Gualberta Alaide Beccari and The Tempting Perspective of the Moral Regeneration of Humanity (1868–1906)

Reading feminist writings from the second half of the nineteenth century is a fascinating but at the same time confusing occupation. Although these writings are more than accessible in that many of the problems discussed in them are still current today, when we examine the solutions they proposed it is almost like entering a different world. It is a world that has become foreign to us, and that we would prefer to leave as quickly as possible so we can focus on the familiar once again. Paradoxically, this one-sided focus on the recognizable elements of nineteenth-century feminism leads us to understand less and less of that same feminism. Concentration on the recognizable, the current, quickly tempts us to evaluate nineteenth-century ideas as if they were those of contemporary feminism. That can result in ahistorical, moralizing analyses in which the so-called ‘limitations’ of nineteenth-century feminism are the central theme. Examples of this kind of analysis can be found especially in the early works devoted to their predecessors by the generation of feminist historians in the 1970s. 1