Here’s an interesting history source, which brings to the screen Eileen Power’s Medieval Women, and which introduces some odd claims. For example, it says:

Most non-conformists became nuns

Well, that’s probably true for the gentry and nobility, and not the peasant majority. And it certainly wasn’t an option for the non-Christians. Ooops. Power wrote entirely of power (Christian Europe) as she probably considered Jewish and Muslim women as non-conforming, if she thought about them at all.

Consider the counter-example of Marguerite Porete, who wrote Mirouer des simples ames in the late thirteenth century, as found in Chapter 122, fifteenth-century manuscript, Chantilly, Musée Condé F XIV 26 (catalogue 157).

Amis, que diront beguines, et gens de religion,
Quant ilz orront l’excellence de vostre divine chançon?
Beguines dient que je erre, prestres, clers, et prescheurs,
Augustins, et carmes, et les freres mineurs,
Pour ce que j’escri de l’estre de l’affinee Amour.

Modern translation: My Love, what will the beguines say, and all the people of the church, when they hear how good your song is? The beguines already call me wrong. So do the priests, the scholars, the preachers, the Augustinians, the Carmelites, the Franciscans. All because I write about pure Love when nothing false is left in it.

Her book was burned at Valenciennes on the orders of the Bishop of Cambrai, who forbade her from circulating it by threatening judgment as a “relapsed heretic”. She circulated it anyway and was thrown into jail for a year and a half. She declined the inquisitor’s oath and never answered the tribunal, which condemned her for it on top of the book being circulated. The cleric Guiard de Cressonessart declared himself her defender and was punished with a sentence of life imprisonment. Three weeks after fifty-four Templars were burned at the stake, she was too on June 1, 1310 at the Place de Grève in Paris. Then her work circulated anonymously for six centuries in French, Latin, Italian, and Middle English, still copied and read to this day.

I guess the point here is that the film says a woman could choose marriage or a convent. Technically there was also the beguine, as a tolerated non-conformance. All of it reads as Christian. Jewish and Muslim women from birth were excluded by discrimination, their non-conformance forced upon them rather than chosen, since they couldn’t be in a convent or beguinage. Porete is the story of a woman who chose another path and was murdered for it. She didn’t even conform to the non-conformance.

The anti-fascist militia Arditi del Popolo (AdP), was founded in Rome in late June 1921. Faced with a growing threat of armed fascist gangs, regular people gathered around the AdP defense organization and managed to keep streets of cities and neighborhoods safe from the domestic terror squads known as “blackshirts”. Its first action was July 19 in the port city of Piombino, in Tuscany, Italy.

Sung to the tune of Giovinezza (fascist party hymn):

We beat back the violence
of mercenary fascism
all to arms, on the calvary
of human redemption.

This eternal youth
renews itself in faith
for a people who demand
equality and liberty.

Two days after Piombino, at Sarzana, a column of five hundred fascists marched to free their captured leader Renato Ricci. A dozen Carabinieri fired on the right wing extremists approaching the railway station, and AdP fighters joined by local workers and citizens hunted the survivors on the run through the countryside. The chief of staff of the defeated right-wing terror squad reflected:

The squad, so long accustomed to meeting an enemy who nearly always ran away, or offered feeble resistance, could not, and did not know how to defend themselves.

Food for thought.