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Lidia Menapace died at the age of 96 from complications from Covid-19. The Ansa news agency writes that the former senator died at 3.10 am in the infectious diseases department of Bolzano hospital. Menapace, born Lidia Brisca, in 1964 as a member of the Christian Democrats, was the first woman elected to the Bolzano provincial council – the other was Waltraud Gebert Deeg (Svp) – and the first woman to sit on the provincial council.
Who was Lidia Menapace?
Born in Novara on April 3, 1924 (born Lidia Brisca), Lidia Menapace participated in the Resistance from a very young age as a partisan relief. He enters a formation in the Ossola Valley becoming a second lieutenant with the battle name “Bruna”. At age 21 he graduated with the highest grade in Italian literature from the Catholic University of Milan. The post-war period sees her involved in Catholic movements, particularly in the Fuci (Federation of Catholic Universities of Italy) and later in the Christian Democracy.
In 1964, a candidate for the DC, she was elected the first woman in the Bolzano Provincial Council, where she had moved after her marriage to the Trentina doctor Nene Menapace (who died in 2004), becoming an effective counselor for Social Affairs and Health. At the beginning of the 1960s she became a professor of Italian language and methodology of literary studies at the Catholic University: her post was not renewed in 1968 after the publication of the document “For a Marxist Choice.” After leaving DC that same year, Menapace approaches the Italian Communist Party. In 1969 he was one of the founders of the first nucleus of manifest, about which she wrote regularly until the mid-1980s. In 1973 she was one of the promoters of the Christian movement for socialism. From 2006 to 2008 she was a senator of the Communist Refoundation, in 2011 she joined the National Committee of the Anpi.
“We have to get out of this virus and restart politics,” he said in an interview with Republic on the eve of April 25. “I imagine groups of people thinking about changing things within a great movement of change. A political life in which everyone sees things that do not work and works to transform them, in which the bad things are fixed. However, it does not generate fragmentation and many small parties. I would say: after the epidemic, let’s start from politics again ”.
“If there had been no women there would have been no Resistance, period”, recalls Lidia Menapace in the chapter dedicated to her in the book by Gas Lerner and Laura Gnocchi “Noi partisiani” (Feltrinelli).
“A small woman, ironic by vocation and nonconformist in her background, in public and private life, in her ideas and lifestyle. A feminist who loved the women’s movement, stubbornly uncompromising in the use of language, able to explain with simplicity and great culture how much harm the incorrect use of words could do, especially on gender issues, “she writes manifest in a memory. Menapace is considered one of the most important voices of Italian feminism.
Hospitalization for Covid-19
On December 3, Anpi Alto Adige had announced her hospitalization for Covid-19: “Lidia Menapace is ill. We have heard of his hospitalization in Bolzano due to this cursed covid. The conditions seem very serious ”. Since the 1970s, Menapace has been active in politics in associations, movements, institutional positions with a commitment that is immediately and always characterized by feminism and pacifism. In 1973 she was one of the promoters of the Christian movement for socialism. At the beginning of the eighties he was a councilor in Rome on the lists of the Democratic Party of Proletarian Unity. In 2006-2008 she was elected a senator on the communist lists of the People’s Republic of China. Proposed to the presidency of the Defense Commission of Palazzo Madama, his candidacy was rejected due to his irreducible pacifism, in fact “antimilitarism”, according to the interested party. In 2007 she was elected president of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on depleted uranium. In 2009, she ran for the European elections on the Prci-PdCI anti-capitalist list of the Northeast constituency without being elected due to not having reached the threshold established by the electoral law. In 2011 he joined the National Committee of Anpi. In 2018 he agreed to run for the Senate with Power to the People! even knowing that she would not be chosen. She is the author of the autobiographical books: “I, partisan. My resistance” (Piero Manni Editore, 2014) and “Sing the blackbird over the wheat. The novel of my life” (Piero Manni Editore, 2015). Menapace received the Margherita Hack – Lay of the Year 2019 award.
Lidia Menapace was one of the most recognized feminist activists for almost 60 years, among the first to emphasize the importance of sexual language as a fundamental tool against sexism. At the Unione Donne Italiane (Udi) he led the most politically creative season contributing to the association’s exit from the stagnation generated by the XI Congress of 1982, through the innovation of political forms in shared responsibilities, proposing a “Pact between theoretically incompatible political thoughts “. As a peace activist, Menapace proposed the Permanent Convention of Women Against All Wars and Political School under the auspices of Rosa Luxembourg.
