Protestant Women Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Italy

In my dissertation project, Protestant Women Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Nation-Building at the Crossroads of Gender, Culture and Religion (1860–1915), I reconstruct the history of 26 Protestant women who experienced their religiously motivated missions as mobile teachers in nineteenth-century Italy.The pro-Risorgimento Waldensian Church from the northern Protestant „ghetto“ Val Pellice, Piedmont, promoted from 1860 to 1915 its own national program to contribute to the consolidation of the new nation-state by opening churches, philanthropic associations and elementary confessional schools for children regardless of religion and gender. Within the program, 240 women teachers were sent voluntarily to teach in the national territory, especially in Central and South Italy. This project aims to focus on the history of 26 women by analyzing their unpublished report letters addressed to the presidents of the Evangelization Committee and stored in the Waldensian Archives in Torre Pellice (Piedmont).The main goal is to show from women´s perspective how these experiences of mobility and teaching shaped and reshaped their gender, religious and cultural identities in the context of the nineteenth-century Italian nation-building process. In doing so, I emphasize the Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of „hybridity“ to analyse the negotiation of women´s identities by women in the Italian fragmented society on its way to becoming national. I also prioritize the concept „Religious Internationals“ coined in transnational history to describe the nineteenth-century Protestant International community positioned toward the global mission to evangelize. The Waldensian Church was part of this community, therefore the nationalistic act of teaching- to educate children for la Patria, overlapped the religious purpose- to convert Italy to the evangelical faith, which allows me to analyse the Waldensian women´s experience both in terms of national and transnational affiliation. I argue that such an analysis of multiple identities enhances the understanding of both gender histories of Italian Protestantism and Italian nation-building, and of women´s emancipation through education.