Università Roma Tre

The course consists of lectures and seminar meetings, tracing the role and presence of women in the contemporary age. In particular, they are examined in the nineteenth century, that is, in the first of the two centuries of modernity, which is also the foundation, the processes and movements of women's emancipation, starting from the conquest of civil rights and the demand for access to political rights.
In this direction, specific attention is given to the suffragist movement. A second important topic addressed in the course concerns the image of women both as a self-representation and as a perception by civil and ecclesiastical institutions. A further topic of study concerns sexuality: in the nineteenth century in social and health studies, but also in a large part of literary production, it mainly concerns the universe of women of pleasure and prostitutes. The analysis of regulated prostitution, practiced in closed houses, allows us to penetrate even the complex mechanisms, legal, sanctioning, but also social-health and cultural that interconnect civil society and the state.