Women’s Home

Women and Nonviolence, Feminism and Solidarity

The Women’s Home, located at Via Vanchiglia 3 in a vintage mansion also housing the Gramsci Institute and the Salvemini Institute, was established in 1979 and has since been a meeting and workshop place to a number of Torino’s feminist groups.
The Home was established as Social promotion Society in 2005, aiming at listening and backing women at large, at fostering a gender culture in every social milieu (self-determination, health, motherhood, violence on women, work, peace), at being a place for everyone to express her own creativity. To this purpose, it arranges training courses and offers several listening as well as psychological and legal support schemes; it houses feminist records; it hosts a number of groups, including the Women in black, a prominent issue of pacifist feminism.
This group was established as a network in Jerusalem in 1988, following the onset of the First Palestinian Intifada, and has internationally spread. The local branch meets up in protest on every last Friday of each month – 6.00 to 7.00 p.m. – on the corner of Via Garibaldi with Via XX Settembre.

“The Women in black
REJECT the rationale of nationalism and of weapons
CHOOSE to speak in the first person
TAKE an individual responsibility as to war and destruction, and the hate and exclusion it entails
STATE through silence their radical remoteness from the propaganda outcry of a country in arms
EXPOSE their bodies to other people’s looks to testify to their concrete unshakeable NO to militarism and violence
DRESS in black as a conscious denunciation way of the overwhelming death culture
PROTEST for any war not to be removed or forgotten, for a righteous peace outlook not to look frail and wobbly, and for millions of women and men of various nations not to be thwarted in their strive for a decent living.”