The women of Lombardy who drafted the Constitution: when women shaped democracy

After 8 September 1943, Bianchini’s house became a meeting place for the anti-fascist movement in Brescia, and a clandestine printing press was set up there, from which the newspaper *Brescia libera* was published. In 1944, she joined the Fiamme Verdi and contributed to the Catholic partisan newspaper *Il Ribelle*, signing her articles under the pseudonyms Penelope, Don Quixote and Battista. In an essay entitled ‘To Our Teachers’, published as part of the activities of ‘Brescia libera’, she urged teachers not to swear allegiance to the Italian Social Republic and not to leave young people without the tools to understand the present.

However, his activities soon attracted the attention of the Fascist police, and Bianchini decided to move to Milan, where he continued his clandestine work and helped those persecuted for political reasons and Jews fleeing to Switzerland.

Elected to the Constituent Assembly on 2 June 1946 on the lists of the Christian Democracy, Bianchini championed, above all, the principles of freedom and pluralism in education and learning, which she regarded as essential and irreplaceable in combating all forms of authoritarianism. For Bianchini, the role of institutions is to ensure the social and economic conditions necessary for everyone to freely recognise their calling and pursue it.

Re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1948, she served on the Education Committee and remained in Parliament until 1953. Not standing for re-election that year, she decided to return to teaching and, until 1973, was a teacher of history and philosophy at the Liceo Virgilio in Rome. She died there on 27 September 1983.

Whilst Bianchini’s political consciousness had its roots in Catholic associations, Maria Maddalena Rossi’s was communist from the very beginning. Born in 1906 in the province of Pavia, she graduated with a degree in Chemistry in 1930. In 1937, she joined the clandestine Communist Party and became involved in the Soccorso Rosso, the network that assisted politically persecuted individuals and their families. Arrested in 1942, she was interned in Sant’Angelo in Vado, in the Marche region. After the fall of fascism, she sought refuge in Switzerland, where she contributed to anti-fascist periodicals aimed at Italians in exile and internees. Returning to Milan in December 1944, she joined the clandestine editorial team of *l’Unità*. The her story is at the heart of Benedetta Sceresini’s book, *Madre della Repubblica. Maria Maddalena Rossi in 20th-century Italia (Biblion, 2025), which traces the political and civic journey of one of the leading figures in the women’s emancipation movement in republican Italia.

Elected in 1946 to the Constituent Assembly on the Italian Communist Party’s list, Rossi served on the Committee on International Treaties and spoke on the peace treaty signed in Paris on 10 February 1947. Her political commitment also focused on women’s rights, the family and equality between spouses.

In Parliament, she championed women’s right to enter the judiciary, a struggle that formed part of the broader campaign for equal access to public sector jobs and senior management roles. That journey reached a crucial milestone with Constitutional Court ruling no. 33 of 1960, which arose from the famous appeal by Rosa Oliva de Conciliis against the exclusion of women from the competitive examination for a career as a prefect.

With a keen insight into society and an understanding of the reasons behind the inequality between men and women, Rossi also addresses the gap between the principles of equality and the actual circumstances of women, with a political commitment that has translated into parliamentary work focused on rights, social protection and the impact of war on the civilian population.

However, Rossi’s legacy was not limited to the Constituent Assembly: elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1948, she served as a Member of Parliament for three consecutive terms, until 1963, and from 1947 to 1956 she was president of the Italian Women’s Union (UDI), an organisation committed to the defence of women’s rights and their emancipation.

Another cause that Maria Maddalena Rossi championed with great vigour was the protection of women who had been victims of war violence: on 7 April 1952, she spoke in the Chamber of Deputies on the issue of pension and compensation claims that had still not been settled for women who had been victims of war violence in southern Lazio. In particular, she drew attention to all those women who suffered sexual and physical violence in May 1944 at the hands of troops from the French Expeditionary Corps – events known in the public consciousness as the ‘marocchinate’ – calling for the suffering they endured to be recognised and for the victims to be guaranteed a response from the institutions.

After leaving Parliament, she devoted herself to the administration of Portovenere, in Liguria, where she had spent many summers. Having served as a town councillor and councillor for public works, she was elected mayor from 1970 to 1975. In December 1987, the Province of Milan awarded her the gold medal for her social, political and civic commitment. She died in the Lombard capital at the age of 88 on 19 September 1995.

Lina Merlin (born Angelina) is not from Lombardy but from Veneto; however, her connection with Milan – where she lived and fought the anti-fascist battle – makes her a Milanese by adoption, and she certainly deserves to be mentioned alongside the ‘Lombard mothers of the Constitution’, Bianchini and Rossi. Born at the turn of the century in the province of Padua, Merlin had been a teacher and a socialist since 1919, but in 1926 she was dismissed for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Fascist regime. It was then that she decided to move to Milan, where she became involved in the anti-fascist movement and worked alongside Filippo Turati. Arrested in 1929, she was sentenced to five years’ internal exile in Sardinia, but upon her release (in 1933) she returned to Milan. During the Resistance, she helped establish the Women’s Defence Groups and, in 1945, was one of the founders of the Italian Women’s Union (UDI).

Elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1946, she joined the Commission of 75, tasked with drafting the Constitution: here she played an important role in the drafting of Article 3, advocating the inclusion of the words ‘without distinction as to sex’ amongst the principles prohibiting discrimination. This specification was added to the references to race, language, religion, political opinions and personal and social circumstances, laying a fundamental constitutional foundation for equality between men and women: legal equality was, in fact, one of the central objectives of her political activity.

In 1948, Lina Merlin was elected to the Senate and, on 10 June, became the first woman to address the Senate. Among her causes were the removal of the phrase ‘son of unknown father’ from civil registry documents and the protection of female workers against dismissal on the grounds of marriage. Her name, however, remains linked above all to Law No. 75 of 20 February 1958, known as the Merlin Law, which abolished brothels and the system of state-regulated prostitution, without criminalising prostitution itself.

In 1961, she left the Socialist Party after being told that she would not be re-nominated for the Senate. She died in Padua on 16 August 1979, and in 2021 the Senate dedicated a bust to her, thereby recognising her fundamental role in the history of the republic’s institutions.

Laura Bianchini, Maria Maddalena Rossi and Lina Merlin did not belong to the same political and cultural world: Bianchini came from a background of social Catholicism and education; Rossi from communism and the fight for women’s rights; and Merlin from socialism and the struggle for legal equality. Each placed a different emphasis on her work – ranging from schooling to freedom of education, from the family to social justice and the formal principle of equality – but their struggles converged on a common goal: to ensure that the Republic did not leave women on the margins of the emerging democracy.