Diva Agostinelli and Rebecca DeWitt A 79 Year Old Woman Who Bowls An Interview with Diva Agostinelli, Anarchist
When I was young, I was convinced that I was going to be Voltarine de Clyre, Louise Michel, Sofia Perovskaya. I was going to go out there and make the revolution. Ever since I was a kid, that’s the way I saw myself to the point that I would go to the grocery store and start making speeches to the women.
And, I guess in a way I was almost a joke to the people in town and I didn’t realize it. The young men in town had a pool hall called the Speedway and they would call me in - my mother said I was 6 or 7 then. They’d take my shoes off, put me up in my stocking feet on the pool table and say “Tell us about the revolution” or “Tell us about the strike” and I would make a speech. God knows what I said. They would put nickels on the pool table and say “What are you going to do with this money Diva?” and I would say “I’m going to bring it to Nena for the political victims.”
I would collect my money and run up to Nena’s house. In school, they gave me a soapbox when I graduated. I was always making speeches, always in trouble. Although, being a small town, they knew me and never expelled me.
I went to Philadelphia and, this is very hard to say, but I was so disillusioned with the rank and file of the anarchists. The anarchists I grew up with in Jessup, they never treated me as if I was one, a child, and two, a female child. I get to Philadelphia.it was a more traditional Italian culture and their attitude towards women stank. I was horrified and I was in a terrible, terrible bind because they were kind, they worked and sent money to the movement. They supported me in the sense that I didn’t pay for room and board for four years. I realized that they were good people but they were ignorant about a lot of issues. They were all working class people but so was my family.
Well, I came to NY and I met some really terrific people, David, Audrey, the Why? group. They saved my life in a sense; I mean it was the best thing that happened to me. We were naïve, we really didn’t know as much as we thought we did but it was wonderful. I felt I belonged, I felt I was part of something important. We worked hard, we had meetings, we had discussions and we wrote the magazine. When the war came.I did not support the war effort.