How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 / Edition 1

by Victoria de Grazia

Overview

"Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians," goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate. How the fascist dictatorship defined the place of women in modern Italy and how women experienced the Duce's rule are the subjects of Victoria de Grazia's new work. De Grazia draws on an array of sources—memoirs and novels, the images, songs, and events of mass culture, as well as government statistics and archival reports. She offers a broad yet detailed characterization of Italian women's ambiguous and ambivalent experience of a regime that promised modernity, yet denied women emancipation.

Always attentive to the great diversity among women and careful to distinguish fascist rhetoric from the practices that really shaped daily existence, the author moves with ease from the public discourse about femininity to the images of women in propaganda and commercial culture. She analyzes fascist attempts to organize women and the ways in which Mussolini's intentions were received by women as social actors. The first study of women's experience under Italian fascism, this is also a history of the making of contemporary Italian society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520074576
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/11/1993
Series:	Centennial Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	875,766
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Victoria de Grazia is Professor of History, Columbia University, and the author of The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (1981).

Table of Contents

Preface

1. THE NATIONALIZATION OF WOMEN
2. THE LEGACY OF LIBERALISM
3· MOTHERHOOD
4· THE FAMILY VERSUS THE STATE
5· GROWING UP
6. WORKING
7· GOING OUT
8. WOMEN'S POLITICS IN A NEW KEY
9· THERE WILL COME A DAY

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

This noteworthy study reveals how the regime of Il Ducein web , Benito Mussolini, systematically sought to prevent Italian women from experiencing emancipation even as he heralded the advent of the ``new Italian woman'' ( nuova italiana ). Analyzing the deep conflict between modernity and traditional patriarchal authority, de Grazia defines the emerging ideals of Italian womanhood in the 1920s and '30s when Catholic, Fascist and commercial models of conduct competed to shape women's perceptions of themselves and of their society. The author, who teaches history at Rutgers, has much to say about the quasi-religious cult of Ducismo, about Fascism's ``virilist'' politics and about the exaggerated machismo of a regime that taxed celibate men to pay for child welfare programs. The product of meticulous research and deep contemplation, the book is an important contribution to women's studies. Illustrations. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Extremely well researched and drawing upon a vast array of sources, this is the first full-length study of the experiences of women under Italian fascism. The author (history, Rutgers Univ.) places fascism's impact on women in the context of wider social, economic, and demographic changes arising out of World War I. Theorizing that Mussolini's government sought to ``nationalize'' women, she demonstrates how his regime affected women of different class, region, and occupation, how it contended with the Italian Catholic tradition, and how it used or created new kinds of social organizations to meet women's needs. De Grazia underscores that women were not simply passive victims of the dictatorship, however. Academics will be interested in the questions she provokes about women's experiences in mass politics in other European nations. For another book on Italian fascism, see Alexander Stille's Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, reviewed in this issue, p. 95.--Ed.-- Marie Marmo Mul laney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.

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