Italy Buries Emma Bonino, the Feminist Who Fought the Country's Conscience

Italy held a state funeral on Tuesday for Emma Bonino, the Radical party politician, former government minister and European commissioner who died at 78, according to The Local Italy. The Guardian's obituary records that she was a feminist activist long before she was a minister, and that in 1974, having been told by a doctor she was sterile, she became pregnant and sought an abortion in a country where the procedure was still illegal.

That episode, the Guardian writes, set the direction of her public life: contraception, divorce, abortion and later euthanasia, fought through referendum campaigns and through the Radical party she helped build. She served as a government minister and as Italy's European commissioner, and The Local Italy describes her as a feminist fighter whose death drew tributes from across the political world.

The two foreign accounts agree on the shape of the career and differ in emphasis: the Guardian frames her as an activist who entered politics as an instrument, The Local Italy as a trailblazer the political world came out to honour. Both note that the causes she carried were contested in Italy at the time and remain so.