The consequences of women’s movements are often used by scholars to exemplify the mechanisms of the achievement of a specific outcome. This example could also be useful to represent the unanticipated consequences of a social movement as a social problem.
The paper aims at analysing unanticipated cultural consequences in historical and social processes, exploring the aftermaths of the feminist social movements in Europe and Italy from 1970-1990, with particular regard to the South. In fact, some feminist elements have been taken into account, especially regarding the cultural change of society, and have been incorporated into political and institutional life, but something quite unexpected has happened.
The fil-rouge of the analysis is that the long-range effects of women’s movements, through the achievement of goals regarding the condition of women, have concurred in several results (neither expected nor intended by the movements) in family dynamics, gender relationships, and the social and self-representation of women, especially in southern Italy. These have produced several contradictions in social institutions and everyday life that must be understood in order to be overcome. Such contradictions have had a negative impact on the application of European laws that are often disregarded for cultural reasons.
