This article analyses the relationship between Italian feminism and mental health in the 1970s, focusing on Turin. It explores the main theoretical debates that dominated feminist magazines and meetings during those years. In feminist groups and collectives, discussions about women’s wellness and illness began with the broader theme of health and knowledge of one’s body. However, they subsequently expanded to include personal, theoretical, clinical and political issues related to mental health. New experiences such as autocoscienza (consciousness-raising) and the practice of the unconscious allowed feminists to examine the effects of gender roles and models, existential contradictions, distress and intolerance, discomfort with doctors, psychiatric hospitalisation and the shortcomings of territorial services. The case of Turin shows that these experiences paved the way for subsequent interactions between feminism and the psychiatric reform movement.

The article analyses cross-class encounters within 1970s feminist campaigning from the perspective of the history of emotions. It is based on a case study of a feminist women's sexual health clinic (consultorio autogestito) in a working-class district near Turin, the Falchera, in the mid-1970s. The article investigates the role played by emotions in the creation of a sense of community among women from different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. The encounters between feminist activists from Turin and working-class women living at the Falchera are understood as framed by these emotional exchanges, which led the women involved to question in new ways their own life-stories, aspirations and understanding of libertà. It is argued that these exchanges led to a reshaping of feminist politics at the grass-roots, specifically in the articulation of strongly situated notions of liberation. The analysis is based on original interviews and interviews published at the time.

Ada Gobetti's Storia del gallo Sebastiano represents one of her many anti-fascist activities. By the time of the story's creation, Ada Gobetti had lived under fascism for 16 years. While Sebastiano descended from a long line of non-conformists in children's literature, it imparted a very specific ideological and political agenda, since Sebastiano was born at the height of fascism. Read by thousands of Italian children during the war, the story provided a clever critique of Mussolini's attempt to make children conform to the fascist ideal. Through Sebastiano, Ada Gobetti enlisted parents and their children in her efforts to urge Italians to resist fascism. After the war, as vice-mayor of Turin, the first woman to hold such a position in Italy, Ada Gobetti worked diligently to effect positive reforms in the schools, and fought openly for the rights of Italian women and children. She also wrote extensively on child rearing and devoted much of the remainder of her life to pedagogic activities to promote a ‘democratic education’ for both children and their parents.