This site and the -
next -
book do NOT
be a fount of notices but an ENCYCLOPEDIC
gather of different
subjects:one
another to
be read time by time, or better to
be CONSULTED
even for learning, and so this Web site will always be
maintained
under speedy and diligently revised construction:
On the matter of fact people
had to
lament
hindrances on looking through this site, and asked to be better
orientated. To favour this need the site's map changed: as first sight
one can begin from a simplified
page opening wide the whole indexed
files, both the Italian and the English and plurilingual ones, eventually before looking at the file prefacing
the English pages,
future
first chapter of the English book. Any way the site is
continually
up-graded: to be carefully informed also on the past more significant
ones it is suitable to go to the dedicated file Novelties on
the site.
To read a book - a real book on
paper,
sewn and bound - is easier than reading long files on-line: in a little
while the English pages of this site - as has already been done for the
Italian ones - will be PUBLISHED, PRINTED
and
SOLD
in book-stores - as a NORMAL BOOK as is already
the Italian
book from this site Bambini
di
ieri
= adulti di oggi.Adulti di
oggi ->
adulti di domani
The
meaning of the arrow
on the site and book title suggests three
messages:
it could be a sign of help.
of direction
or
also a hint to "against"
This
English
file/chapter Domestic
chores. Ergonomic and psychology of a TRUE work
does
not mirror exactly the Italian one Le FACCENDE
DOMESTICHE.Ergonomia e psicologia di un VERO lavoro,
completed by Legislazione
e
infortuni. Incidenti domestici since
provided with different and even more first hand quotations, pictures,
references
and links: look to better settle all subjects at the subchapters #accidents, #Italian_women, #men.
Any way both files/chapters are validated and completed by the
parallel -
English and Italian: also both not completely mirroring each another - What is ‘
Emotional
Labour’? and Che cos’è il
‘lavoro emozionale’? files/chapters - giving a theoretical
improvement
coming from another - socioeconomic - point of view.
Any way every subject regarding children and moreover children
development is strictly related to parenthood and rearing, family and
motherhood: so it is mandatory to strictly confront this file/chapter
with all those regarding "children" - to begin by Childhood:
times of mutability. But
here also "work"
as
itself and its
basics -implying
thevital
reality of body related "complexes" - are the subject matters: thus to
better understand this topic it should be "uncoiled" by more general
explanatory concepts, it is to say to read this file/chapter together
with the "sublimations" one - Sublimations:
visual
schemes and scientific explanation.
There's
a difference
between working hard
and working smart, between
being
busy and
being productive.
(A British woman could
say that American women haveto do it all, while
English women settle
formuddling
through)
In
1995, the United
Nations
estimated that the "invisible" unpaid work done by women around the
world
would be worth 11
trillion dollars at fair market value.
..
getting the
housee in order involves a lot of small things...
the kind of things thatcan get me to become
compulsive.
WORK
The - Italian - book DOMESTIC CHORES
Ergonomics
and psychology of a REAL work
changed into a new
edition the volume published on 1974 by Nuova Italia
titled I
complessi della casalinga (The
housewife's complexes),
coming out now under the more appropriate Italian title Le
faccende
domestiche. Ergonomia e psicologia di un VERO lavoro,
(Domestic
chores. Ergonomics
and psychology of a TRUE work). This book had its
natural
mirroring complement
in the more recent volume Infanzia:
tempo di
mutamenti (Childhood: times
of mutability): both in fact contribute
to open
a structural analysis centered on the basic
concepts of initial phases - the
former from the point
of
view of adult people, of grown-up life and above all of grown-up WORK;
the latter from the point of view of children approaching on growing-up
(see Consciousness
and memory). But together they
constitutes a whole,
an
integral
part of an UNIFIED
logic validating the
fateful
concept ofBEGINNINGS,
of subsequent passages,
of
developing phases, of PAST,
PRESENT
and FUTURE: of
scientific concepts
centered on
"organizers"
and on "cones of expansion" that mutually integrate and interact.
Domestic
chores deals with the subsequent part of the process: but
it too
starts from a ORIGINAL
infantile context, on unremitting texture where, like
individual lives,
also human activities can evolve starting from concrete, corporeal,
“little”
and perhaps even “infantine” features, no matter how this beginnings
can be the start points to unroll towards more
elaborate,
“sublimated” and powerful forms of participation in associated life
- stretching
even to creative, far-reaching performances. (See the indexes of both
books, and see also
a schematic outline to these passages in the linkfrom
bodily to abstract, printed in the Italian book on
page 40).
Through
the eyes of developing
individual, as suggested by the title itself, Infanzia:
tempi di mutamenti describes and clarifies the
situations of
personal physiological changes
in differentiation either realized or perturbed (it is to
point
out this menacing possibility that
the previous edition was edited as contribution of a Round Table
focused on every kind of Violence
against
the child).
In their specular presentation both books tend to help to consider all
human occurrences already
underway: activities, not
only life,
as a wide range of developmenting paradigms that follow each other and
connect
in precise passages - diversified, but neither casual nor disorganized,
rather regular, inevitable and consequential.
Children from
sons and daughters develop on "parents" and "citizens";
chores
dedicated to act in
short-sighted "to do" - seemingly to be self repeating and continually
the
same
rerunning time of the QUOTIDIAN - are
notwithstanding the basis
of every way to work: till simplest temporary labours to
reach
also attainment of far-reaching
future significance, even "immortal", as
art.
The Italian title mentions a TRUE
work, together with the derived participle from a Latin verbfaccende,
meaning simply to
be done, things
to
do which could be referred to every type of WORK or
rather
to a series of works, jobs and/or professions. In fact isn't
significant the plural
form of this derived noun at plural from a verbal Latin
origin,
in Italian: faccende,
in English: chores?
Whatever that may be, whether seen separately
or in their complexity, the "things to do", the things "to be done daily",
are neither irrelevant nor trivial activities; neither are they so
obvious
as to be considered an ending in themselves. The current title of the
book
speaks of a TRUE - capital letters - work: in
fact not
only human children and developing living beings but also adult
activities,
as well as every kind of work, have their initial founding bases
biologically
programmed with the main complexes acting as organizers:
in fullanalogy - not only as
metaphor - with theembryogenesis'
biologicalSpemann-Mangold
organizer. (The name organizer
centre
or organizer
was
given
by Spemann to the formative stimuli which are exerted from one part of
the embryo to another. For this discovery of the organizer effect in
embryonic
development, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
in
1935).
From such bases, diversifiable sequences depart:
but they can unroll up and open, or get entangled in each step between
the concrete to the sublimated (and vice versa). All these processes
don't
have a "program" related only to the growing of the body: they
accompany
step by step the full path of every life. They can either expand in
broadening
evolution towards increasing abilities and potentialities in order to
reach
true RIPENESS,
or they
cannot develop, rather they can embroil, narrowing a muddled
life-stream; they
can greatly enrich, but they can also contract and block
capacities
and resources. Besides also in term of advancing spaces and times they
can worse, and worse: coercing evolution even into
environmental
damage and personal ailments, with menacing
consequences for future generations.
First of all considering the
PSYCHOLOGICAL
side, one must say that this work and these chores advance to actions
and shape situations drawing
directly
from nearby bio-psychological
INITIAL
NORMAL
DEVELOPMENT of
normal infantile
complexes (they too in the PLURAL)
alsoto be
seen in their multiform and apparently contradictory becoming.
In effect already the complementary volume Infanzia:
tempi di mutamenti by the title itself
awards the relevance
of the dishomogeneity of
thesefundamental
TRANSITIONS (i.e.:
in fact transitions that lay the foundations) and aims to stress the
importance
of their starting and becoming: analytically explaining their
appearance
and development, detail by detail. Ergonomics,
discussed in the present volume, studies work more than people:
"domestic
chores" with their multiform and multifaceted actions and reality can
be
followed in their operative details, furthermore presented
as basic
constitutive elements of several, different
activities: their traces can be recognized as PROTOTYPES
of several manual WORKS, of several qualified JOBS
and of several, at times even theoretical and abstract,
PROFESSIONS.
Summarizing three are the KEY
concepts in this
book for completing the parallel
between personal and generational development, between "persons" and
"activities":
1)
HOUSE WORK is
at the basis of every kind of adult's task, since in domestic chores
one
could find the very basic
subjective foundations of many kind of work, job, craft, toil and even
business; and all this in different ways according to different
people's
customs or every life-styles. (An American tv commercial reported that
if life
is messy, clean it up British
women say that American women have to do
it all while English
women settle for muddling
through) 2)
Any way
everyone, EACH
OF US, both women and men is its PROTAGONIST,
each of us takes part in it, even if living as single. Each of us can
be
for the time being either a working "home-holder", or cohabitant, a
patron
and/or customer of the home-holder: every one is notwithstanding a
member
of a "home" one of the more fundamental
socio-economic units. 3)
Better still:
everyone is - for ever! - a SON
/ DAUGHTER, while developing or of
age, even after the parents' death; even if developed as orphan
only dreaming a parental home.
So to sum up, this book regards the consequences
to grown-ups of their own phases of development, and alongside, also
explains
how they can help - and not OBSTRUCT - the restless, even if precisely
cadenced thriving of the new generation.
So everyone can
read in-depth the parts of the book she/he judges more interesting,
but
I suggestEVERYBODY
toread
the last chapter of the -
Italian - book: Children
of YESTERDAY
= today's adults. Today's
adults->adults of TOMORROW
PERSONAL
WELFARE and ACCIDENTS
AT HOME
DOMESTIC CHORES. Ergonomy
and psychology of a REAL work: so
tells the title
of this book, pointing out that this organized - real - work is an assortment
of many
different activities, each one requiring different skills,
each
one performing a basic PARADIGM
of other increasingly "important" more general and wider
work,
jobs, professions, even businesses and arts.
All real WORK (or even the
lack of work) is an essential component in the life of NORMAL
ADULTS, and it plays a basic role in the
psychosomatic situation
of EACH INDIVIDUAL acting as:
a main WELFARE
factor;
a cause of danger,
fatigue, disease and in
some cases even of death: look at the subject concerning work-accidents)
a factor to be integrated in the
physical,
psychic, existential homeostasis.
an enterprise whose aims are to PRODUCE
an organization appointed to have CONSEQUENCES either
useful or even harmful
A forceful good nature
turns work
into play: warm
and
fuzzy feelings of helpfulness well up like melted water in
spring, creating glorious long riverbeds that impel toward helping at
every turn.
But usually one cannot simultaneouslymaster
changing various attitudes
and capacities: one cannot be
at the
same
time a qualified professional or a unique artist; the owner and the
manager
of a concern or a diplomatic go-between; an accountant and an
interpreter;
a secretary and a cashier; an eclectic "jolly" and a precise
robot: and all
this
in different ways according to customs of each people or each family
life-style.
Difficult to master all this? But
house-work requests
more than all these kinds of performance: not only are housework
duties
multiform, in the way of doing things, but also things to be done
and ambits themselves vary
greatly. Moreover: if the place where one lives is HOMEfor
everyone, for the home-holder is something different: it is in
reality
almost always an "holding", that is to say a place of WORK,
an organization, a factory of where one is at the same time
OWNER, MANAGER, EMPLOYEE, and LABORER.
At home
the home-holder not
only must all times act
at these different
"chores", she/he is yet compelled to manage every home living
being in ways corresponding to
each
one: performing different tasks together with each relating character,
with changing personal stage of life, with personal also offhand
occurences, even to choose among other
ones' true or pretended
needs, to watch at everyone welfare.
Why
then to put a
pot with its
handle on
the wrong position? Why to get floors and carpets slippery? Why not
to protect windows when there are at home little children or old
people?
What a fake "heroism"
is to use ladders as mountain climbing show, or - simpler - to have
staircase not well discernible? How to manage electricity, fire even
water? How to cleanse windows and balconies?
Chronicle of Saturday May 5 2007:
in a city of less than a million
inhabitants as is Turin, 6 (six)
children
every day, it is to say every year
2400 (two
thousand four hundred) children of less than five years
old are
to be taken at a First Aid for domestic accidents....
In the
Italian Web files and in Italian
book the subject of Domestic
accidents
is more widely shared:
beyond the file/chapter regarding Domestic
chores
(almost mirroring this
one) another
file/chapter is particularly dedicated to the
serious problem of Accidents
at home,
presenting peculiar Italian laws
and Italian
Organizations against and for them. The variability of International
laws and the different milieus of readers lets as
more consistent only to allude at the crucial points of this
emergence: a true
danger surely worrying for the large unrelenting rate of DEATHS
not only of damages and wounds. Any way a mockery
perhaps is more
noteworthy than pedantic explanation, so dummy and exaggerate
overemphasizing caricatures can be more persuasive to
signify just the contrary of a joke: not "implements" by themselves are
"monsters"
but it is the unconcerned or rather meaningless behavior of absent
minded users which transforms normal utensils into
malignant and
harmful enemies.
To make
this question painless
but at
the same time more trenchant, this sub-chapter just proposes cartoons
sharing domestic tools
becoming threatening monsters, also suggesting a book
displaying a similar - half satirical - point of view: The Design of Everyday Thingsby
Donald A.
Norman.
Do you need to know
how many children fall
down stairs or how many people aged over 65 have skateboarding
accidents each year? Welcome to RoSPA's home
and leisure accident
web
pages. For the first time home and leisure accident data is available
for you to search independently. Data is provided for the years 2000 to
2002, taken from a representative sample of hospital attendances around
the UK. National estimated figures are given. Here you
will find more detailed
information
on the Home and
Leisure
Accident Surveillance
web
database. RoSPA provides this service under
contract to
the Department of
Trade and
Industry (DTI).
All data was
collected and collated by the DTI. Therefore we regret that RoSPA cannot accept responsibility
for the
accuracy, completeness or content of the information provided. Click Proceed to find out more about the
RoSPA web
database.
Home
and Leisure
Accident statistics
You
are about to carry
out a query using the Home and Leisure Accident
Surveillance
(HASS/LASS) web database. Before you go ahead, please read
the
following important information, and then click Proceed. This
database is a
simplified version of the full DTI HASS/LASS
database.
It enables you to search for basic
statistics, but does not give you access to case study information. The web database allows
you to browse a list of articles, locations, injuries, etc, and
formulate your query by combining the listed items. Some choices may be
restricted to ensure you receive accurate statistics. The database will provide
you with the number
of accident victims
for your
chosen query during the years 2000, 2001 and 2002. Please read our help pages for further assistance,
or contactRoSPA’s Information Centre.
Infocentre staff
will be happy to guide you through the search process, or carry out
complex queries using the full DTI HASS/LASS database. Community-based
interventions for the prevention of burns and scalds in children Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
2004, Issue
2. Art. No.: CD004335. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD004335.pub2.
There
are a very limited number of research studies allowing
conclusions to be drawn about the effectiveness of community-based
injury prevention programmes to
prevent burns and scalds in children.
There is a pressing need to evaluate high-quality community-based
intervention programmes based on efficacious
counter-measures to reduce
burns and scalds in children. It is important that a
framework
for considering the problem of
burns/scalds in children from a prevention perspective be articulated,
and that an evidence-based suite of interventions be combined to create
programme guidelines suitable for implementation in communities
throughout the world.
The Cochrane Collaboration. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI:
10.1002/14651858.CD004335.pub2
Burns and
scalds are a
significant cause of morbidity and mortality in
children. Successful counter-measures to prevent burn and scald-related
injury have been identified. However, evidence indicating the
successful roll-out of these counter-measures into the wider community
is lacking. Community-based interventions in the form of
multi-strategy, multi-focused programmes are hypothesised to result in
a reduction in population-wide injury rates. This review tests this
hypothesis with regards to burn and scald injury in children.
Objectives:
To assess the effectiveness of community-based interventions, defined
as coordinated, multi-strategy initiatives, for reducing burns and
scalds in children in children aged 0-14 years. Modification
of the
home environment for the reduction of injuries Injury in the home is extremely common,
accounting
for around a third
of all injuries. The
majority of
injuries of children under five and
people aged 75 and over, occur at home. Multifactorial
injury
prevention interventions have been shown to reduce injuries in the
home. However, few studies have focused specifically on the impact of
physical adaptations to the home environment and the effectiveness of
such interventions needs to be ascertained.
Objectives:
To review the evidence
for the effect
on injuries of modification of
the home environment with a primary focus on interventions to reduce
physical hazards.
RA Lyons,
LV Sander,
AL Weightman, J Patterson, SA Lannon
S Jones,
B Rolfe, A Kemp, A Johansen
Cochrane
Databse Syst Rev
2003
CRISIS
AND FAMILY
The house is above all a place to
live in, which
means that it is felt an authentic expansion
of the self: hence phenomena and problems which may seem
inherent
to the physical and biological part of the person extend to the house
too: also for animals - at least for some of them - the den and the
territory
assume vital relevance and their loss or conservation provokes
emotional
consequences and typical behaviours.
An e-mail asked why a simple relocation was accompanied by
too much profound and unexpected reaction.
Tonight
I
started to
empty
furniture
and began to prepare boxes and chests for removal. Do you know how I
felt
while doing it? Alone: it seemed
to
me that everything had advanced and that myself on the contrary had
taken
a different direction, which senses of solitude, as if those photos,
those
travelling companions, those schools friends were there by
accident,
or rather that I was there by accident. Yet I drew from their presence
a sense of non-solitude. Somehow
they
made me feel not alone. One cannot say that I felt in a group,
taking part, present and alive with them, but just not-alone.
Well, now it is as if I had wanted to distance myself from all of them
in order to get the clear sensation that, on the contrary, I wanted to
mask, I did not want to admit. Death
also is more
mine. I
am
going away from this home where I have lived for
seven years; I carry with me all that’s mine, but I am leaving a place
and it is as if I was leaving a part of myself for good; in a few weeks
I shall be in a new one. But
I am sad..
There will be nothing more of
mine in the old one, but even the new one
will be a stranger.The heaviest thing is this sense of a void, I should
like to feel some human warmth, I should like to be desired, and I
would…
To this question, like to many other
similar ones,
a reply is very easy: an
almost standard
reply. Entering a new HOUSE, even a house that will be felt
as ONE’S OWN is - physiologically - ALWAYS
accompanied by a meaningful CRISIS,
as
all
"crisis"
apparently painful and surely upsetting.
For many people, to move into a new house of
one's own coincides either with marriage or with some major changes,
such
as emigration. Usually the blame for the crisis is attributed to
changes
of habit and above all of personal RELATIONS. In concurrence with
marriage, obviously, several
factors come together: but then why do many couples NOT
live cheerfully in the house, while they felt happy during their
"honeymoon"? Why often they feel again pleased during
subsequent travels? The crisis of
habitation ownership is felt as negative? On the contrary it is POSITIVE,
it has a meaning, it has typical modes and times: it usually lasts at
least for
few months and can be very much like the biological crisis of
the ADOLESCENT. As teens age it does
bring
and assure a veritable ENLARGEMENT of identity:
it coincides really with the ethological, animal, occurence of
expanding
the “den” into surrounding areas.
The sense of SOLITUDE
and
the more than alive consciousness of DEATH
(excuse
the deliberate pun about life and death) are due to this jump into
maturity,
to this new profound existential crisis (crisis or rather catastrophe
in the Thom's mathematicaldynamic
systems sense - Structural
Stabiltiy and
Morphogenesis). This is a crisis of a more
completely
acquired IDENTITY,
and even a crisis of consciousness of the PRECARIOUSNESS
and SEPARATENESS
that identity - i.e. ontological existence
in philosophical terms - implies. Solitude or separateness?
Separateness?
Are separateness and stress on separateness negative terms from which
to
run away? Why then, having reached that kind of material separation, is
everyone so jealous of PRIVACY?
Why is
everyone
so often frightened of thieves? Why is every body so interested in
HOUSE
KEYS as if they formed part of the self? And why does everyone
be so engaged in furnishing doors with reinforcements, and windows with
curtains???
How different is death itself even in conceptualisation,
when it conclude
a
significant life and
not a parasitic one, longing for a “non-solitude” using "others" as a
sort of PROSTHESIS of
one’s incompleteness!
You are now
visiting
the MOCHO web site. MOCHO stands short for Motherhood Choices.
The web site is part of a research project on this topic. The full
title of the project is The
Rationale of Motherhood Choices:
Influence
of Employment Conditions and of Public Policies. MOCHO is one
of
the
many projects that fall under the Key Action Improving Human
Research
Potential and the Socio-economic Knowledge Base of the Fifth
Framework
Program of the European Commission. It is a
three-year
project
that
has started on the 1st
of
October 2001 and will run until the 1st of
October 2004. Five countries participate in the project.
Besides
Belgium and the Netherlands, the coordinating countries, Italy,
Greece and France are involved.Go
to: Future
events list
(Visit our European
sister organizations.) WITH is an
organization for Irish
stay-at-home
mothers who are interested in child development and the social and
economic
rights of the partner at home. WITH Aims Article
41.2 of Bunreacht na héireann recognizes the value of theunpaid
work of women in the home.WITH therefore
seeks:
-
recognition for the
unpaid work carried out in the home and community
in all aspects of
the economy - equality in practice, not simply in theory, with
other
working men
and
women - parity for single-income families under the tax
code - the extension of benefits under the social
welfare
code to women and
men working in thehome caring for the young,
elderly or
handicapped - to hold the current government to their promise
of a
pension for
women
in the home - a stay-at-home parents’ benefit - to create an awareness of the needs of children
and
the importance of
the mother/childrelationship to the emotional and
intellectual
development of the
child - to support women in their struggle against the
social
and economic
pressures
which oftenforce them to seek outside
employment - the restoration of tax allowances and/or credits
for
dependent
children - extended career breaks to facilitate those who
wish to
take time off
to care for children ormembers of the family in
need of care -
maternity benefit payable with child benefit for the first three
years
of a child's life recognition
for the
skills acquired in running a home and family - opportunities for women in the home to reenter
the
labor market and
to
access educationand training courses - the provision of affordable housing for young
families
If
you support these
aims,
and
would like to join us or get more information, please contact us!WITH
is
active on a national, European Union, and international level.WITH, c/o
11 Wyattville Park, Loughlinstown, Dún Laoire, Co Dublin,
Ireland Telephone
+353 1 282 6460 or +353 46 943 0314 email: womeninthehome@eircom.net
This
panel aims to look at breastfeeding
as a composite andcomplex
process resulting of the interrelationship betweenphysical
and socio-cultural factors. What appears to be just as a worldwide
spread infant nutrition practice belonging to the realmof
the "natural", is actually embedded in distinctive social milieuxable
to transform a characteristic feature of the female body intoan
expression of culture. Moreover, breastfeeding practices, aspart
of a wider system which include other reproductive matters,should
be seen in relation with pregnancy, labor and delivery.The
casestudies presented will follow this perspective, which isnecessarily
holistic, and will try to embrace both the northernand
the southern hemisphere.
Second European
Feminist
Research
Conference
1994 Graz / Austria Feminist perspective on TECHNOLOGY WORK+ ECOLOGYJuly 5-9
1994 Graz University of Technology Austria. TECHNOLOGY, HALTH
AND THE BODY
Any way to be a file of this site and a chapter of this book, the
Author offered this Conference
-
whole text and Postscript - under the same
title: What
is EMOTIONAL
LABOUR?
Costantino
Battistina.
Dipartimento di
Scienze Sociali Università di Torino
A classic -
till 1903 -
and famed are Author and book:
Any way
historical,
sociological data of the early 20° Century are to be considered,
since the assertion:
economic
independence and specialization of women also to better raise children
advances a strange "conciliation" among this famed and active
"feminist"
and the conclusion of the also famed and often denigrated book Sex And
Character: An
Investigation Of Fundamental Principles by Otto Weininger:
a young
philosopher - young since suicide at twenty three years old -
furiously hostile against women - mostly against mothers and their way
to raise daughters.
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's The Home
is a
scathing attack on the
domesticity of women in the early 20th century. Her central argument,
that the economic
independence and specialization of women is essential
to the improvement of marriage, motherhood, domestic industry, and
racial improvement resonates in this work. Throughout, she maintains
that the liberation of women -- and of children and of men, for that
matter -- requires getting women out of the house, both practically and
ideologically.
Old fashion
books covers,
old
fashion housework tools, past - and no
more present - houseworks organization and housewomen's dresses and
look...: but any way something is ever the same!
From: The Historian
| Date: 3/22/2005
| Author: Pojmann, Wendy
(1) The unique case of
Italy, with
its often tumultuous
twentieth-century history, provides an exciting focal point for studies
of women's movements throughout the world. When the fascist government
of Benito Mussolini fell, and a democratic government was established
in June 1944, Italian women could not vote, divorce was not recognized,
and abortion was illegal. (2)
Today Italian women enjoy the benefits of
advanced political and social rights, but few Anglo-American readers
are familiar with the women's movement in Italy.
During the
Italian "resistenza" the
role of women changes radically. The Italian woman is abruptly involved
in
politics, social and cultural issues. To this purpose the war acts as
triggering agent. It is, in fact, the war to create a space for women
on a
public front: women get the chance to be productive, to bear public
responsibilities and to be brave; they make their own way through those
social
roles which were once restricted to men alone. At the same time women
keep
their traditional positions as mothers, wives and sisters.
As the war
comes to a close most of the women
directly involved in the liberation movement take a step back,
returning to
their private lives without receiving any medals or acknowledgements. A
few of
them, though, become aware of the singularity of their experience and
choose to
leave behind a recording of what they lived through. Some write as
events take
place, others wait decades before going over their experience. The
memoirs and
autobiographies which came as a result of such recordings are, today, a
precious source of insight on the history and evolution of women in our
century. These
writings are far more than the
documentation of events from an objective point of view. They portray
an
interesting field of investigation in terms of literary studies, as
they offer
a key to approach different types of writing and the different angles
from
which the writer portrays herself within the story she is narrating.
Moreover
they offer a chance to reflect on the diversities in selfawareness and
the
thought pattern the writer conveys on the art of writing in itself.
Abstract This article
examines the
figure of the housewife
and domestic work in post-World War II Italy. Fascism
promoted two images of the housewife: the middle-class, urban homemaker
inspired by American conceptions of home
economics,
and the rural
farmwife destined to prevail during the thirties. These
two
images
offer both continuity and disjuncture with the image of the housewife
in the post-1945 period. The social and economic context in postwar
Italy favored the diffusion of the image of the full-time homemaker, an
effect of the family policies promoted by the two principal political
parties. Instruction
manuals on home economics appeared in great
numbers during the 1950s and 1960s. Examining these
manuals
prompts the
following questions: How was the role of the woman in the home defined?
What was her relationship with the world beyond the family? How was she
supposed to perform her work? Domestic work expands in these decades to
a few ultimate practices, becoming a totalizing mission and a value in
itself, but resulting in the exclusion of women from any large-scale
participation and activity in the life of the nation. On 12 April 1945,
just days before the Liberation, Ada Gobetti, a
prominent figure in Turin's anti-Fascist Resistance,
wrote
in her Diario partigiano
(Partisan Diary) that the most
difficult
problem will be that of the
housewife--refractory to every political preparation and the most
difficult to reach--it will be one of the most difficult to resolve if
one wants to create a new society. Was it
possible among
the ruins
of the war to propose a different relationship among women, the family,
work, and society... ?
Fatherhood
and home-men.
It
is most likely that a typical
family doesn't
exist: neither
as majority nor on average; but at every times and in every places
there
were and are many inconsistent varieties of family types.
It
is therefore very wrong to make stereotyped appraisals that "old style
families" are ideal and perfect, with their typical "good, real"
fathers
and mothers, during the "good old times"; or on the contrary it is as
much
incorrect to state that the "new" is always a progressive improvement.
Every preconceived
idea validates or confirms itself in self ingrained
circles
either good or more often vicious. In both cases these definitions -
these
hintings at a global improvement, as well these warnings of the threat
of damages - must refer only homogeneous, self-restricting groups,
described in a similar banalizing and undemonstrative way.
Then how has to be considered at present times the:traditional
separation of church (home)
and state (paid work)?
In fact the "protagonist" of "church-home"
could be a MAN,
who -
perhaps alike, perhaps with a different style - can perform the same
tasks as house-wives since compelled to manage the same difficulties
and answer to the same
demands.
Editorial
Reviews Amazon.com Suzanne Braun Levine, a
founding editor
of Ms. magazine, gives voice to a largely
unsung
revolution -- uplifting the nurturing role of men -- in her wisely
written
first book, Father
Courage.
Observing, for instance, the trend of more and more fathers walking
their children to school with a "profusion of pink and yellow and red
cartoon-character backpacks slung over their shoulders," Levine notes
that fatherhood
is changing. And so begins her quest to investigate the
often-contradictory challenges and motivations that grip and sometimes
baffle today's fathers. Using
batteries of
interviews with fathers
from various walks of life, Levine shows how men -- in the struggle to
succeed at work and in parenthood -- are reinventing what it means to
be
a father. Readers meet fathers who explore new ways of child rearing,
split time with their wives to cover household chores, and cope with
sacrifice when it comes to careers. Father
Courage is both about
and for these fathers, "who are discovering the pleasures
of a
dynamic relationship with their families" and who are "beginning to
suspect that there are more men like themselves, although most are too
busy putting one foot in front of the other to speak up."
Drawing from
social science, anthropology, media, psychology, and many other
sources, Father Courage
wades into the currents of modern society, not only to recast our
understanding of fatherhood, but to remind us that changes in
fatherhood also alter motherhood and the very fabric of family life.
This connection, deeply feminist at its core, explains why a woman
would be invested in championing the rights of fathers. Levine even
offers fathers a rallying cry: Pick up your power, she says. Use it
to turn around the very institutions that are bestowing it on you.
Why? Because as Gloria Steinem once put it, You will
never have a true
democracy without democratic families to nurture it. --
(Byron
Ricks)
From Publishers
Weekly : Can
men
have it all?
Raised to be breadwinners and also nurturing parents, many contemporary
fathers "disappoint those they mean to impress more than either would
like." Levine has talked to fathers who are challenging "the
traditional separation of church (home) and state (paid work)" about
the rewards and frustrations of trying to co-parent. Frequently letting
the men speak for themselves, she draws a convincing picture of an underground
movement just waiting for the right moment to coalesce and
set about the unfinished business of the women's movement: "It is all
of a piece, the entry of women into the workplace and the integration
of men into the family." Many fathers in this transition generation
feel they face their difficulties alone and are surprised to find how
many others are like them. From the birth experience at the hospital
through the early months of parenthood and beyond, men often receive
conflicting messages from society that encourage them to be supportive
but not to get too closely involved in the dailiness
of
raising
children. Women, too, are often unwilling to "relinquish the mystical
powers attributed to motherhood" that is for many the only power they
have. Levine also contends that a double standard in the workplace
favors women who need to take time to be with their families but
discourages men from putting family first. Writing at the equity
frontier of family
politics,
Levine provides a useful sourcebook for
would-be revolutionaries and makes an eloquent plea for more public
conversation about private pressures.
Agent, Michael
Carlisle; 10-city
tour. (Apr.) Copyright
2000
Reed Business Information, Inc.
So how can
get and
previously got "men"
with
children? Tyrants or companions? authoritarian or... toys?
Only
on the modern times or even on the first 1900
years?
Today's
fathers versus those old time models? Old style strictness (???)
against
present
easy-going education (???)? Or the other way round...?
Look at this picture from the Italian translation of a page of My
Magazine. Being the
Continuation of the Children's
Encyclopedia1919
, Enciclopedia dei Ragazzi
edition of
1924 - page 4142
- also printed on
previous years.
Riding
the father? Isn't "my dad" the
best toy, dog, cat, horse?
To play with dad? IT IS THE FOREMOST!
Today's
fathers versus those old time models? Old style strictness (???)
against
present
easy-going education (???)? Or the other way round...?
None
of these common-place assertions can sustain any confrontation with the
variable reality: very demonstrative in this dirction is the picture
with its childish
poetry found only in the Italian translation of My
Magazine. Being the
Continuation of the Children's Encyclopedia; to
overhaul
this lack we quote thereunder another
poetry by Author Unknown:
Anyone can
be a
father, but it takes someone
special to be a DADDY!
What
Makes A Dad
God
took the
strength
of a mountain, The majesty of a tree,
The
warmth of
a summer
sun, The calm of a quiet sea,
The
generous
soul of
nature, The comforting arm of night,
The wisdom
of the
ages, The power of the eagle's flight,
The
joy of a
morning
in spring, The faith of a mustard seed,
The
patience
of
eternity, The depth of a family need,
Then
God
combined
these qualities, When there was nothing more to add,
He
knew His
masterpiece was complete, And so, He called it
... Dad
Child
protection is an
important social issue in Chile. In response to the results of a study
that showed that, in 2000, 74% of children living in Chile were
maltreated in their homes, the Metropolitan
South Health Service called
on the primary-care units in the municipalities of South Santiago under
its control to develop a comprehensive programme of interventions, the
objective of which was to
strengthen
family relationships and to lend support to families and children
vulnerable to abuse.
... In response to the call for action, the health and education units of
San Joaquín began work on a programme called Skills for
Life.
The
good things about my dad: he helps me, he defends me, he cuddles
me, he
cares for me a lot, and, finally, he plays with me. The bad things
about my dad: he shouts at me, he fights with my mum, when
he doesn't
speak to me (expressed as the law of ice), and he is hysterical and
selfish.
"Mother"
is the best, the "symbiotic" unique partner?
What a mystification!
For
the child, the mother is the pillar of the family, therefore it is
important if the mother mistreats them. But the child returns the
maltreatment with acts of love (kind words and drawings of hearts). The
child needs to feel loved by the parents.
Scandal on National
Gallery of London!
Really
happened! During a visit to the
gallery last year, a breast-feeding mother was ordered by an attendant
to stop.
-
Do
you find breastfeeding
offensive?
- If you do, tough. New
laws will make breastfeeding in public every
mother's right.
The National
Gallery
has nearly 50 paintings and portraits featuring
bare breasts on its walls, including a Tintoretto entitled The
origin of milky way
If one can
enjoy
good examples, it is difficult likewise not to be influenced by the bad
ones. Actually and unfortunately it is difficult to take oneself away -
and often even : "to rescue oneself" - from the couple's, family's, or
social lifes' style (especially home-life's) and work 's pathways in
general
(homework in particular) when received as "imprinting" in one's own
home-factory.
To make matters worse both grown-up partners
- the more as PARENTS - bring to their
new
home-hold their prejudices, inhibitions, puerile and partial solutions,
and all existential compromises and neuroses acquired in their parental
home.
Veronica Alvarez,
Nurse,
Head of the Child
Health Programme, Sor Teresa de los Andes Family Health
Centre, San Joaquín, Chile: In
2005,
San Joaquín has been rotating
the campaign posters in
the
family health-care centres and schools, and will continue
to
work with
families and community organisations, though a series of interventions,
to build a healthier paradigm for family and interpersonal
relationships.
Look then this other excerpt of the document shared above.
(For genuine
children's pictures go to the link on the original
article).
Hello,
mum.What
I don't like about you: you yell at me, you scold me,
when
you want to tell me something you shout, you hit
me. What I
like about you: sometimes
you cuddle me, at times we play, we go out, we go to the plaza. (Mum I
love you because you give me what I want, I don't like it when you and
dad fight. Bye, mum.)
Besides and
worse: are "mothers" as for simply to be "mothers" the main leading
character
in the "family scene"?
And furthermore: how noteworthy should be not only
every cub
by itself, but also every factor in every moment!
Pigeons and children: wealthy children and - on the background - "poor"
ones.
Venice July 20 1912
Turin:
play-ground 1960
years
How gets the individual
temperament during the progression of ages?
And what place for brothers
and sisters?
Look at the composed little boyphotografied
with his mother and sister on 1862,
and onSpring 1934
as
dignified great-grand-father showing the same composed countenance as
himself when little boy; look rather in this same
picture the joking demeanour of
both grand-daughter and grand-father.
Children "working" conscientiously
Istria 1934:
engagement and concentration.
a little -
city dweller - willing to become a real country
man (Piedmont 1965)