Revolution and Gender in the “Venetian ’48”: Women’s Emancipation, the Cult of the Male Hero, and Literary Memory

The research project “Revolution and Gender in the ‘Venetian ’48’: Female Emancipation, the Cult of the Male Hero, and Literary Memory” examines Venice’s revolutionary period of 1848–49 as a defining historical moment in the renegotiation of gender roles. Drawing primarily on newspaper articles, pamphlets, and caricatures from 1848, the study will first examine how Venice’s brief break from Austrian rule created space within public discourse for women’s voices to demand participation in the patriotic struggle.  Subsequently, the study will demonstrate how these Venetian accounts of a “Risorgimento femminile” sparked controversial debates even before the Republic was crushed and were quickly pushed into the background in Italy’s national culture of remembrance through the heroization of Venice’s soldiers as exemplars of male heroism. To reconstruct these gender-political negotiation processes and their patriotic visual narratives, specific literary works (novels, poetry, plays) about the “Venetian ’48” will also be taken into account—works that have thus far been largely overlooked in scholarship.