80 years ago, a landmark referendum empowered women in Italy and led to the birth of the Italian Republic. On 2 June 1946, millions of Italian women entered polling stations across a country still scarred by war and queued to do something their mothers and grandmothers had been denied: cast a vote at national level.
The occasion was the institutional referendum in which the Italian people chose between monarchy and republic, and simultaneously elected a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. It was a founding moment in modern Italian history, and it was also, for around half the electorate, the first time they had ever been recognised as full citizens of a democratic state.
