Bianca Bianchi (politician)


Bianca Bianchi was an Italian teacher, socialist politician, feminist, and writer.

Biography

Upon the death of her father, the town's blacksmith and active socialist, she moved to Rufina, with her mother's family, then to Florence to continue her studies. She obtained his master's degree and enrolled in the faculty of teaching. As a teacher, she encounters difficulties and obstacles, to the point of losing her job, due to disagreements with her superiors on her independent way of conducting lessons, for example her desire not to neglect Jewish culture and civilization. She therefore accepted the proposal for an appointment as an Italian language teacher in Bulgaria, from December 1941. In June 1942 she returned to Italy and, after a brief period in which he settled again in Rufina, she returned to Florence after the fall of Mussolini.
She took part in the meetings of the Action Party, the spread of anti-fascist leaflets and in arms transport for the partisans. In 1945 she joined the Socialist Proletarian Unity Party of Giuseppe Saragat and Pietro Nenni and collaborated with various political journals. She was a friend of Angelica Balabanoff and shared her aspiration for women's emancipation and her pessimism about the backward position of the country.
In the elections of June 2, 1946, she was among the 21 women out of 556 members elected to the Constituent Assembly. During her participation in the Constituent Assembly she spoke on the problems of school, pensions and employment. In January 1947 she followed the Saragat group in the split of Palazzo Barberini which gave birth to the new Italian Democratic Socialist Party.
In 1948, a candidate in Sicily was elected in the I Legislature for the list of Socialist Unity. From the fifties she devoted himself to the study of educational issues and to the creation of the School of Europe of Monte Senario, a model institute for elementary and middle school children. The ideas that motivate this experiment, in many aspects experimental and avant-garde, are expressed in the essays L'esperienza di un'educazione nuova alla Scuola d'Europa. In the same years she collaborated with the newspaper La Nazione in Florence, writing the "Occhio ai ragazzi" column aimed at educational problems.
From 1970 to 1975 she was elected municipal councilor of Florence on the PSDI lists, holding the office of deputy mayor. Starting from this time she also devoted herself to writing works of an autobiographical nature.

Selected publications