Women in Twentieth-Century Italy

Perry Willson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781350307360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Over the course of the 20th century, the rapid transformation of Italy from an impoverished, predominantly agricultural nation to one of the strongest economies in the world forged a fascinating and contradictory society where gender relations were a particular mix of modernity and tradition. In this accessible and innovative study, Perry Willson provides a nuanced and insightful analysis of the impact of social, political, economic and cultural developments on Italian women's lives. She also explores how women were affected by, and how they themselves helped shape, key historical events such as the rise of Fascism, the 2 world wars, the 'economic miracle' of the post-war years and the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s. Women in Twentieth Century Italy is the first book-length overview of Italian women's experience during this period of intense and dramatic change. Drawing on the latest historiography in the field and written in a lively and engaging manner, it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Italy's recent past.

1

Italian Women at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

In his 1902 survey of the growing numbers of women graduates in Italy, Vittorio Ravà described them as, ‘a strong and numerous phalanx . . . that is advancing and preparing to fight economic and social battles’.¹ Ravà was far from the only observer at the time to sense change in the air for Italian women. At the dawn of the twentieth century, education for girls was increasing and a few women were making their mark in the public sphere in professions like teaching, writing and medicine. Middle- and upper-class women were beginning to venture more beyond the home. A small, but determined and far from insignificant, feminist movement was campaigning for legal reform and attempting to challenge, or at least rethink, some of the prevailing ideas about the role of women in society.

This period was also one of broad changes which affected many women, including those beyond the educated elite. The final decade of the nineteenth century saw rapid industrial growth in parts of the North, which served to accelerate the rural–urban shift. The birth rate was beginning to fall in some areas. Life expectancy was on the rise as mortality rates fell steadily² and, despite the fact that Italy had Europe’s highest emigration rate, the population was increasing (25 million in 1861, 33 million in 1901 and 37 million in 1921).³ A new and vigorous, if divided and quarrelsome, socialist movement was active in many parts of both urban and rural Italy. The primacy of the Catholic Church in defining social and moral values was being challenged by a group of new social scientists.

Change, however, was uneven and, for millions of women, limited. Even Ravà’s survey found only 224 women who had actually graduated from the universities of the unified state by 1900. Gender divisions were still wide and the sexes led very different and often separate existences. The legal, economic and social status of women was in many respects inferior to that of men. Excluded on the grounds of their sex from voting or holding public office, and lacking, particularly if married, many legal rights accorded to men, Italian women were not yet active citizens.

Women’s lives were shaped by the fact that Italy was still a very regionally-based society, with a weak sense of national identity and a poorly functioning and only partly democratic political system. Economic development varied greatly from region to region as did social customs and cultural beliefs. Everywhere there were great inequalities of wealth and yawning social divides. The peasantry, most of whom led lives characterised by extreme poverty, was the largest occupational group. Despite the antagonism between Church and state created by national unification, the Catholic Church continued to exert great influence on society, particularly on moral questions relating to the family, sexuality and gender roles.

A belief in the inferiority of women was widespread. Many thought of women as weak, emotional beings little suited to interaction with the harsh, outside world. There was much emphasis on women’s sexual conduct. In southern Italy (but also, to an extent, in parts of the rural North), the concept of ‘honour’ was extremely important. In the ‘honour code’, the social prestige of a family, particularly the male members of the family, could be damaged by the ‘sexual immorality’ of their female relatives. This moral code condoned the killing, by fathers, husbands and brothers, of women who had transgressed sexually. An unmarried woman who was known to have lost her virginity was seen as evidence of the weakness of her male relatives, proof of their inability to protect or control her properly. In this system, ‘reparatory marriage’ could restore a family’s honour and this potentially might include forcing a woman to marry her rapist. Although the honour code placed great emphasis on the virginity of unmarried women and the fidelity of wives, and essentially saw female sexuality as bad, it differed from Catholic morality. As Margherita Pelaia has noted, the difference lay, ‘above all in the emphasis on the external dimension of reputation rather than the internal one of conscience, and in the violence of the sexual double standard, the huge gulf between the male prerogative of sexual conquest and women’s obligation to remain chaste and pure’.⁴ The Catholic Church, instead, saw all sexual pleasure, for either sex, as potentially sinful. There was, moreover, no room in the honour code for the cleansing effects of repentance and pardon.

Virtually all Italians were at least nominally Catholic and, for the vast majority, religious belief and religious practice were important aspects of everyday life. Despite the intense dispute between Church and state that had followed unification and the rise of the (mostly anti-religious) socialist movement, the Church was still a powerful force in society. The influence of the clergy, through sermons and the confessional, was, moreover, greatly enhanced by high levels of illiteracy which gave them a near monopoly on information for some sections of the population, particularly women and the peasantry.

The Church vehemently opposed divorce, saw men as inherently superior and believed that gender inequality in marriage was essential for it to work on a day-to-day basis. It saw women’s primary role as motherhood and opposed female emancipation and extra-domestic employment. The most comprehensive spelling out of the Vatican’s views on marriage and the family came with the Papal Encyclical Casti Connubi in 1930 but such ideas can also be found in various other late nineteenth-century papal pronouncements. According to Casti Connubi, married couples were meant to love each other but only in the context of accepting a clear gender hierarchy in the family. The encyclical spoke of the ‘primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children and the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience’. Female emancipation was dismissed as ‘false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband’.⁵

It would be wrong, of course, to simply see the Church’s attitude as timeless and immutable, for even the Church itself was changing. The cult of maternity, particularly the virginal maternity of the Marian cult, was especially strong at this time and increasing numbers of female saints were being created, such as Rita da Cascia, canonised by Leo XIII in 1900. All this had the potential to enhance the appeal of Catholicism among women. Moreover, by the end of the century, Catholic discourse which depicted the ideal mother as a long-suffering, self-sacrificing, silent creature, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, was giving way to a more active model.⁶ Catholic mothers were assigned the task of stemming the tide of secularisation unleashed by the French Revolution and the advance of atheist socialism. Mothers were urged to play an active role in the religious education of their children and to be constantly vigilant about the corrupting influences of modern society on their offspring.

The Liberal state did little to challenge the Church’s influence in matters relating to gender relations and the private sphere. Campaigns for the legalisation of divorce, for example, fell on stony ground in the late nineteenth century.⁷ Sexuality was subject to little state regulation (apart from prostitution – see below) and mainly left to be policed by priests. Acts of ‘indecency’ were prosecuted if they sullied the public domain, but otherwise little was done. Unlike some other European countries, Italy did not make homosexuality explicitly illegal at this time, although homosexuals could be prosecuted under indecency laws.

A more serious challenge to Church authority came from a different direction, with the rise of the new social science. Criminologists, demographers, sexologists and others in this period began to actively investigate all sorts of matters that had previously been deemed largely private, moral issues. This academic movement had important implications for women since, unlike the clergy, who invoked God’s will and simple tradition, these commentators believed that they spoke with the authority of science and ‘modernity’. Many of their ideas were, however, essentially just prejudice posturing as science. Criminologist Cesare Lombroso (easily the best known of these academics), for example, attempted to ‘scientifically demonstrate’ the inferiority of women. According to Lombroso, it was evolution that had shaped women into creatures with ‘smaller and softer muscles and lesser intelligence’.⁸ Similarly, doctors often pathologised female behaviours which deviated from what they saw as ‘natural’ (the norm of the bourgeois wife, devoted to maternity) as ‘diseases’ like hysteria. The rise of one particular branch of this new social science – demography, with its interest in statistics that calculated women’s reproductive output – was eventually to have important implications for gender relations, in the shape of the Fascist demographic campaign.

The Civil Code

Like women elsewhere in Europe at this time, Italian women were legally subordinate to men in many respects. In 1900, women’s legal position was still largely determined by the Pisanelli Code, the civil code introduced by the newborn Liberal State in 1865.⁹ Despite various campaigns by feminists and other reformers, much of this code remained on the statute books until the 1970s (albeit with some modifications in 1919). Based on the Code Napoléon, it allotted women a subordinate position in the family. Its introduction meant that some women, from certain northern regions, lost rights they had previously enjoyed.¹⁰

Admittedly, the code’s clauses did include provisions for gender equality. Girls and boys both enjoyed the same legal rights and, as sons and daughters, they could inherit equally. Unmarried adult women could own property, make a will, engage in commerce, and so on. Although dowries continued to have a legal status, they were not compulsory.

Despite these positive features, the Pisanelli Code contained many inequalities. An assumption of male superiority and the need to assert men’s authority was inherent in many of its clauses. Women were denied suffrage rights and were banned from holding any kind of public office. Men’s authority within the family and over their wives was bolstered in many ways. If a man hurt his wife whilst ‘disciplining’ her for what he considered disobedient or malicious behaviour, for example, he was punished quite leniently. The ‘defence of honour’ was accepted as an extenuating circumstance in murder cases. There was also inequality in the grounds for marital separation since male and female adultery were treated differently. Adultery was a serious matter in this period, a crime that could lead to imprisonment. Men were deemed guilty of it only if they flagrantly kept a concubine either in the marital home or elsewhere. If a husband had casual sex it was deemed irrelevant, whereas if a wife had extramarital sex even once (either during or prior to marriage), or simply if public opinion believed her to have done so, this was grounds for marital separation.

Both sexes were equal in terms of not being able to divorce, but this had very different implications for men and women since, upon marriage, women lost a whole raft of legal rights. As wives, women were compelled to adopt their husband’s name and citizenship, and live where he decreed. Although married women could still own, inherit and bequeath property, any acts relating to the management of this property (such as selling it or taking out a mortgage) required a ‘marital authorisation’ (their husband’s consent). Although both parents were supposed to play a role in taking important decisions about their children (such as who they could marry), if they disagreed, by law the husband’s view prevailed. Women could exercise patria potestas (the power to decide alone for their children) only where husbands had deserted the family, emigrated or were in prison.

Another group of mothers with patria potestas were widows (an improvement compared with the Code Napoléon). Widows also enjoyed many of the legal rights of unmarried women. They did, however, face some restrictions. Deceased husbands could, for example, continue to exercise control (through their wills) over how children should be educated and over the administration of their property. Widows who remarried within ten months risked losing their entire inheritance.¹¹

The Pisanelli Code also discriminated against those born out of wedlock. Illegitimate children who had been recognised by their parents, for example, enjoyed lesser inheritance rights than their legitimately-born siblings. The code was also harsh on unmarried mothers as paternity searches were not permitted.

The Family

The bourgeois model of the male breadwinner and a full-time domestic and maternal role for women was increasingly influential in this period and this was, indeed, the reality for most upper middle-class (and some lower middle-class) married women. The middle-class home was seen as a haven from the harsh realities of the outside world, a nest of love and restorative domesticity for the husband after his day toiling in the public sphere. It was a place where women could devote themselves to being good wives and mothers. For millions of Italian women, however, this notion was to remain an unachievable fantasy until at least the 1950s. Most poor homes were overcrowded work-places. Few men earned a ‘family wage’.

A range of different family forms existed depending on class, region and whether they were urban or rural.¹² Families could be large or small, extended or nuclear. The largest households were found in northern and central rural areas, where certain types of peasants (generally those who were resident on the land they tilled), such as small landowners, small tenants and sharecroppers, tended to live in extended families. The exact size and composition of peasant households depended on many factors (particularly the size of the landholding). At one extreme were the enormous households of sharecropping families, particularly prevalent in central Italy, where up to 40 people lived and worked together as one unit. In the South, in contrast, households were often small because most peasants lived not on the land, but in towns and villages. Most urban Italians, of whatever class, lived in nuclear families, as did some of the braccianti (landless farm-labourers), who were numerous in the Po Valley. Nonetheless, extended families of various types could be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Italian Women at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
• 2. The ‘Tower of Babel’: First-Wave Feminism
• 3. On the ‘Home Front’: World War One and its Aftermath, 1915–20
• 4. ‘Exemplary Wives and Mothers’: Under Fascist Dictatorship
• 5. Doing their Duty for Nation (or Church): Mass Mobilisation during the Fascist Ventennio
• 6. War Comes to Women, 1940–45
• 7. Moving into Town: New Social and Economic Roles, 1945–67
• 8. Women’s Politics in the Shadow of the Cold War, 1945–67
• 9. ‘Io Sono Mia’: Feminism in the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’, 1968–80
• 10. The ‘Dual Presence’: More Work and Fewer Children in the Age of Materialism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index