. Lonzi herself recalled how, even as a child, she was fascinated by the autobiographical writings of female saints: “through their words, what I would otherwise have had to reject as the result of morbid and unreal emotions began to take shape. 1 What captivated Carla was their ability to question, to doubt, and to search within themselves for strength—often giving up everything, yet never letting go of what she called the essential.

Carla Lonzi dedicated her entire life to the pursuit of this essential—a search driven by a vital need to remain true to herself. This commitment was clear from the very beginning of her career as an art critic, where she challenged and overturned the conventional model that placed the artist and their work at the center, while everyone else—especially, as she would later emphasize, women—was left to the margins, merely as passive spectators.

Her writings clearly reveal her firm refusal to betray herself: “Leaving was nothing, compared to the pain of betraying myself. And this ease with which I could walk away whenever something was asked of me that conflicted with my conscience was, more than anything else, what kept me from losing myself in emancipation or apparent success.” 2

Despite all the recognition Lonzi received—and it would have been more, had she settled for the role offered by a world gradually opening up to women’s emancipation, she never confused freedoms with Freedom: “feminism presented itself to me as the possible way out between the symbolic alternatives of the female condition: prostitution and cloistered life. It meant living without selling one’s body and without giving it up. Without losing oneself and without seeking refuge.” 3

She eventually left her art critic job to devote herself entirely to feminism, to the Rivolta Femminile 4 group—which she co-founded—and to the practice of building relationships with the many women who shared with her a path as intense as it was fruitful. Though her journey ended too soon, when a serious illness took her life at just 51, her writings remain a lasting legacy—one of the most valuable contributions Italian feminism has produced. The understanding of reality, the depth of her analysis, the ability to identify both the limitations and boosts to women’s freedom in the real world while bringing into it things unforeseen by the established order: this is the substance of her writing. Approaching all this for the first time can almost be overwhelming. For the women of her generation and mine who had the privilege of engaging with her thought, Carla Lonzi was deeply meaningful. For me personally, it was the right encounter at the right time. I still remember today, with immense gratitude, the impact that her essay Sputiamo su Hegel (Let's Spit on Hegel) 5 had on me when I was still a young woman who longed for justice and political activism. Even before reading it, the title alone had already given direction and meaning to my personal journey, already marked by confusion and frustration.

One might wonder, however, what Carla Lonzi can still offer to younger women, raised in a time when emancipation has (more or less) been achieved. I believe she offers something both precious and indispensable, especially today, when politics seems to have been reduced to something very small, a mere management of interests (often personal), and the needs of the economy, of politics, of society seem to have shrunk the spaces for a true freedom of action. A time in which the world feels both unchangeable and full of danger, and the presence of the other is experienced, above all, as a threat.

Lonzi teaches us that when women refer to their own gender, they create a space in which to weave relationships that bring about the very freedom that today seems at risk. This kind of female freedom recognises differences—starting with the fundamental difference between the sexes—and knows that alterity is what creates subjectivity. This freedom is rooted in the present since it stems from relationship, which always imply the presence of bodies and words. It belongs to an embodied subject, whether woman or man, who—in the words of Maria Luisa Boccia, one of the main interpreters of Lonzi’s thought—doesn’t disregard their own sex, but in fact reverses their natural sexed condition and turns it into the conditions of possibility of that very freedom.

Through her life and her writings, which are themselves the result of that life, Lonzi shows us that female freedom is the unexpected accident that opens the way to other accidents. Guided by her deep love of freedom she showed us a path into a new, possible world, revealing that love for the world and love for oneself are not in conflict.

This path is open to anyone, woman or man, who is able to turn toward what is essential: “Now I exist: this certainty justifies me and gives me the freedom I alone have believed in[...]. All the distinctions, the categories that once shaped my identity through dissent—as a woman, I saw no other way—no longer belong to me: I do what I want. This is the only thing that feels true in every situation, and I subscribe to nothing else. I understand how much I’ve left behind along the way, but I also know that nothing could have stopped me from seeking what is essential. Now, it’s the superfluous that draws all my attention and my desires.” 6
1 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini, from C. Lonzi, “Itinerario di riflessioni”, in È già politica, Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, Milan 1977.
2 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini, from C. Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla. Diario di una femminista. Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, Milan 1978.
3 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini, from C. Lonzi, Itinerario di riflessioni.
4 Rivolta Femminile (“Women's Revolt”) refers to the first female-only feminist group, created in Rome in 1970 with a meeting between Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and Elvira Banotti.
5 C. Lonzi, Sputiamo su Hegel, La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, Milan 1974.
6 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini, from Taci, anzi parla