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Carla Lonzi (Florence, March 6, 1931 – Milan, August 2, 1982) was an Italian writer and art critic, feminist, theorist of the self-consciousness and of the sexual diversity, founder of the Rivolta Femminile editions in the early 1970s.

Lonzi’s significant works include: Autoritratto ("Self-Portrait", 1969); Manifesto di Rivolta femminile ("Manifesto of the Feminine Revolt", 1970); Sputiamo su Hegel, La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti ("Let’s Spit on Hegel, The Clitoridian Woman and the Vaginal Woman, and Other Writings", 1974).

Rivolta femminile
The first manifesto of Rivolta Femminile ("Female Revolt"), posted up on the walls of Rome in 1970, is the foundation act of the group. Written with the collaboration of Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, the manifesto contains the seeds of all the subjects that feminism would have analysed: the statement and the pride of the difference against the claim of gender equality, the refusal of female complementarity in whatever field of life, the critic against the institution of marriage, the recognition of the productivity of female work, and not least the centrality of the body and the claim of a subjective sexuality, free from male requests.Carla Lonzi and her group represented an avant-garde, anticipating the focal points of Feminism, successfully intuiting from the start the absolute need of practices such as the separatism and the self-consciousness. This original experience was characterised by the consistent use of writing, the importance attached to it, and the consequent publication of several texts through the foundation of their own publishing house, therefore called Rivolta Femminile as well.

Moreover, she originally took a stand on the issue of voluntary termination of pregnancy: she didn’t speak out either for or against, but she got to the heart of the matter, discussing about whether feminine sexuality has its own authentic expression in the forms that then result in getting pregnant, but also fearing that speaking out for abortion could legitimate forms of sexuality that would lead to the colonization of women. She broke away from Marxism, read as a partial and incomplete analysis, since it was developed without considering the specificity of over half the human race.

Carla Lonzi, through Rivolta femminile, was the pioneer of Italian Feminism.