Equal Pay in Cold War Italy: Women and the Battle for Equality and Social Justice

Equal pay as a global struggle culminated in the so-called golden age of the twentieth century, but has remained highly relevant in the decades following the UN International Women’s Year and in the present day. The debate and struggle for equal pay in Cold War Italy is examined as a useful case study for understanding how the concepts of equality and social justice were put into practice in relation to women workers. The specificity of the Italian context is explored in a comparative perspective that shows how struggles for equal pay linked different geopolitical spaces. Women’s associations, trade unions, employers’ associations, the Italian government, the European Economic Community and the International Labour Organisation are involved in the debates and struggles. Special attention is also given to the biographies of Italian women involved in the thirty-year struggle for equal pay and equal rights, which also played a role at the European and international levels.

Eloisa Betti is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies of the University of Padua and co-coordinator of the Feminist Labour History WG of the European Labour History Network. Since 2019, she has been the coordinator of the pilot project ‘Gender, work and technical culture’, which creates new training tools through public history and documentary to promote gender equality in education. She holds a PhD in European History from the University of Bologna, where she taught labour history from 2018 to 2023. Previously, she was a Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and a EURIAS Fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna. She has written extensively, both in Italian and English, on labour history and women’s work. Her recent publications include the monograph Precarious Workers. History of Debates, Political Mobilization, and Labor Reforms in Italy (CEU Press, 2022), the edited volume E Betti, L Papastefanaki, M Tolomelli and S Zimmermann, Women, Work and Activism. Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in the Long Twentieth Century (CEU Press, 2022), the journal articles ‘Equal pay and social justice: women’s agency, trade union action and international regulations. Italy, the ILO and the EEC in the global context (1951–1977)’, The International History Review, 2021, and ‘Fordism’s Underside: Women’s Work in Postwar Italy’ in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 1, 2025.