Femminismo e teosofia: la presenza femminile nella massoneria e nelle società esoteriche

The essay is based on the contents of the seminar held as part of the transnational conference Networks and Forms of Italian Female Activism in the Long Nineteenth Century (1820-1922), aimed at starting a reflection on the types of women's associations, with specific attention to intellectual thinking, the forms and ways of aggregation that contributed to developing different modes of commitment. In this perspective, my contribution focuses on female associations of an occult and esoteric nature which flourished in the wake of those heterodox spiritualistic doctrines which had so much diffusion and success between the mid-nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In the first part, I focus on the impulse and suggestions that these doctrines, grafted onto the Mazzinian legacy, transmitted to Italian proto-feminism. In the second part, I review individuals and work of some esoteric women, with particular regard to their involvement in the women's issue and their activity in the social and political field.