Becoming legal: feminism and abortion law in 1970s Italy
Elena Caruso
Abstract
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.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.