Carmen Covito’s ‘Tempo parziale’: Mothering and Work in Italy in a Nutshell

Carmen Covito’s short story ‘Tempo parziale’ (2009) [‘Part Time’] can be read as a comment on the peculiarities of female employment and defective social policies in contemporary Italy. Originally written in 2007 for the INAIL campaign Diritti senza rovesci [Rights without flip side] against discrimination and disrespect of labour rights, it deploys devices of creative reading and irony to create a narrative of ‘labour ethics’. The story’s representation of part-time work in the management sector through the testimony of a highly educated mother of twins offers an insight into employers’ anxieties around hiring women with children on the one hand, and into the construction of a female worker’s resistance on the other. The article proposes that strategies to assert autonomy can only become effective and ironic when the narrative encounters the response of a creative reader.