PEM Habitat Teatrali presents The Strike of the Little Girls.

Tickets: € 16 full price; € 14 over 65 and under 30; € 8 students.

In June 1902, the center of Milan was crossed by a procession of little girls. They sang the workers’ anthem and marched towards the Labor Chamber.

They were the so-called “piscinine”, which in Milanese dialect simply means the “little ones”: girls, in fact, little girls, who worked as apprentices with the seamstresses of the city. The youngest was only six years old and the oldest just fourteen, and their childhood, far from what we might imagine today, was spent in exhausting and poorly paid work, in unhealthy environments and under the constant threat of abuse and exploitation.

Their struggle was the first child labor strike in European history.
These tiny creatures fought against the giants of their time. And their courage, their naive determination ultimately achieved an unimaginable victory, marking a milestone in the struggle for labor rights.
A forgotten story, which deserves to be brought to light, told like a fairy tale in which poetry and irony mix just like in the voices of the little girls.

No one today remembers who the piscinine were. Just as no one imagines the harshness and misery of the world they lived in.
It is one of those stories that time has covered up. Only a few names and some phrases collected from contemporary newspapers are known about them. Yet their story speaks to us directly and powerfully.
Perhaps because the violent injustices and the burning inequalities of their time seem to foreshadow those toward which ours is heading. Or perhaps because their strike tells us that no right is won or defended without taking risks, without putting oneself on the line, and that the path to democracy is a constant effort in which one cannot hold back.
So narrating the epic of those anonymous little girls, of that small crusade lost among the lines of great history, is not just a curious anecdote, but becomes a necessity.
Pausing to observe what happened 120 years ago not only helps us understand the present: it teaches us to build the future.
A story we want to reconstruct especially by bringing to light the lives of those little women who, along with others, had their right to be children taken away, and who found in common solidarity and struggle a human and social redemption.

For info: https://www.piccionaia.org/evento/lo-sciopero-delle-bambine-ferrari/