Tina's courage

Bassano del Grappa, 26 September 1944. In the central square, the Nazis occupying the Venetian town hang 43 young partisans.
Among them is the brother of a schoolmate of Tina Anselmi, 17 years old.

This episode marks the fate of a great protagonist of the post-war Italian political landscape.
Tina decides quickly: she will enter the partisan struggle with the name of Gabriella (she was educated in the Christian faith from an early age, she chooses the archangel Gabriel as her protector). "If the Germans catch you, pray that they kill you because otherwise what they will do to you will be worse", warns the commander of the Battisti Brigade. For many months she travels a hundred kilometers a day maintaining links between partisan formations, carrying clandestine press, weapons, coded messages. At the end of the conflict, she will negotiate with the German command to limit revenge and retaliation as much as possible. Already registered in December 1944 with the Christian Democrats, Tina became involved in the CGIL trade union and then in the CISL. You promote disputes above all in the spinning mills with very decisive ways of fighting against your employer.

«After this first youthful experience, my interest in the specificity of the female condition would never have diminished», she later declared. She is in charge of the national youth DC, she is elected to the directive committee of the European Women's Union. During your long parliamentary mandate - 24 years - you are a member of the Labor and Social Security, Hygiene and Health, Social Affairs committees. We owe her the law on gender equal opportunities.
In 1976 she became Minister of Labour, an unprecedented fact in Italy, as the first woman to head a ministry.
In 1977 you signed a law that opens up equal pay and treatment in the workplace for men and women.

As Minister of Health, you promote the National Health Service, which ensures free healthcare for all. Considered by many as a "mother of the Republic", she is proposed several times during the elections for the Head of State. Tina's political commitment is naturally moved and animated by a robust underlying faith which makes her attentive to the "signs of the times" pointed out by the Second Vatican Council. In line with the address given by Pope John to the synodal works, you feel the need for dialogue between the Church and the contemporary world and for a renewed language to express one's beliefs. You particularly grasp the political aspect, open to freedom of conscience with respect to the closures and rigidities of the past. The values of Catholicism are consubstantial with the civil values expressed by the Constitution, rich «in all the values of freedom and peace that the Resistance had expressed and that the political forces were able to gather. [...] Re-reading it, still today one perceives [...] the inspiration that guided the constituents in placing man, his dignity, his need to be the protagonist of the political affair, the builder of that common good, condition and premise for every personal good".

In 1981, Nilde Iotti, then president of the Chamber, entrusted her with the task of presiding over the commission that was to investigate Licio Gelli's P2 lodge, a task that cost her fierce criticism and growing political isolation, even from her own party. Tina Anselmi also had the opportunity to outline the portrait of Licio Gelli, acutely grasping his main psychological and character traits: «How many times, we commissioners, have we asked ourselves about him, a person not of great charm, not even of overflowing intelligence, an insignificant man, in conclusion. My conclusions are that precisely monomania combined with total amorality has placed him above his own mediocrity. History is always traversed by great little men».

From 1998 to 2003 she was honorary president of the National Institute for the history of the Liberation Movement in Italy until 2016. She dedicated her last efforts to the memory of the Resistance, convinced that only the transmission of the values linked to it could preserve the younger generations from experience of new fascisms. "We must not lose the memory of what happened, of what we paid because history repeats itself, there is nothing and no one who can save us the day when we betray this history right in our memory". She died at the age of 89 in Castelfranco Veneto, his hometown.

Anna Maria Gobbato
NP December 2022