Beyond Biological Ties: Sibilla Aleramo, Maria Montessori, and the Construction of Social Mothehood

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Italian intellectuals opposed women’s participation in the public sphere, maintaining that women could not engage in politics due to their exclusive love for their biological children. Contemporary feminists countered this notion by promoting the idea of social motherhood. Sibilla Aleramo and Maria Montessori, better known for their work in feminist literature and early childhood education, respectively, made important contributions to this debate by implementing, theorizing, and popularizing the notion of social motherhood. This essay traces the strategies the two intellectuals used to demonstrate how women could act as political subjects via a socialization of the maternal functions. In her novel Una donna, Aleramo offered a fictional portrait of the social mother. Influenced by it and by the feminist debate on motherhood, Montessori conceptualized the notion of social motherhood as both a socialization of maternal duties and the expansion of women’s maternal virtues into the social world. Montessori also applied this notion to her first pedagogical experiments in San Lorenzo (Rome) and with the orphans of the 1908 Messina-Reggio earthquake. An analysis of these intellectuals’ formerly overlooked contributions provides a new understanding of the role of social motherhood in the contemporary feminist debate in Italy.