Right-Wing Women

From Conservatives to Extremists Around the World

Paola Bacchetta, Margaret Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136615702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An oft-neglected subject, right-wing women are an important component in understanding the many racist, fascist, and anti-feminist movements of the 20th century. Providing original research on an array of right-wing groups around the world, the contributors paint a disturbing and complicated portrait of the women involved in these movements. From Mussolini supporters to Klanswomen, this collection provides an eye-opening look at extremist women.

Part I

Agency/Subjectivity/Subject Positions

1

She Loved Mussolini: Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Fascism

Carole C. Gallucci

Margherita Grassini Sarfatti (1880–1961) is famous for founding the Novecento art group in Italy in 1925, and infamous for being Benito Mussolini’s mistress for nineteen years. An important and influential intellectual in her day, Sarfatti published thousands of articles on topics ranging from art and politics to literature and culture, hosted a literary and artistic salon that drew major cultural figures of the day, and enjoyed access to powerful people and institutions. Her biography of Mussolini, Dux, was an international best-seller translated into eighteen languages. So well known was Sarfatti that she was invited by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt to tea at the White House on April 15, 1934. In the 1930s she lost favor in Mussolini’s Fascist regime and went into exile in Paris and Argentina, where she attempted to reclaim her earlier identities and recast her life. Sarfatti occupies seemingly multiple and contradictory subject positions, as Jewish and Catholic, politically left and right, feminist and Fascist. When studying Sarfatti, scholars typically speak of categories such as pre-Fascist, post-Fascist, feminist, antifeminist, postwar, and post-Mussolini. While these qualifiers rightly reflect the complexity of Sarfatti’s life and works, they suggest an uncomplicated relationship of self to ideology that may prove to be too limiting. Is she, as Victoria de Grazia has argued, an “an organizer of culture,” or is she, as Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan have suggested, a Fascist ideologue?¹ If we take Barbara Spackman’s theory of Fascist discourse (1996) as combining oppositional positions and apply it to Sarfatti, we are left with a perplexing question: is it possible to be both a feminist and a fascist?

A complex and contradictory figure, Sarfatti has been clearly viewed as a Fascist. While critics overwhelmingly agree that Sarfatti was a member of the Fascist Party, a proclamation she herself made in 1919, there is no critical consensus on whether she was, or can even be considered, a feminist. Scholars such as Franca Pieroni Bortolotti and Giovanna Bosi Maramotti have argued that even her so-called early period is nothing short of antifeminism in the service of self-interest.² More recent studies find a definite ideological break with feminism by Sarfatti in the mid to late 1920s, in part a result of the consolidation of the Fascist regime (de Grazia 1982, 152; Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, 307; Harrowitz 1996, 145). Yet Sarfatti considered herself a feminist from her earliest writings beginning in 1901 and, to the best of my knowledge, never disavowed this position in her own writings. Rather, it seems, she simply changed, under Fascism, what it meant to be a feminist. Indeed, Sarfatti’s complicated (repositionings over time raise important issues for subsequent critical studies on women and Italian Fascism, such as the relationship of feminism to fascism, the definition of feminism itself, and the factors that may condition producers of culture.

Sarfatti is an important figure to study for several reasons. First, an analysis of women intellectuals who supported Fascism in Italy will open up new areas of inquiry and alter feminist discourses. While Sarfatti herself may not be able to cross the lines between feminism and fascism or even occupy a liminal space between them, she severely complicates the notion that all Fascists were anti-women or that all women were anti-Fascist. Much work still needs to be done, for example, on the “Fasci Femminili,” or women’s auxiliaries of the Fascist Party, and their attempt to formulate a “Fascist feminism.” By studying women’s production, consumption, and attitudes of support toward fascism, future research will lead to the construction of a more accurate picture of women’s writing in twentieth-century Italy and Europe. In this way, we can connect the work of Italian women Fascists with the history of other women intellectuals in Europe, particularly Germany, who openly sympathized with Nazism and fascism.³ Furthermore, the previously unknown story of Fascist women supporters can be linked to a more established historiography of anti-Fascist activists, providing a better context for their actions.⁴ The kind of research I propose may create alternative paradigms on women and fascism.⁵

In this essay, I propose a new study of Sarfatti’s texts written between 1913 and 1955. I will explore how Sarfatti attempted to reconcile feminism with Fascism. I have organized Sarfatti’s life and works into three phases: her early years of socialist feminism; her middle years at the height of Mussolini’s power, when she is more clearly in line with Fascist thinking about women; and her later years, when she attempts to reposition herself in history and absolve herself from her own responsibility in the development of Fascism. This helps explain her silence about Mussolini in her final memoirs. Yet I would like to suggest even in her writings of the middle years, which are antiwomen, that Sarfatti is still concerned with women’s issues and may even subtly contest some elements of Fascist ideology.

To this end, it will be useful to begin with an overview of Sarfatti’s life. Sarfatti was an art critic, novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. She was internationally recognized as an art critic, both for her support of the arts and for her literary and artistic salon, which drew major figures of Italian and European intellectual life, such as Luigi Pirandello and F. T. Marinetti. Sarfatti began writing and publishing as early as 1901. Her writings appeared in major feminist and socialist publications, such as the socialist daily Avanti! in Milan, the feminist review La Rassegna femminile in Florence, and the socialist literary review Avanti della domenica published first in Florence and later in Rome. Many of her early writings addressed women’s issues. In these early years from 1901 to 1925, Sarfatti positioned herself as a feminist and a supporter of women’s rights. In 1901, Sarfatti joined the Milan Feminist League and wrote articles for that organization’s journal, Unione Femminile, supporting voting rights for women. Socialist men and women were divided over whether female emancipation would take place under the revolution or whether women were immediately entitled to equal rights, including the right to vote. After years of debate, the Socialist Party officially endorsed universal suffrage for women only by 1910. In 1912, the year after Sarfatti met Mussolini, she was writing for La Difesa delle Lavoratrici (The Defense of Women Workers), the official voice of socialist feminism. Sarfatti wrote articles for La Difesa on voting, work conditions, equal pay, family law, and divorce. For instance, in her 1913 article “Perchè le donne han bisogno del voto” [“Why women need the vote”], Sarfatti argued that, contrary to pervasive antiwomen rhetoric which said that granting women the vote would destroy the home, voting women had a higher intellectual and moral program then men: “[Women] have saved houses, families and innumerable hearths, for the present and the future” (2).

Sarfatti also supported legal rights for women. Sarfatti’s 1914 article “Le nuove leggi sull’ordinamento della famiglia” [“New family laws”], listed the proposed bills for new family laws: “Bill for civil marriage over religious, bill for divorce, bill for paternity laws, who therefore would dare to say that politics is ‘men’s business,’ that politics is ‘something that doesn’t concern women’?” (1). Sarfatti insisted that society, now that women were a significant presence in political life, correct the injustices affecting women (1). Sarfatti understood that society as a whole, and specifically the working class and the bourgeoisie, would have to band together in order to obtain equal rights for women.

Sarfatti often invoked the first-person plural in her early writings, insisting that “we women” take matters into our own hands. Using this rhetorical strategy, Sarfatti created a common bond and sense of community with her female readers. She attempted to universalize women’s experiences by addressing the reader directly: “Italian women, you socialists and working women, be on the alert!” (1). Sarfatti reiterated the rhetoric first proposed by early feminists who encouraged female empowerment through increased economic and political participation. Sarfatti’s subsumption of the category of women under the category of mothers in this early phase, sometimes construed as anticipating Fascist rhetoric, was rather a common rhetorical strategy of the natural rights philosophy of the Enlightenment.⁶

In her middle phase, roughly 1926 to 1936, Sarfatti recast her earlier positions on women’s role and function in Fascist society. In this group of writings, Sarfatti was more in line with Fascist thinking about the proper place of Woman. For the Fascists, women’s rights now meant prolific motherhood in service to the new Italy. Scholars have argued that as mistress to the duce, Sarfatti abandoned feminism and chose to concentrate instead on modern art, not modern women.⁷ A more Fascist and less feminist Sarfatti appears in two of her major publications during this period: the 1926 biography, Dux, and the 1929 novel, Il palazzone.

Sarfatti considered her biography of Mussolini, Dux, her greatest literary achievement. Giuseppe Prezzolini had suggested the idea to Sarfatti in 1924 after being approached by an English publisher interested in a biography of Mussolini (Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993,299). Sarfatti’s biography was published first in English in 1925 with the title The Life of Benito Mussolini, and in Italian in 1926 as Dux. Mussolini, who had earlier provided Sarfatti with personal diaries and letters, wrote the preface to the Italian edition, and there he insisted: “In thus presenting myself I am giving the highest proof of human endurance for the moral edification of my fellow-mortals” (The Life, 9; Dux, 7). Dux quickly became a best-seller. It was translated into eighteen languages and went through seventeen editions from 1926 to 1938. Its status as a best-seller in Italy may have been determined by censorship laws and Fascist control of printing. The Fascist ideologue Arturo Marpicati went so far as to insist that it was the duty of everyone to read it: “It is one’s duty to know it. It is necessary to those who live today, as it will be indispensable to the historical future.”⁸

Fascist propagandists called Sarfatti the “artefice del Duce” or image maker of the duce (de Grazia 1992, 230). Historians, including Philip Cannistraro, have credited Sarfatti with creating a myth of Mussolini by helping to shape his cult of the personality (Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, 302–305). Sarfatti created a myth for the masses of a man destined to remake Italy: “Benito Mussolini is an archetype of the Italian—he is a Roman from top to toe and to the marrow of his bones… . Roman in spirit and appearance, Benito Mussolini is the resurrection of the pure Italic type, which after many centuries flourishes once again” (The Life, 20; Dux, 10). As an officially sanctioned biography, Sarfatti rewrote the past and largely omitted Fascist violence, including the murder of Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 (The Life, 138, 149; Dux, 98). We can only speculate as to her knowledge or ignorance of Fascist violence and repression. Given her intimate relationship with Mussolini, it would appear that Sarfatti was well aware of such acts. She excused the murder of Matteotti as an expression of manly rivalries: “With a party of energetic young men, some of them inclined to violence, the more that is accomplished the more likely is friction to arise, and it is impossible that mistakes will not be made.”⁹ In his review of 1926, Luigi Tonelli saw Dux as the embodiment of an epoch: “Besides being a great and acute biography, Dux seems to be the story of thirty years of Italian political and spiritual life” (251 ; see also Cecchi 1926,245). Dux reflects the height of Sarfatti’s power in Fascist Italy.

Crucially, Sarfatti does not present an ideal ruler, but rather a very real man. She included his accounts of violence, opportunism, and antifeminism. Sarfatti presented Mussolini as a virile leader surrounded by adoring women. In the conclusion, Sarfatti defined the biography as “a woman’s book.” Reviewers agreed.¹⁰ By doing so, while seemingly demeaning it, Sarfatti actually valorized microhistory and oral history by focusing on the relations between history and story. According to Sarfatti, History may be made up of, in this case, a great man and great deeds, but it is also made up of important women and quotidian stories. Although Sarfatti concluded that “[t]he scene, Signor Presidente, is dominated by your figure” (The Life, 346), she made quite sure that he was nonetheless surrounded by influential women, including Sarfatti herself.

When Sarfatti’s only novel, Il palazzone, was published in the spring of 1929, she defined it a “love story.”¹¹ In 1929, Goffredo Bellonci aligned Dux with Il palazzone, arguing that Dux recounted the story of a man representing “masculine virtues,” while Il palazzone narrated “the feminine essence, woman” (8). The main themes of the novel include the obedient, subservient woman [“Woman, woman, woman: unremittingly woman!” (238)], male virility and domination, and the necessity of Fascism because Italy “needs a leader” (198). The representation of the main female character, Fiorella Maggi, conforms perfectly with Fascist thinking about women as lovers, sexual objects for the new man, and as “exemplary wife and mother” (sposa e madre esemplare, Meldini 1975). Fiorella is all of these, wife, mother, and lover, who exists insofar as men confer a social role on her: “to feel his, protected by him, led and scolded, possessed by him completely and totally!” (236). In the novel, Sarfatti set up a “war of the sexes” in which men are dominant, violent, and active, and women are tender, obedient, and passive (116, 121, 123–125).

According to Giovanna Bosi Maramotti, Il palazzone is clearly a Fascist novel: “Il palazzone is a Fascist historical novel for its able introduction of myths which provide the basis of an education largely affirmed in the thirties” (1982, 106). While women are represented as sexual objects, men are violent Fascist leaders, aligned with unruly, violent, aggressive forces. For instance, the character Manlio Valdeschi, after attacking nearby workers, “impersonated [the] ideal of high and industrious virility” (240). Whereas femininity is presented as passive submission, masculinity is presented as positive aggression. Furthermore, in this book, Sarfatti presented striking workers as potential enemies of the state: “You must be joking! They are a hundred thousand chatterboxes, greedy to overpower, little tyrants by cowardice” (198). When not focusing on the specifics of a so-called female writing, critics seemed to applaud “the ideal story of a generation, our generation from war to Fascism” (Panzini 1929, 3).

Sarfatti herself seems to admit that the fictional novel is actually autobiographical in nature.¹² She saw herself in the role of Fiorella and Mussolini in the role of Manlio: “We will keep our secret [love] quiet, jealously, if you want it, but you must be mine and no one can stop it” (225). If we read Il palazzone as a romanticized version of Sarfatti’s relationship with Mussolini, then we are immediately struck by her self-portrait, in which the real powerful working woman is reduced to the fictional passive sexual object. One must recall that this was Sarfatti’s only foray into fiction writing. Besides her waning power, one possible explanation for this novel may be that her female representations and concomitant ideas seem to be based on prevalent literary trends, most notably the work of the Futurists and D’Annunzio (Bosi Maramotti 1982, 110–111). In these models, women are sexual objects to be conquered and dominated in a lyrical prose of hyperbolic proportions.

Sarfatti and her family converted to Catholicism in 1928. Scholars explain Sarfatti’s conversion as a way to align herself with and protect herself from the increasingly intolerant Fascist regime, where Fascist ideologues began publicly voicing anti-Semitic sentiments.¹³ Nancy Harrowitz, among others, points out that Sarfatti never abandoned her aesthetic principles on art (1996, 144), since she was dubbed the “Fascist dictator of culture” in the 1920s. Rather, Sarfatti continually argued for modernism in art, devoid of any so-called Fascist content, a highly controversial and increasingly unpopular position. This stance, together with her Jewish origins, were at least partly responsible for her waning influence on Mussolini and her decreasing position of power in the regime. Her increasingly difficult position may in part explain her other pro-Fascist articles published in the 1930s, which focus on the regime’s demographic campaign and the cult of domesticity. One notable example is her speech “Women of Fascism,” published in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine on November 12, 1933. Even so, it will be useful to recall that in the 1930s Sarfatti tried desperately to persuade Mussolini not to form an alliance with Hitler. Nonetheless, the regime passed and enforced the Racial Laws of 1938, which denied many rights to Italian Jews, including forbidding intermarriage between Italians and Jews, removing Jews from positions in government, banking, and education, and restricting their property.

One must consider that even in works in which Sarfatti i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Agency/Subjectivity/Subject Positions
• Part II Right Activisms and Racialized/Classed/Religioned Others
• Part III Interrogations: Right-Thinking, Feminisms, and the Left
• Part IV Righted Bodies: Discipline, Excess, Pleasure
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index