Becoming legal: feminism and abortion law in 1970s Italy

Conventional top-down approaches to legal reform tend to overlook the contributions of social movements in legal change, often resulting in a gender-blind analysis. In response, I advance ‘becoming legal’ as an analytical framework to rethink legal change in terms of a bottom-up process encompassing informal proceedings as well as formal status changes. Enabling a gender analysis of legal change, becoming legal gives significance to often overlooked sites, agents, and practices. Rather than focusing on the widely studied experiences of Britain or the United States, I ground the argument in the first comprehensive analysis of feminist mobilization around abortion law reform in 1970s Italy. During this period, the Italian Parliament approved Law 194/1978, which still regulates abortion access in the country. Beyond traditional legal methods, I draw on original archival materials that span feminist records and parliamentary debates, and new oral history interviews with campaigners.