On October 14, Women Writers Day is celebrated, a date designed to make visible the role of women in literature. We recovered five readings written by European women who fought for the rights and freedoms of women to have a place in the European project.
One Life, Simone Veil
Auschwitz survivor, Simone Veil dedicated her life to the fight against discrimination and intolerance. Born in 1927, in 2010 she published her memoir “Una vida”, a first-person account that collects her experiences: the memory of the Holocaust, her commitment to Europe and her fight for women’s rights.
As French Minister of Health, she decriminalized abortion and approved the law that allowed access to contraceptives. She was also the first woman elected president of the European Parliament. In 2008 she won the Carlos V Award in honor of “her recognized merits in the fight for the advancement of women.”
My homeland A4, Ana Blandiana
An exceptional poet, prose writer and essayist, he is a legendary figure in Romanian literature. Her book My Homeland A4 has been recognized as one of the great European books with a vocation for freedom and she has been awarded the “European Poet of Freedom” prize.
Blandiana is part of the group of writers who conceived their literary vocation as a form of moral resistance. She founded Civic Alliance, an independent organization that fought for democracy and made Romania’s entry into the EU possible.
Malina, Ingeborg Bachmann
Ingeborg Bachmnann (1926 – 1973) was an Austrian poet and author, one of the foremost German-language writers of the 20th century. The influence exerted on her by the different European movements led her to travel through France, England, establishing her final residence in Rome.
Bachmann is one of the representatives of the intellectual reconstruction of Austria after Nazism, and one of those who best expresses the anguish of the postwar period and the uncertainties of the time. Malina is the story of a plea, of a confession, of a passion, of the self in search of her identity, in the midst of unsustainable tension.
We, without a country, Ursula Hirschmann
The memoirs of Ursula Hirschmann (1913-1991) constitute a lucid testimony of an exceptional protagonist of the European 20th century, where the vicissitudes and difficulties of a life are recorded, summoning us to an exercise in history and collective memory.
In them, she presents herself as a “wandering European”, without a homeland, coming to be part of the exiles, exiles, refugees, of the European women of the 20th century who, based on their experience and situation, think of Europe or are politically and actively committed to the construction european. She will be a pioneer and Europeanist she will also be part of the group of women that in 1975 she founded in Brussels Femmes pour L’Europa.
Memoirs of a European, Louise Weiss
Activist for women’s rights, journalist writer and French politician, Weiss (1893 -1983) founded the magazine “The New Europe” at the age of 25 as an instrument for peace and cooperation throughout Europe. She wrote on political issues, sociological essays, novels, plays, on art and archeology, and turned her experiences into travel books; she published six volumes of Memoirs of a European between 1968 and 1976. In 1971 she created the Louise Weiss Foundation in Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament of which she was the first president, to give an annual award for contributions to the advancement of the “science of peace” and the improvement of human relations.
