The Manifesto of Rivolta Femminile disrupted societal norms in Italy by openly rejecting the foundations of the country’s patriarchal social order during a time when rigid gender roles remained largely unquestioned. It describes marriage, motherhood, and women’s unpaid domestic labor as instruments used to suppress women. The manifesto challenges not only the domestic sphere but also the moral authority of the Church and the political agenda of the male-dominated Left, including Marxist ideals, and it calls for the dismantling of established political movements that had previously expected feminist demands to be absorbed into broader class-based struggles.

“Liberation for woman does not mean accepting the life man leads, because it is unlivable; on the contrary, it means expressing her own sense of existence.”