After having tried to reconstruct the most significant moments of the long and arduous process of female emancipation in the Kingdom of Italy (the slow improvement in literacy, the struggle for access to the highest levels of education and to the professional registers, the new professional achievements...), this second part of the essay will mainly focus on the figure of the female teacher, who is most often relegated to the insular reality of rural schools in conditions of serious discomfort and isolation. The history of these ‘frontier’ teachers has reached us above all through news stories or the stories of its protagonists, but also through the many pages of literature that have contributed to leaving a long-lasting trace of this female epic of grief and determination.
