Alaide Gualberta Beccari

Alaide Gualberta Beccari (born 1842 in Padua - died 1906) was an Italian feminist, republican, pacifist, and social reformer, who published the feminist journal Woman during the 1870s and 1880s.

Alaide Beccari was born in Padua in 1842, the only one of her parents' 12 children to survive to adulthood. Beccari's father was a civil servant in Padua, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. Beccari's father was a supporter of Italian unification and joined the Risorgimento during the uprisings of 1848. When the uprising failed, he fled to Turin. She worked as her father's secretary for a time, then returned to Padua when it was captured by the forces of Lombardy-Venetia.

At age 16, Beccari was living in Venice, where she launched the journal Woman.

The journal Woman was published biweekly. Beccari's publication promoted women's rights following Italian unification in 1861. She was a social reformer, when moral and political reform were gaining popular support in Great Britain, France, the United States, and elsewhere as part of a larger Reform movement during the 19th century.

Woman was a rare feminist voice in Italy during the 1870s and 1880s, and in the language of the period, it supported "woman's emancipation". Beccari, like other Italian feminists of her generation (such as Erminia Fuà, Aurelia Cimino Folliero, Sara Nathan, Giovanna Garcea, and Adelaide Cairoli) equated women's emancipation with Italian unification politics, referring to "the woman's Risorgimento". The journal Woman gave coverage to Anna Maria Mozzoni, who fought to reform Italy's laws regulating legalized prostitution. Mozzoni and Beccari publicized the concept of the "citizen woman" and "patriot mother".Woman also promoted the causes of Josephine Butler. Articles originally printed in Woman were translated and published abroad, in England's feminist journal Englishwoman's Review. In 1877, Woman held a petition drive, garnering 3000 signatures in support of women's suffrage in Italy.

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