Why is Antigone still alive? Despite spitting on Hegel and Freud, the tragedy of the contemporary Italian woman’s situation

Despite the great efforts of the Western world aimed at resolving the gender gap, in Italy the gender gap has stood unchanged for decades and despite the significant number of European policies that Italy has committed to in order to solve this problem, nothing seems to be able to reduce the persistent submission of women to traditional logic that keeps them strongly subordinate to men. This chapter considers the possible internal state of feminist thought which has produced a hold back in the emancipation of women. This process requires a small change in certain key feminist concepts and a consideration of both sociological and psychosocial aspects, in order to understand what has happened in the last few decades; for example, the reification of Italian women and the failure of the passage from the second to the third feminist wave. The milestones considered are inherent to motherhood and its role in the modern family, related to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and the Antigone figure, who is the fil rouge of the discussion. The discussion ends concludes by tacklingfacing the problem of amoral familism that Italy clearly exemplifies; a country heavily matricentric unable to reach the “abjection of mother” as indicated by Julia Kristeva.