Final Project: Women in Politics

When I heard we had to think about a cultural topic to develop for our final project I had not doubt: I would like to write about women in politics, in Italy and in the United States. Probably the fact of working on Us elections for so much time and contributing to the Wiki page fully dedicated to this issue has influenced me a lot. One of the Democratic candidates running for the office of President of the United States is in fact a woman, Hillary Clinton, and I guess this is the first time a woman gets so close to such a meaningful and high political position. I think that this is really amazing, I mean, the whole issue fascinated me a lot but at the same it made me wonder and a lot of questions suddenly came up to my mind. A President woman: could it ever be possible in Italy?
The embarrassing low presence of women in the Italian political scenery is a matter of fact: considering all European countries, Italy stands in the one of the latest places with only 10% of women in the government. On the contrary, it seems that in all Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly in the North of Europe, the percentage of women occupying leading positions in political institutions is very high, or at least their number is equal to that of men. In Italy the situation is rather sad: women seem not to be interested in politics, they don’t candidate and they usually don’t vote for other women. The government introduced the so-called “quote rosa” hoping to increase the number of women in Parliament trying to solve this problem but it seems to me that nothing really changed. My impression is that the world of politics still belongs to men and as a girl studying in a faculty where the number of girls is clearly predominant if compared to that of boys, in a University that is, as a far as I can see, mostly ruled by women, I really would like to see more women involved in politics. So, what I would like to do is try to analyse the problems that women still have to face with as voters and as candidates in the Us and in Italy and most of all to examine what are the social and cultural factors that prevent women from becoming important political leaders.
This week we were also expected to think about immigration in Italy and to do some on line research to gather information, so that we will be prepared to talk about it with the American students. So I just came back from surfing the Net looking for the latest data, statistics and news about it and I found some articles taken from “La Repubblica” stating that immigrants in our country are more or less 4 millions, 6.2 % of the Italian population, and that they mostly concentrate in the cities of Rome and Milan. They talk 150 different languages and they primarily come from Romania, Morocco and Albania. A recent statistic revealed that the relationship between the Italians and the immigrants is hard and contradictory: 48,5% of Italians still consider immigrants as the cause for the lack of jobs available for Italian people and the lack of public safety. Anyway, one Italian out of two see them as a meaningful resource: without them probably our country would collapse. Immigrants work, pay taxes, send their children to school, make Italy a multicultural country but they still cannot vote, or better they can do it only after they have acquired the Italian citizenship, that is to say after 10 years, isn’t it? I really think this is unfair: immigrants should vote and politicians should talk about them and the problems they are involved in while doing their electoral campaigns. No one instead mentioned them and this is really paradoxical. Anyway there are so many things to say about immigration in Italy, it is such a vast and appealing topic to talk about that a single post cannot be exhaustive. I will look for other information before Wednesday and I’m looking forward to hear what the Dickinson students think about it, what their point of view is and how they feel about immigration in their country.