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Between the spring of 1968 and the winter of 1974, dissident desire ran into a wall. No one could agree on how to name the obstacle, but many sensed that (to paraphrase Wilhelm Reich) student rebels had been preparing to deal with the 300-year-old problem of alienation under capitalism only to find themselves confronting the thousands-of-years-old problem of the suppression of human life through patriarchy (Reich, 1976, p. 170). Italy did not lack a feminist movement. While some have traced its origins back to the Renaissance, the fight for women's rights is at least as old as the Italian state and feminism remained a potent political force during the Fascist period (de Grazia, 1992; Malagreca, 2006). The Constitution of the post-fascist Republic stipulated that the state had a responsibility to defend sexual equality and remove any social obstacles to human flourishing. But the Gruppo Demau was arguably the first Italian organization to systematically question whether politicians schooled in centuries of masculinist thought were in a good position to judge what human flourishing meant for women. As the group made clear in their 1966 manifesto, they did not want to be assimilated into a man's world as equals. They wanted to put an end to the ‘masculinization of women’ (DEMAU, 1991[1966], p. 35).
Demau (shorthand for ‘Demystification of Authoritarianism’) had its origins in a study group for Milanese women convened by the 28-year-old Daniela Pellegrini in 1964-5. In its first instantiation, the collective called itself ‘ACAP’ (Association Against Patriarchal Authoritarianism) and sometimes ‘DACAPO’, a play on an Italian expression meaning ‘from the top’ (Pellegrini, 2012). In addition to collectively reflecting on pleasing and painful memories - in the manner of contemporaneous consciousness-raising groups around the globe - Pellegrini and her colleagues mined the classics of anthropology and psychoanalysis for language that would help Italian women create an