Exclusion of women from voting

The Exclusion of women from voting is shown in the Donnafugata plebiscite as both a denial of political participation and a condition that officials can obscure. Women who protested their exclusion were jeered at and driven from the square; four days later, a newspaper described them instead as patriotic supporters welcomed by the crowd. The episode sets the plebiscite’s claim to popular consent against the people its political procedures leave out and the dissent they recast.

The rule in the plebiscite

The narrative presents women as excluded from the vote during the political transition marked by the Donnafugata plebiscite. The procedure itself unfolds through male political actors: Don Fabrizio Corbera hands his affirmative vote to Don Calogero Sedàra, while Don Onofrio Rotolo votes at the Prince’s request. Father Pirrone does not vote because he has not registered as resident in the town. The scene makes participation depend on recognized civic standing, while the women’s protest later makes clear that women do not share the franchise.

The official result gives 515 voters, 512 votes cast, 512 affirmative votes, and no negative votes. Those figures describe the recorded electorate, not a universal public voice: women are absent from the count, and the announced unanimity must be read alongside the exclusion that the square’s protest makes visible.

Protest and suppression

Before dusk, several women appeared in the square wearing tricolour ribbons in their hair to protest their exclusion from voting. Their appearance briefly brought the gendered boundary of the new political order into public view. Even the most advanced liberals jeered at them, and they were forced to leave. The episode offers no account of the women being admitted to the booth or having their protest entered into the official proceedings; their political claim is met with ridicule and removal rather than participation.

The newspaper account published in Palermo four days later reverses the meaning of the event. The Giornale di Trinacria reported that women had demonstrated their faith in the country’s future amid great patriotic acclaim. In the square, they had been mocked and driven away. The report does not simply omit their protest: it turns an objection to exclusion into an endorsement of the political celebration, making the women visible only as evidence for a consensus they had not expressed.

Political consent and narrative significance

The episode belongs to a larger pattern of unreliable public consent at the plebiscite. Don Fabrizio Corbera had expected around forty negative votes, yet the proclaimed total was unanimously affirmative. Don Ciccio Tumeo later told him that he had voted no and that his choice had been changed in the count. The women’s exclusion is not the same act as the falsification of Tumeo’s vote, but both details complicate the official appearance of unanimity: some people are outside the electorate, while a recorded dissent can also disappear from the result.

By placing the women’s protest beside the triumphant public announcement and its embellished newspaper version, the narrative shows that the new order’s language of national unity does not ensure equal political standing or faithful representation. The rule is consequential not only because it bars women from casting ballots, but because their attempt to contest that boundary is suppressed and then rewritten as patriotic assent.