Italian Feminist Daughters: What the ‘Generation Y’ Has to Say about Growing up in a Feminist Household

Seeking to reconcile childhood and feminism as well as moving away from adult-centric perspectives on generational change, this paper explores the childhood experiences of women of Generation Y that grew up in feminist households in Milan, Italy. Specifically, it aims at understanding the role that mothers have in shaping the political identity of their daughters and the effects of feminist assumptions on motherhood and family structures. The research engaged with existing literature, connecting the mother-daughter relation to debates around agency, care, politics of childhood, concept of ‘generationing’ and generational feminism. Adopting an abductive value-based reflective and relational approach, the data was collected through one-to-one, semi-structured biographical interviews with Milanese women born between 1981 and 1999 who had a feminist mother. Findings from the interviews show an overall positive impact of feminism on gender stereotypes within family structures that reflected themselves on household dynamics as well as on generational order. Placing communication at the core of their parenting agenda, feminist mothers broadened their children’s possibility to perform agency and transformed the existing standardized top-down power relation with their daughters into a more horizontal dynamic based on trust and mutual learning. Challenging the idea that messages tend to get lost in translation across generations, this paper also unveils a strong continuity between feminist waves as daughters’ political identity is deeply shaped by their mothers’ feminist dialogue.