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"Roberta, Lucrezia & Porpora, Roma". Lina Pallotta, 1990.

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Porpora Marcasciano is an Italian political personality and writer; she is currently president of the MIT (Transgender Identity Movement). Since the seventies’ agitations, in queer circles as well as in other areas of political engagement, she has contributed with her activism to a radical approach in LGBTQ+ organizations for civil vindications and rights, and bringing cultural awareness on the matters.

To be inspired from her translates, through my perspective, to respecting her work, in its historical relevance and legacy value, and the life she has shaped for herself and as a political act. In fact, it is to take on the trans-feminist approach when embracing a collective struggle, which is now as ever stratified and complex. To be, then, deeply critical of the social and economic structure on which prejudices, patriarchal binarisms, discrimination still flourish. An aggressive structure, as Porpora -among many others- has found out, to which existing in public is already perceived as a menace, when one is perceived as representing a “deviant” identity.

It should not only be an exercise in poetics, then, to keep demanding Bread and roses - and violets too.

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During my teenage years, I was introduced to the remarkable figure of Frida Kahlo. She embodied dynamism and resilience, actively engaging in every aspect of social life despite the challenges she encountered throughout her lifetime. She had to face chronic health issues, aggravated by a traumatic childhood accident. Kahlo's unwavering spirit and determination allowed her to transform her pain into profound artistic expression, inspiring countless individuals worldwide. Frida Kahlo boldly rejected the conventional Western beauty standards, embracing her distinctive Mexican features with pride and defiance. Throughout her life and art, she remained committed to celebrating her indigenous roots and cultural heritage, portraying herself unapologetically with her strong, expressive features.

Her legacy serves as a poignant reminder of the enduring power of creativity and resilience in overcoming adversity. Rather than succumbing to despair, she transformed her personal struggles into a source of artistic inspiration, using her creativity as a means of catharsis and self-expression. She represents, to this day, an icon of empowerment and self-expression.

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Being a student in International Relations, Margaret Thatcher is a symbol of inspiration who I absolutely admire.

Born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, a small city near Nottingham, and of Irish origin. After graduating at Oxford, she started her political career at 25 and after nineteen years she served as prime minister of the UK and leader of the Conservative Party.

First woman to do so, she was also the longest serving British prime minister of the 20th century. The press named her the "Iron Lady" for her politics and leadership, she was referred as the most powerful woman in the world; so powerful that the time period of her office is called "Thatcherism", inspiring women all over the world.

We can say that she started the process of women being not only part in politics, but women as leaders and being in charge of organizations and countries. It is not bold to say that it is thanks to Margaret Thatcher if nowadays leaders like Von Der Leyen, Meloni and many others are at the top of the political world.

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Oriana Fallaci was a successful writer and renowned journalist, from a cultural point of view she was one of the most prominent women figures.

She was born in Florence in 1929, well within the fascist dictatorship. The Mussolini political regime did not fit in at all with the rebellious nature of the writer, she spent years fighting the regime.

These hardships gave rise to the need to have a voice, which led her to the world of writing and particularly journalism. Journalism allowed her to travel (something that women were very rarely allowed to do at the time) and to get to know the world. Since her first collaborations with the journal “Europeo” she established herself not only as a reporter but as a protagonist of the journalistic narrative. Aside from the star-style interviews which made her name, she was an accomplished war reporter in Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Indian sub-continent. She began her career with celebrity interviews but progressed rapidly to international politicians such as Henry Kissinger and Indira Gandhi. The "La Fallaci" style of interview became something of a cult in North America - adversarial, emotional and extremely lengthy.

Throughout her work, she has remained a fierce figure, always in constant pursuit of revealing the truth in a society dominated by men. She was witty, well-prepared, and antagonistic; she got people to say things they ordinarily would n

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Miuccia Prada is nowadays one of the most important creative directors in the fashion industry. Even though who is not closely acquainted with this figure may consider a prominent figure of the fashion world being a feminist as a paradox, Miuccia Prada may actually prove this wrong. She is the grand daughter of Mario Prada, founder of the famous fashion brand. As a young girl she had no interest in the family activity and in fashion in general. She was much more active in the political field, she studied political science in Milan and even joined the Carlo Marx section of the Italian PCI. She was a "sessantottina" during the '68 riots in Italy and a second wave feminist. We can deduce that during her years of communist advocacy, working in the fashion industry was not even contemplated as a far possibility for Miuccia. Only later in her life she started to realize the potential that the world of fashion had to fight for women empowering and against discrimination. Miuccia did her first steps into the fashion as an outsider, as someone who had much to criticize to the mechanisms and patterns that characterized that world and the way women were depicted within that industry. Miuccia has been and is still nowadays a brilliant figure because she was able to do something no-one had been able to actualize before: she was able to destroy the discriminative patterns of the fashion industry from the inside, by resorting to mechanisms that characterized that very industry. She was able to overcome the voyeuristic and male-gazed attitudes that were dominant features of the industry, yet playing within the same game. I think that, even though her contribution is not much recognized by non-experts, she has been a prominent figure in the Italian feminist advocacy, because through her collections she has strongly contributed to build a new representation of what is the appearance and the role of women in societies. Before clothes for women were only meant to be beautiful and appealing according to the voyeuristic male desire, Miuccia has instead introduced the concept of practicality, of creating clothes that could be practical and useful for women, bringing so on the runway a new feminine figure, not anymore a fetish object of desire, but a new perspective on women: the one underlining their need for practicality, functional to their emancipation and to underline the fact that women are not merely objects of superficial admiration, but are citizens who can bring big contribution and be as active as men in society and labor force.

Miuccia did a real Revolution in the fashion industry, completely overthrowing the schemes that had been imposed up to that moment and proposing a new perspective of women and of how women can self-determine themselves in society, also through the power of what they are wearing.

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“write about a woman that inspired you” is probably the most common task ever given by Italian teachers in elementary schools, and I personally remember how, when I was a little girl I’d often think about her:

Teresa Menarbin, was born in 1924 in San Fidenzio, a small village in the middle of the countryside between Padova and Rovigo, in Northern Italy. Her father was a farmer and her mother the village’s obstetrician, her two brothers were taken away in the earlier stages of the Second World War from the army and deported to other regions, the family did not hear from them for years.
She helped in the hiding of her father and a family friend underneath a crop where they used to grow carrots and cauliflowers, by bringing them food and water from the house as she was still a kid, and did not risk (as much as adults) to be stopped, searched or questioned by Fascist-Nazi officers.
By the end of the war her brothers found their way back home, times were more calm and so she got the opportunity to study and become a teacher.

In 1946, at 22 years old, she participated and voted to the referendum held in Italy to decide to hold on to the Monarchy or rather, step up to a Republic, it was the first time women were allowed the right to vote in Italy, and she is always very proud to remark that.
Not too later on, she met her beloved husband Marco Antonio with whom she had four children. They moved from village to village, as he was starting his career as a doctor, they were kept close by a great love which she still cherish and honor nowadays. Marco Antonio unfortunately passed away suddenly in the late 1960s, and so, she decided to request an early retirement to take care of her four children (two of which were still under 10) and the elder relatives (some aunts and uncles both hers and her late husband’s).
As the children grew up, graduated, moved from the family-home to work and eventually got married, she started dedicating her time to voluntary work, which involved teaching analphabet adults to the gatherings of women in her village at first to pray the rosary, and then to read books and improve as they could their cultural levels.

Through the years among the family, she gained the nickname of “highlander”, as she really did go through many difficulties and never bent; in spite of some health issues, she held on strong to her independence up until 2021 (aged 97) when she broke her leg, and even though she completely recovered, she finally stopped driving and started needing some daily help, which she had never even thought about before. She now is in a nursing home, surrounded by the love of her family and will be turning 100 years old on February 28th.

Teresa Menarbin is my grandmother. I've always admired her strength, but what really struck me was her ability to quickly take up the pieces of the family and having the courage to give up everything and give priority to her family.
It is not much about how good she was in respecting the moral and social values of the family, as that is not up to anyone to evaluate. My admiration focuses on the strength of a human being to heal from the sudden death of such a loved one, be the only referenceable parent for four kids, and became the backbone for everyone in the family. And again, showing each and every one of us what does it mean dedicating a life to altruism, the determinance she has been holding for almost a century now, from when she carried food from the house to the hiding place or messages around the village to help people communicate, or when she dedicated her life to the help of others through her volunteering activities.

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She might not be considered a feminist, but still, I consider a feminist instance every attempt of coming to light in a male dominated environment by a person that is not a man, without in her/their turn submitting to or even fostering a patriarchal dynamic: according to me, Rosa Luxemburg falls in this category.

She was born in Poland in 1871, studied in Warsaw and then Zurich. For a while she led the Polish Social Democratic Party, before settling in Berlin, where she wrote her major works in political economy, which had a major impact in contemporary marxist economic studies. At the dawn of WWI, she strongly opposed the capitulation line of the Social Democratic Party, which led to the abandonment of a pacifist position in favor of nationalist ideals. Taking part in the foundation of the Communist Party of Germany, she was arrested during the uprisings and was massacred by the police.

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Throughout my life my grandparents, Shoshone-Bannock and raised in the Nez Perce Rez, have told me about a brilliant musician and activist named Zitkála-Šá (or Red Bird). Red bird was a Yakaton Dakota women who was vital in Natives receiving full citizenship rights in America. She was greatly against assimilation and spent much of her life teaching her language to whomever would listen. She wrote about her time in a missionary boarding school and spent lots of her time post-graduation creating schools and funding for those schools on Native reservations. One thing I have admired most about her is how proud of her traditional beliefs she was. Being against assimilation and forced Christianity in a time where she and her people weren't considered citizens was a dangerous thing. Her activism towards getting Native citizenship was intertwined with working with suffragettes to gain women's rights to vote. Her activism and pushing of white women to use their privilege for not only Native peoples but Black people as well was controversial at the time. To me, it showed how intersectional and ahead of it's time her activism was.

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The woman that inspires me the most is Audrey Hepburn. She was born in the aristocratic family in Belgium. Despite the fact that she was known for her elegance and style, her good manners and talent, she was a strong and brave woman, building her career and at the same time caring about her family, children and lives of the others in general. In 1989 she became a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF, she was helping people of Africa and South America, by providing food, water and medicine to the villages. She was more than just an actress, for me she was a person with a heart of gold, I hope that in my future I`ll be able to participate in lives of the others in similar way.

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Leonilde (Nilde) Iotti was an Italian politician and a partisan. She was a member of the Italian Communist Party and a leading figure of its formation called “Women’s defence groups”. During her political career she took part in the drafting of the Constitution as a member of the Constituent Assembly. Not only was she the first woman elected President of the Chamber of Deputies, but she also set a still unbroken record of longest time holding the position.

Furthermore, she was European MP under the first Italian delegation, where she worked to reform the election to parliament itself, through the promulgation of the law on direct European suffrage.

Her most well-known battle is the reform of civil rights, with the introduction of divorce into the legal system and its preservation thanks to the victory in the 1974 abrogative referendum.

I find her inspiring because she pioneered breaking the glass ceiling of Italian politics, and once she acquired power and a platform she worked tirelessly to improve the condition of all other women and granted them more freedom and rights. I also deeply admire her militancy in the Resistance against Nazifascism.

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Malala Yousafzai is a young Pakistani activist and blogger. She protested against the prohibition for girls to go to school imposed by the Talibans writing a blogger to let the world know what was going on in her country. Due to this activism, at the age of 15, she was attacked and shot in the head during her journey to school by the Talibans. Luckily she recovered completely.

In 2014, she won the Nobel prize for peace for her activism for the education of young girls.

When I was in middle school, some teachers were telling us her history and it inspires me in approaching feminism.

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As a socialist woman, I have been deeply inspired by Behice Boran's political and intellectual portrait. Behice Boran was one of the most influential Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century in Turkey. Her intellectual creativity was combined with political courage and she showed it clearly in certain phases of her life. Boran became the first women leader of Turkey’s largest socialist party ‘’Workers’ Party of Turkey’’ (TİP) in 1975 and she was also the first socialist woman deputy member of the national parliament. Obviously, she was an unprecedented woman for her time: a young patriot, a sociologist, an activist who stood against the imperialist aims of the US in Turkey, a socialist politician, a political leader, a member of parliament, a political theorist, a mother...

Moreover, she was among the pioneering women scientists of Turkey to conduct sociological field studies where she reflected deeply on research results by following a comparative scientific method. In this respect, Behice Boran was the scientist who applied the method of examining social layers for the first time in Turkey. She clarified the concept of social structure in her works, and developed insightful theories regarding Turkey's complex socio-economic structure.

On the other hand, Behice Boran was among those who paid the heaviest price for the ideas she held in 70s-80s Turkey, a time when violent ideological struggles between left and right, government and students, intellectuals were gaining momentum. She was imprisoned three times as a political convict, she had to give birth to her first child in prison, she had to escape the country in her seventies and many more bitter examples. To put it in a word, she faced the brutality of the government but she never gave up on her cause and kept her resistance alive till the day she passed away in exile.

To sum up, Behice Boran made history as a woman social scientist, academician and a socialist leader. Everyone, whether they embraced her thoughts or not, had to talk about Boran's strong personality because she was a fearless woman, a political leader, an academician, a mother and maybe more…

N.K.

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The smiling woman in the photo is my grandma, Angela Libero, born on the 9th of August 1947 in Sannicandro Garganico, a small village in Southern Italy.

She was the last of three children and lost both of her parents when she was quite young. So she was grown by her sister (who was twenty years older than her) and in a second moment by her brother. Even if loved, she was perceived by the families of her sibilings as a burden. Therefore, they made her leave school at 8 years old so that she could start working. When she was only 14 she was sent one year in Northern Italy to work in a tabacco firm.

She met my grandpa when she was 16 and they married at 19, they spent the first marriage night on the train to go to the "North" hoping to create a better future for themselves and their future family.

In Piedmont, she found work in a firm that produced chips for electronic objects. There she was victim of bullying because she was from the South. This aspect, together with the burden of caring for her new family, the house and the consuming working hours caused her severe depression. For this reason, she went into pension pretty soon (she was only 45).

What I find incredible is that, besides all the difficulties that she had to go through, my grandma is the most happy person that I know, from her every day I learn the beauty of simplicity and the importance of being connected to nature.

Her life is not an example of feminism, she adapted without any question to the fact that she should be first and foremost a "mother" and a "caregiver". This is one of the reasons that made me start studying feminism: to show her that an alternative to what she has always known exists and to validate some feelings that she sometimes has.

My grandma is incredibly curious, so even if reading is now complex for her, she would often ask me questions about some things that I mention or decisions that I took for myself, and she would listen with an open heart and without judgment, making me feel as if what I am doing is worth the effort.

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Matilde Hidalgo de Procel, a pioneering figure in Ecuadorian history, blazed trails in the realm of feminism with her unwavering dedication to women's rights and gender equality. Born in 1889, she became the first female physician in Ecuador and throughout South America, defying societal norms and advocating for the inclusion of women in the medical profession. Beyond her medical achievements, Matilde Hidalgo was an outspoken feminist who fearlessly fought for women's suffrage and political participation. In 1924, she made history by becoming the first woman in Ecuador and all of Latin America to cast a vote in a national election after women gained the right to vote. Her activism extended beyond her homeland, as she participated in international women's conferences, tirelessly advocating for the rights of women globally. Matilde Hidalgo's legacy continues to inspire feminists worldwide, as her courageous endeavors paved the way for future generations of women to pursue their aspirations and demand equality.

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When I reflect on an inspirational woman, the first person who comes to mind is my mom, even though it might sound like a cliché. I think we often underestimate the vital role mothers play in society, taking their efforts for granted or simplifying their work as routine. We tend to see mothers solely as caretakers, overlooking the immense sacrifices they make. My mother grew up in the Caribbean in a deeply religious household and later moved to the UK to pursue her education, where she met my father. She faced various challenges throughout her life, dealing with issues related to race and adjusting to life in different cultures. She had my brother shortly after finishing university and went on to have three more children over the years. Now, she lives in Germany and speaks the language. What truly inspires me about her is the sacrifices she made to raise a family and be there for us during our upbringing. She never fully pursued a career because of her commitment to us. In today's society, where success is often measured by career accomplishments, my mother's sacrifices often go unnoticed.

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When I think of feminist icons, the first one that pops in my head is Angela Davis. Born in the state of Alabama in 1944, she spent her life fighting systemic oppression on many different levels, becoming one of the most prominent figures of the intersectional approach. Relying on a marxist outlook, she targeted issues such as the prison system in the US, the fight for afroamerican liberation and the overcoming of gender disparities by showing how capitalism benefits from these oppressions, and calling for its dismantlement in favour of a socialist society. Davis' feminist perspective stems from the understanding that women are not born equal, and that feminism has to take into account factors such as race and class in order to achieve real liberation. She staunchly opposed the notion of feminism as the possibility for women to actively participate in systems of oppression (e.g. Margaret Thatcher) but rather argued for a feminism that aims at overcoming the structural injustice rooted in the system itself.

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Born and raised in Parma, Italy, now teaching in the US, Federici is a sociologist, philosopher and activist who revolutioned the fields of women's studies and marxist feminism with her research on the intersections between reproductive work, primitive accumulation, colonization and the capitalist subjugation of women.

She co-founded the Wages for Housework campaign in the 70s which paved the way for the recognition of domestic and care work as a feminist matter on a global level, and collaborated with a lot of radical feminist organizations around the world including Women in Nigeria (where she thaught for years) and Ni Una Menos.

I believe her work is an outstanding example of radical feminist politics and critical theory also with respect to "classic" leftist politics and marxism, dominated by men and macho attitutes. Her takes, for example, on the history of the witch hunt related to the modern conception of women's roles impressed me immensely and I think marked my way of thinking.

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Contemporary image by Mongolian artist Dolgoon, depicting Queen Anu at the battle of Zuunmod

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Queen Anu (c. 1653-96) was a remarkable figure in history during the downfall of the Mongolian Empire. Known for her fierce characteristics and wisdom, she was a representation of Mongolian historical women breaking gender stereotypes. Her husband, Galdan Boshugtu Khan, would rely on her for counsel during his reign, which witnessed the expansion of Dzungar Mongol dominion from the western reaches of the Great Wall of China to the eastern expanse of present-day Kazakhstan, and from northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia.

In 1696, apprehensive of a potential resurgence of Mongol power, the Qing dynasty dispatched three armies westward towards Mongolia, with the Qing Kangxi Emperor leading the expeditionary forces. Galdan manoeuvred his troops southward from the Khentii Mountains to confront the western column of the Qing army at the Battle of Jao Modo in May 1696. However, his forces soon found themselves encircled by the superior Qing forces.

In a decisive moment, Anu led a counterattack, enabling her husband to evade the enemy encirclement.

She was not only a formidable fighter but also a devoted soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice to secure the future of the Mongolian empire. Her courageous actions left an indelible mark on history, shattering the prevailing stereotypes surrounding the portrayal of women within the annals of the Mongolian Empire.