The Lexical Construction ofWomen’s ‘Image’: Party Specificity and Gender Asymmetry in Italy’s Constituent Assembly

This study is organized in two parts. In the first part, we applied traditional methodologies of text analysis to the records of the Italian Constituent Assembly (1946–1947). Specifically, we focused on the representation of women emerging from the Assembly debates that shaped the 1948 Italian Constitution. The corpus was constructed from the stenographic reports of the Assembly’s plenary sessions and the work of the Sub-committees, selecting all interventions in which women are explicitly mentioned. Texts were organized into sub-corpora according to the speakers’ political affiliation, allowing for a comparative analysis of the linguistic strategies employed by the different parliamentary forces. In the second part, after a first exploratory analysis of the data, we apply network analysis. This methodology allows to study the evolution of the co-occurrence network, to examine how different forces forged and constructed identity and roles, and to map the semantic distance between them and the main concepts in each party’s narrative. The study aims to bring to light lexical and semantic differences in the discursive construction of the female issue as adopted by the main political alignments active in the debate. The analysis reveals significant semantic divergences within an otherwise largely homogeneous stylistic framework. Overall, the study shows how the women’s issue constitutes a site of discursive polarization. While Christian Democracy tends to use a lexicon anchored in the family sphere and traditional roles, the socialist party appears more related to the issues of emancipation, labour and social rights. The Communist Party also appears sensitive to issues of work and social justice, but unlike the Socialist Party, it also introduces elements related to the traditional family into its lexicon.