Aging & Wisdom Quote by Emma Bonino

Bonino’s line compresses a whole theory of social change into the blunt, almost industrial rhythm of “factory workers” and “mobilisation.” It’s not a romantic origin story of feminism starting in salons or universities; it’s a claim that women’s political awakening is forged in the workplace, under the discipline of shifts, wages, and collective grievance. The phrasing matters: “women movements” (plural) suggests messy coalitions rather than a single banner, while “great mobilisation” evokes trade-union muscle more than individual empowerment.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the polite myth that rights arrive mainly through enlightened lawmakers. Bonino, a career politician with deep roots in European liberalism, gestures toward something more unsettling: pressure from below, organized at the point where capitalism needs bodies and time. Factories turn private life into public negotiation. When women enter that space en masse, the “old models” (the patriarchal family wage, the obedient daughter-wife, politics as a male club) stop being cultural defaults and start looking like outdated machinery.

There’s also a strategic political intent. By linking feminist change to labor mobilisation, Bonino positions women’s emancipation as structurally inevitable once economic participation becomes collective and visible. It’s an argument for legitimacy: these movements weren’t fringe moral crusades; they were mass politics with the capacity to “destroy” arrangements that had presented themselves as natural. The word “destroyed” is doing real work: it frames transformation not as gradual reform but as rupture, the moment tradition discovers it’s outnumbered.