Good Girls Don’t Wear Trousers     by Lara Cardella, Translated by Diana di Carcaci Original language: Italian Published by Arcade Publishing Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Hardcover, 128 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.77 x 7.83 x 5.33 ISBN: 155970263X List Price: $16.95 Not available for ordering Published by Hamish Hamilton Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 118 pages Not available for ordering

Lara Cardella, a writer born in 1969, describes here a present-day Italy stuck in the Middle Ages, characterised by the violence and abuse of an apparently everyday Southern Italian family. The protagonist and narrator, Anna, is a Sicilian teenager who finds herself unable to conform to the traditional role of submissive female and is forced to steal a false freedom for herself with lipsticks and miniskirts. The trousers she longs for are a symbol of the independence enjoyed only by men in a culture of continual discrimination against the female sex. Her early attempts to be male, imitating stereotypical masculine behaviour, are the first steps on the long road towards her goal of reclaiming herself and her own individuality. But the impossibility of transforming herself into the triumphant image of her own oppressor forces her to the opposite extreme: the most reviled role of the buttana (whore).


This book became quite a literary cause celebre not only because its author was only eighteen but also because it reveals that the Southern tradition of bringing up girls in an atmosphere of coercion and self-negation is continuing in a society where modernisation and emancipation from the past have left whole areas of life still in the shadows.