Genevieve Vaughan

There she met Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921–1985), whom she married in 1963, moving with him to Italy.

Genevieve Vaughan (born November 21, 1939) is an American expatriate semiotician, peace activist, feminist, and philanthropist, whose ideas and work have been influential in the intellectual movements around the Gift Economy and Matriarchal Studies.

Her support also contributed heavily to the development of the global women’s movement.

Vaughan was born and grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas.

During her childhood, her family became wealthy through oil, and she developed a consciousness of the great disparity of wealth between her family and others'.

She completed a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1961, and subsequently enrolled as a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.

In 1964, he was asked to help start a new philosophical journal applying Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money to language.

Vaughan writes that while the journal did not materialize, her husband wrote several books about this topic, and she found herself in disagreement with his framing of language as a form of exchange.

Her own experience as a mother of small children who were learning to talk suggested that language is a form of gift-giving.

Alongside Rossi-Landi, Vaughan attended the first meeting of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Milan in 1974.

She began her own research and in 1977 completed two essays, "Saussure and Vigotsky via Marx", and "Communication and Exchange" In the latter, she introduces the ideas of "communicative need", exchange as an aberrant form of communication, and money as a one-word language.

They had three daughters together, and eventually divorced, in 1978.

Rossi-Landi is credited as a founder of the SocioSemiotics movement, which stresses the "sociality" of sign use.

1978 was a watershed year for Vaughan.

She divorced, entered psychoanalysis, and began to attend a feminist consciousness-raising group in Rome.

Many of the women in the group worked at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the group became a connection point for women from around the world to discuss important issues about women and development, environment, and peace.

In the early 1980s, Vaughan began to study, write, and teach in Italy.

During these years she was developing a gender analysis around exchange and gift-giving.

In 1980, Vaughan hired her cousin Frances Farenthold, a former Texas legislator, gubernatorial candidate and president of Wells College, to help her embark on a course of socially effective giving from her personal fortune.

In 1981, she was at the Virginia Woolf Cultural Centre in Rome, an independent women’s university started by feminist philosopher Alessandra Bocchetti.

After attending summer semiotics institutes at the University of Urbino for several years, she introduced a feminist element in 1982, organizing a women's group and presenting a paper about care as non-sign human communication.

By starting with gifting as communication, Vaughan arrived at a different take on the Gift Economy than other philosophers.

She took issue with Belgian Luce Irigaray on the subject of exchange of women, instead taking the gift nature of women’s free labour in the home as the starting point for a generalized theory.

Of Marcel Mauss, Vaughan writes "The insistence upon reciprocity hides the communicative character of simple giving and receiving without reciprocity and does not allow [Mauss's followers] to make a clear distinction between giftgiving and exchange as two opposing paradigms."

In 1983, when The Gift by Lewis Hyde was published, Vaughan was not in accord with his emphasis on obligation, reciprocation, and gratitude, instead emphasizing the role of needs as a coequal component.

Where Hyde defines "a true gift" as based on "gratitude", Vaughan describes a true gift as one that satisfies a need.

Returning to the US in 1983, Vaughan began to acquaint herself with a wide range of women’s and feminist activities related to peace, culture, and economics.

She developed supportive and collaborative relationships with many women activists, both unknown and well known.

In 1984, Vaughan, Farenthold and Sonia Johnson started organizing the Feminist International for Peace and Food.

In collaboration with the venerable Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), FIPF developed a Peace Tent to be held at the United Nations third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya.

Vaughan convened and funded preparatory meetings for this project in Texas and in Rome.

Among those in attendance were Bella Abzug, Robin Morgan, and Marilyn Waring.

Video of the Peace Tent shows the process in which women from enemy countries were brought together to hold face to face conversation, while other women stood in support and sang to calm them, so that the discussions could proceed.

In 1987, Vaughan began writing her first book, which would be titled For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange. It would be a decade before it was finished and published, as other activities came increasingly to the fore.

Vaughan would be involved with other peace projects over the next decades, including European and US women’s peace caravans, a Moscow women’s peace meeting in 1987, meetings in Mexico between US and Salvadoran women, and a multilateral meeting of Colombian women on a Japanese peace boat, in 2001.

In 1987, she became involved in Women for Meaningful Summits and began a series of fact-finding trips with Farenthold to Latin America.

Vaughan also visited the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in England.

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In 1988, Vaughan incorporated her numerous projects into a nonprofit organization, the Foundation for a Compassionate Society.

The foundation lasted for ten years and supported hundreds of projects.