By Alessandra Minello
A well-informed and data-rich essay that offers ideas and proposals for overcoming the demographic crisis and for imagining a society in which work and private life live in harmony.
Fewer and fewer children are being born in Italy, childless women are increasing, and those who become mothers are doing so later and later.
Why has a dimension of life that should be simple become so complicated? Answering this question requires addressing both cultural and structural aspects that weigh on the shoulders of Italian women. Among the former, the myth of motherhood that exerts a very strong pressure in the name of an ideal of “perfection”. Among the structural aspects, the lack of childcare, unequally shared parental leave and job insecurity.
An enlightening book that, in addition to a rethinking of family policies, investigates the need for a redefinition of the balance of power in the domestic and public spheres so that women lose their throne as "angels in the house" and men renounce the scepter of power in the labour market.