Italiano 
English An emancipationist movement of which Ersilia Bronzini the creator of the Asilo Mariuccia was a full member. Bronzini played a key role in the fight against exploitation, injustice and discrimination against women would be fundamental to the socialist cause and women's rights. She was born in Oleggio, Novara, in 1859. Due to an economic setback, the family sacrifices the education of females to allow males to study and train for a profession. Ersilia compensated for this by forming a good self-taught education, studying mostly languages, literature, history, and philosophy. This personal drive to educate herself does not save her from a sense of suffering and inadequacy, but she will overcome it through the intellectual energies that will always sustain her.
Through her brother Edoardo, a trainee in a Milan law firm, at the age of eighteen Ersilia met what would later become her husband, Luigi Majno, in 1883. A young lawyer and jurist, Luigi Majno would also be, for several years, a city councilor in Milan, and from 1900 to 1904 a deputy for the Socialist Party. Soon, however, Ersilia will be deeply involved with socialism and will question her bourgeois values, taking to heart the role of women in society and the right to "just" justice. Marriage is also experienced under the banner of iron solidarity and mutual camaraderie, and personal growth is directly related to the transformation of society, to which both spouses devote their energies.
She thus began to collaborate with the Midwife Guard, active in Milan since 1887 with the aim of providing free maternity care to less well-off women. This experience is fundamental in her life also politically since there she met socialist Anna Kuliscioff and becomes convinced of the importance of offering women material support, but even more, of educating them to change their destiny, and open them to a new vision of themselves, as women, mothers, and workers. From the same years is her involvement with the General Association of Mutual Aid and Education of Women Workers, founded in 1862 by Laura Mantegazza Solera, of which Ersilia Bronzini Majno later became president.
In 1899, together with ten other young women almost all from the educated, secular, and progressive Milanese bourgeoisie, she is among the founders of the Unione Femminile, which will become, from 1906, Unione Femminile Nazionale, following the opening of sections throughout Italy. She remained president of this association for ten years.
The brilliant results of her social and political action are however tempered by the painful sequence of family tragedies that affected Ersilia. She lost, first her youngest daughter Mariuccia, and then her eldest, Carlotta.
The institution with which Ersilia's name is most immediately associated and to which she remained linked throughout her life, directing it until her death in 1933, is the Asilo Mariuccia. Dedicated to the memory of her daughter, it was established as part of the activities of the Milanese Committee for the fight against white trafficking, of which she was president. The committee is part of a vast international network, stemmed out of the action of the British Josephine Butler.
After her death, in 1933, the Union organized a solemn commemoration to remember her and pay a "tribute of honor and gratitude", to an extraordinary woman, among the most active protagonists of the Italian women's emancipationist movement, capable of combining social reformism with the professionalization of work in the social and initiating actions, first local, then national, until reaching an international dimension.
