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content/factor/whoarethesewomen.md

@@ -20,7 +20,18 @@ Against this limited vision, the mounting feminist movement was in the same year
 
 Many among Lebole workers went on to become expert trade unionists and party members often contributing to discussions around issues mainly impacting the lives of working class women. In the book *Quelle della Lebole. Frammenti di fabbrica tra interni e esterni*, for example, Patrizia Gabrielli highlights how the Leboline initiated important mobilizations demanding the city of Arezzo to provide kindergarten care for their children. But beyond the different topics thay tackled, there was something about the way in which Leboline practiced politics as a continuation of their private friendships that remains importantly gendered. The interstitial sociality that these women found at the factory was a source of political pleasure, breaking the solitudes of domestic lives. Birthday parties and gossips about relatioships intertwined with solidarity intiatives with other factories and the spontaneous strikes that punctuated these years. 
 
-In this section, we wish to highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation. 
+In this section, we gather documents and insights that highlight the importance of bringing a gendered perspective to the analysis of the intersection between the automation of productive process and the history of women's struggles for emancipation. 
+
+## The ecofeminist battles of Laura Conti 
+
+On 10th July 1976, there was an accident at the ICMESA plant in Meda, which is now remembered as the “Seveso tragedy”. The accident caused the emission and dispersion of a poisonous cloud of TCDD dioxin, one of the most dangerous synthetic chemicals, on the surrounding municipalities of Lower Brianza, in particular Seveso.
+Activist doctor Laura Conti goes to Seveso to follow the developments of the impacted population. In her work, she denounced the risks to the environment from accidents related to industrial activities and shaped the so-called 'Seveso Directive' (Directive 82/501/EEC), the European law for the prevention of such accidents that offers parameters for the control of the over 12 000 industrial establishments in the European Union where dangerous substances are used or stored in large quantities, mainly in the chemical and petrochemical industry.
+
+
+Laura Conti, who was born in Udine in 1921 and died in Milan in 1993, was a member of the anti-fascist Resistance. She was detained in a camp in August 1944. Later freed, in 1949 she earned her medical degree. It is no accident that Ramazzini, a 17th-century physician regarded as the founder of occupational medicine, was the subject of her thesis in her second year of university, as Laura Conti’s militant practice focused on the protection of workers and the environment from the toxic logic of capital accumulation. 
+She wrote 26 books, founded the environmentalist organization Legambiente and leading the environmentalist and feminist movements’ mobilizations for the closure of all nuclear plants in Italy following the explosion of the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station in April 1986.
+
+In Seveso, Laura Conti’s work focused, among other things, on helping pregnant women to obtain a secure abortion, as dioxin provokes malformations in the foetus. At the time, the interruption of pregnancy was still only a possibility in case of malformations. The Seveso tragedy and the work of Laura Conti helped shape a tough conversation about therapeutic abortion and, more generally, about the notion that interrupting one’s pregancy may be a woman's free decision to begin with. It took Italy two years, or 1978, to pass a legislation on the matter.