March 1, 1927
“Feminism is destructive of women’s happiness,†declares Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Italy’s first woman physician and daughter of Cesare Lombroso (who, with Gina’s husband, wrote The Female Offender). You may know Gina as author of the Italian 1922 antifeminist classic The Soul of Woman.
“It endeavors to bring women to the enjoyment of all privileges enjoyed by man; it encourages woman to copy man in the understanding that in this way woman will enjoy all pleasures which she formerly enjoyed as well as those which only man enjoys.
"Woman and man are different,†states the plucky Gina, "and suffer and derive pleasure from different things. Aspirations which are in the one case strong and permanent are in the other case minor and transitory. The aspirations toward glory, independence, riches, power are permanent and powerful in man, incremental and impermanent in woman, whereas aspiration to love and of loving, or reuniting one’s self to continuous life are stable elements in woman and comparatively passing and irrational impulses in man.†Therefore, woman can never fine happiness in doing man’s work, because it is too alien to her real interests.
Ya see, "once the man has ceased to love the woman from the viewpoint of the usefulness she can have for him, her altruism, her gentleness, her devotion to him, then he ceases to desire woman because of gratitude for the services she can render him, casts her aside as a permanent companion and sees in her only the female who can excite and satisfy his senses.â€
She may sound terrifically reactionary, but take solace in knowing that Mussolini exiled her in 1930 for being antifascist. Although to be honest, she was only exiled for being terrifically reactionary; GLF was also a staunch and vocal opponent of the wonders of the machine age.