FESTA DELLA DONNA 2025

 

"Mimosa cake" from the Cicara Caffetteria, Modica. The mimosa is a symbol of IWD in Italy.

I am writing this very late, so I hope everyone is having or has had a happy International Women's Day.

Here in Italy, it was announced yesterday that the Italian government has approved the draft of a law which will make femicide a crime in itself, instead of being a sub-category of homicide. Other measures to be contained in this law (which still has to go through Parliament) will include sentences for crimes such as ill treatment, stalking, sexual violence and revenge pornography.

This is welcome and it reminded me of something that happened long ago:

"Cathy was married to Jim."

Every year, on this day, I think of pretty Cathy, "Cathy" being the name that I gave her in my memoir. She was the mother of my last, and most serious, boyfriend in Bristol before my family moved to London. Cathy was one of the nicest and prettiest women I have ever met, yet her husband Jim beat her - every single day. Joey would often arrive home to find his bruised and bloodied mother lying unconscious in the grate.

Everybody in our Bristol neighbourhood knew about it and they were also well aware that Jim kept a mistress. Whether he abused this woman too I have no idea, nor did I know who she was, though she was someone I probably saw most days either in shops or in the street.

My dad, along with other men who lived nearby, couldn't understand why Joey, tall, strong and eighteen years old at the time, didn't just "sort his father out" physically but I knew that the answer was that if he had, Joey would have arrived home to find his mother lying in the grate not unconscious, but dead.

Cathy tried to leave several times but no one was going to give a woman who had left her husband and had three other children much younger than Joey a job, or let her rent a flat and the police largely ignored domestic violence. 

At the time, newspapers even ran cartoons in which such violence was depicted as funny and it would take until 1971, when a woman called Erin Pizzey set up the first Women's Refuge in Chiswick, London, for the problem to be recognised. Other refuges sprang up all over the country and the women could go to them with their children to be safe from the men who had promised to love them but were now threatening their lives. The Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act of 1976 was the first piece of legislation to begin to deal with the problem and other legislation followed. Coercive control did not become a crime in England and Wales until 2015.

After we left Bristol and my relationship with Joey had ended, I heard that Cathy and Jim had been reconciled and that Jim was ignoring his mistress when he saw her in the street. I do not think that this state of affairs lasted, as in 2020, quite by chance I came across a death notice for Cathy. I forget the exact date of her passing but it was in the first decade of this century. The part about family said only,

"Cathy was married to Jim." There was no adjectival phrase, such as "much-loved Jim" or "her devoted Jim" - just "Jim".

But you, pretty Cathy, will never be "just Cathy" to the now elderly woman who was nearly your daughter-in-law and I cried when I saw your photo that day, over half a century after I knew you. I cried for you and all the women like you, all over the world, even today.

No woman should be afraid outside her home. 

No woman should be afraid to go home.

No woman should be afraid in her home.