Collective Motherliness in Italy. Reception and Reformulation of Ellen Key’s feminist ideas in Sibilla Aleramo and Ada Negri (1905-1921)

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how the Swedish writer Ellen Key’s ideas on collective motherliness and on the relationship between man and woman were received and reformulated in the articles, poetry and prose of Sibilla Aleramo and Ada Negri before and after the First World War. The ideas in Aleramo’s autobiographical novel Una donna (1906) were close to Key’s theories, but her autobiographical novel Il passaggio (1919) was quite different. Ada Negri’s idealistic view of motherhood, as expressed in her collection of poetry Maternità (1904), corresponded to parts of Key’s conception of motherhood, while Negri’s dream of single motherhood and the realisation of that ideal is emphasized in her autobiographical novel Stella mattutina (1921).