In 1902 Anna Franchi published Avanti il divorzio!, a largely autobiographical work that explored with frank directness the moral squalor engendered by the failure of Italian political leaders to pass divorce legislation. Franchi's radical and dramatic demand for an end to the sexual and economic oppression of women burst into a climate where few politicians dared challenge the legal status quo on the family, and where feminist demands focused more on the vote and improving women's working conditions than on a fundamental overhaul of social and family life. If Franchi's experience was a product of her times, her rebellion was ahead of her day. Almost thirty years later in La mia vita (My Life, 1940) she looks back on her youth and describes her life then as a curious mixture of the end of romanticism and the rise of new theories that seemed attractive to a younger generation of women. The “theories” she refers to obliquely are new political positions forming on the left associated with anarchism, socialism, and feminism that achieved comparatively little in terms of legislation but which had a substantial impact on social and cultural thought in Italy during the twentieth century.