Becoming legal: feminism and abortion law in 1970s Italy
Elena Caruso
What the paper says
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.