Anna Kuliscioff

Anna Kuliscioff (; , ; born Anna Moiseyevna Rozenshtein; ; 9 January 1857 – 27 December 1925) was a Russian-born Italian revolutionary, a prominent feminist, an anarchist influenced by Mikhail Bakunin, and eventually a Marxist socialist militant. She was mainly active in Italy, where she was one of the first women to graduate in medicine.

Biography Anna Kuliscioff was born Anna Moiseevna Rozenstejn in 1857 near Simferopol, in Crimea. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of merchants who guaranteed her a happy and dedicated childhood, so much so that she attended courses in philosophy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Her father, Moisei, was one of the five hundred privileged Jewish "merchants of the first guild" who were permitted to reside anywhere in the Russian Empire.

She was said to have an extraordinary memory and a predisposition to logic and reasoning. Encouraged from childhood to pursue studies with private teachers and rulers, she became interested in politics early.

In 1871, after studying foreign languages with private tutors, Kuliscioff was sent to study engineering at the Zürich Polytechnic, where she additionally took courses in philosophy. Political outcasts, in whom the city flourished, acquainted her with rebel and egalitarian thoughts. Deserting her investigations, in 1873 she married Pyotr Makarevich, an individual progressive of honourable birth, and together they went back to Russia. There they worked for progressive groups, first in Odessa and afterward in Kiev .

In 1874, Makarevich was condemned to five years of hard labour for his revolutionary activity. He died in jail.

Romantically involved firstly with Andrea Costa and then with Filippo Turati, whom she both "converted" to Marxism. For this reason she was later defined as "the strong woman of Italian socialism". thumb In 1912 Giovanni Giolitti's government rejected the opportunity to enfranchise women by introducing a law which granted the vote only to males, even illiterate ones, despite the fact that illiteracy was cited as among the reasons for not extending the vote to women. For Anna Kuliscioff this affair begins a dark period of discouragement and a sense of abandonment. In her relationship with Turati, political dissensions mix with personal issues, disturbing their quiet life. The last years of Kuliscioff's life were marked by much bitterness, many health problems, splits within the Socialists, and the rise of the Fascist Party. Anna Kuliscioff died on 27 December 1925. Violence accompanied her funeral procession through the streets of central Milan on 29 December, when some fascists, hurling themselves against the carriages and tearing the drapes and crowns, transformed the funeral into a declaration of war. She concluded her thesis with the audacious hypothesis that the agent of the infection is to be identified not so much in a streptococcus, as supposed by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), but in microorganisms of another nature, the proteins of putrefaction. Golgi first supported Kuliscioff's hypothesis; however, already in the following year, she was denied by other collaborators of her laboratory in Pavia. Her graduation thesis is her only scientific publication, published in the "Gazzetta degli Ospedali". Thus Kuliscioff could find a link between professional and political activity. During these years she had been in a relationship with Filippo Turati. She decided to move to Milan with him. She tried to get hired as a doctor at the Maggiore Hospital, but she was rejected because she was a woman. Anna Kuliscioff was considered a comforter, a friend, trustworthy woman of those who suffered and their beloved. Her patients described her as a woman who was able to penetrate the depths of souls. Unfortunately this didn't last for too long due to her physical conditions. She retired to her home where she continued her lively political militancy. During the 20th century, the presence of women, first in medical schools and later in hospitals and every healthcare facility, registered a slow but constant increase.

Selected works Il monopolio dell'uomo: conferenza tenuta nel circolo filologico milanese, Milan, Critica sociale, 1894 (The Monopoly of Man, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (MIT Press, 2021)) Il voto alle donne: polemica in famiglia per la propaganda del suffragio universale in Italia, Milan, Uffici della critica sociale, 1910 (with Filippo Turati, in Italian) Proletariato femminile e Partito socialista: relazione al Congresso nazionale socialista 1910, Milan, Critica sociale, 1910 Donne proletarie, a voi...: per il suffragio femminile, Milan, Società editrice Avanti!, 1913 Lettere d'amore a Andrea Costa, 1880–1909, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1976 Amore e socialismo. Un carteggio inedito, La nuova Italia, 2001 (with Filippo Turati, in Italian)