Contro la violenza domestica: Agency delle donne e istituzioni nell’Italia del secondo Ottocento

Domestic violence and women’s agency seem like two contradictory and irreconcilable objects of analysis. However it is precisely the experiences of abuse that constitute a delicate but concrete field for the expression of social
actors’ agency. In order to offer a historical framework that combines the two terms and enables us to appreciate their correlation, the paper explores three areas in which gender violence is the subject of discourse, narrative,
and analysis in roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century: they are, first, the space and ways in which violence enters the long-standing parliamentary debate on divorce, then the conflict and violence experienced by
couples who file for separation at the Palermo court, and finally the female point of views about the condition of women in the Italian legal system and its extent of oppression.