Catholic Women's Movements in Liberal and Fascist Italy

H. Dawes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137406347
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

In the early 1900s the Catholic Church appealed, for the first time in its history, directly to women to reassert its religious, political and social relevance in Italian society. This book examines how the highly successful conservative Catholic women's movements that followed, and how they mobilized women against secular feminism.

1

The Italian State, the Catholic Church and Women

When Italy underwent immense social, economic and political transformations in the early part of the twentieth century, the material rewards of the modernization process were unevenly distributed, just as the unification of Italy previously had brought very few benefits, if any, to the majority of the population. The one group which, in particular, saw no improvement to its condition was women, as they continued to be discriminated against by limited access to education and employment, unequal treatment under the law and disenfranchisement. The Catholic Church, the only truly unifying element of the country at the time of Unification, had become a bitter enemy of the Italian State after losing its temporal power. In these circumstances, women and their organizations proved crucial to the Church in dealing with its perceived adversaries: the State, the political left and modern society. To appreciate fully the social and political role which the Catholic women’s movements played in this period, it is necessary to examine their contemporary context. With this objective, Section I explores the broad setting of post-Unification Italy and the troubled path of Church–State relations, and Section II looks more specifically at women’s position in Italian society from the Risorgimento to World War II.

Section I: The Italian State and the Catholic Church

The Italian State

Modern Italy has its roots in the nineteenth-century Risorgimento, which aimed at liberating Italy from foreign domination and unifying the various political entities on the Italian peninsula under one government. Unification was preceded by decades of either overt or clandestine revolutionary activity against the Austrians in the north, the Bourbon dynasty in the south and the administrative system of the Papal States. It involved three wars of independence against Austria (in 1848–1849, 1859 and 1866) under the political and military leadership of Piedmont, and the expedition of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Thousand” to Sicily in 1860. A united kingdom, headed by the Piedmontese monarch, was formally established in March 1861. The process of Unification continued with the acquisition of the Veneto in 1866 and Rome in 1870, and with further territorial additions, including Alto-Adige, Trentino, Trieste and Istria, after World War I. The loss of the pope’s temporal power through the annexation of Rome and the Papal States created among the higher echelons of the Church an aura of almost visceral animosity towards the State.

None of the heroes of the Risorgimento – neither its theoretical champion, Giuseppe Mazzini, nor its revolutionary activist, Giuseppe Garibaldi, nor its political tactician, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour – envisaged the Catholic Church as playing an important part in a unified Italy. The principal forces behind the thrust for Unification had been the members of the modernizing agricultural and industrial bourgeoisie and aristocracy in the north, who saw in the existence of trade barriers between the states on the peninsula a hindrance to further economic development.¹ This new ruling élite of unified Italy failed to address, through the subsequent Liberal governments, the inherent social and economic problems of the country. Its administration was hampered by the absence of a common language, and communication was rendered difficult by the high illiteracy rate. Although schooling was made compulsory, the law was not strictly enforced, so illiteracy and dialects persisted to underline class and regional differences.² For the most part, the country was economically backward, possessing relatively few natural resources, and for the majority of people the only route to escape from poverty, or to improve their station in life, was by way of emigration. New infrastructure and industrial projects tended to benefit northerners while, with the removal of internal tariffs, the southern markets were suddenly flooded with imports, to the detriment of local industry. For many southerners, crippled by new heavy taxes, the Risorgimento represented another form of colonization rather than deliverance from foreign domination. Owing to the lack of resources and foresight, the central government failed to commit sufficient funds for the maintenance of law and order in the south, which in turn led to brigandage and the emergence of the criminal mafia organization. The Risorgimento would not bring emancipation to Italian women, who, on the contrary, “in Lombardy, Venetia, and Tuscany lost political rights and in some instances private authority previously exercised”.³

Nineteenth-century liberalism and Catholicism embodied different ideologies, and these differences played no small part in the evolution of Church–State relations after Unification. As a political doctrine, liberalism emphasizes the importance of limited government, while as a philosophy of life it calls for individual freedom, imagination and selffulfilment. The notions of liberalism include the idea of the State’s positive role in ensuring all citizens equal protection under the law, equal opportunity to exercise the privileges of citizenship and to participate fully in national life, regardless of race, religion or sex. While nineteenth-century theorists regarded the advance of democracy as inevitable, and even desirable, they at the same time dreaded that the extension of democratic rights to all classes of people would lead to the tyranny of the masses and the trampling on the rights of the minorities.⁴ Yet in practice the opposite proved to be the case: “liberal” principles continued to be applied selectively by the liberal governments, excluding wide sections of the population from their covenant, as was the case in Italy with the sole recognition of men as “citizens” and with the treatment of women as minors under their family’s or husband’s tutelage. The interests of the propertied classes were fiercely protected, which allowed the concentration of economic wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of citizens, while leaving unresolved, for instance, the problem of the landless peasantry in southern Italy. Full participation in national life was out of the question for most people, male or female, under a system which kept them disenfranchised.

The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century papacies opposed liberalism because they saw it as having negative effects on society for religious, ethical, political and economic reasons. Such views are elaborated by, for instance, “Antonietta” in the Catholic women’s magazine L’Azione muliebre in March 1901. As regards religion, the harmful repercussions included the separation of State from Church and the secularization of schools, the family and society. Ethically, the objectionable characteristics of liberalism included the independence of reason, the laws and government, and morals without God. Politically, liberalism elevated popular sovereignty to a divine role, since it viewed social power as deriving from the people, to be exercised in its name. Economically, the principle of laissez-faire had legitimized the prevalence of ever-increasing competition, monopoly, usury and social injustice. Liberalism had not only given rise to capitalism but had also led to the enslavement of the proletariat. Moreover, with the disappearance of the ancient guilds for arts and crafts, which had evolved within Christian society to protect the spiritual and material interests of workers, the latter were now left alone and defenceless at the mercy of fluctuations in industry and the labour market.⁵

The propertied classes, with their narrow interests, continued to dominate most sectors of parliament and public opinion, agreeing “on the main lines of financial, religious and foreign policy, and on the need for prudent restrictions on freedom in the interests of public order”.⁶ In the absence of a genuine opposition party, the task of government gradually became that of patronage and pork-barrelling in the electorate, and trasformismo in parliament, “by which government ministers brokered individual and collective favours in exchange for votes”,⁷ and which reached its utmost perfection with Giovanni Giolitti, who dominated Italian politics from 1900 to 1914 either as prime minister or as minister for the interior. Even the electoral procedure itself became corrupted, with prefects and sub-prefects succumbing to local factionalism by manipulating the electoral registers to help friendly candidates or block opponents through addition or removal of voters’ names.⁸

Against the backdrop of the plummeting reputation of parliament and popular unrest, the Liberal governments recognized successful warfare on foreign soil as a potential means of building political consensus at home, acquiring additional territory to relieve population pressures and gaining international prestige. At the end of the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, in particular, harboured territorial ambitions, contriving opportunistic alliances with various European powers for a military strike either in Europe or in Africa. Starting with a foray into Ethiopia in January 1887, which ended in the annihilation of some 500 Italian soldiers on the shores of the Red Sea,⁹ Italy’s foreign policy ventures entailed significant costs in both human and economic terms. Its aspirations to have Ethiopia recognized as an Italian protectorate in 1889 after the death of the Ethiopian emperor were thwarted by its very ally, the local warlord Menelik.¹⁰ The Ethiopian campaign proved singularly unsuccessful, as on 1 March 1896 Italy suffered “the worst defeat ever inflicted on a colonial power in Africa” in the Battle of Adua, in which 5,000 Italians and 2,000 native auxiliaries were massacred.¹¹ The first victorious colonial war came with the invasion of the Turkish territories of Tripoli and Cyrenaica in Libya in the autumn of 1911.¹² The war, which was begun in order to pre-empt a French intervention in the region and to reclaim an important province of the ancient Roman Empire, was cheered across the political spectrum. With the Church’s considerable financial holdings in Libya and visions of a new crusade against the infidel, the Catholic press was among those enthusiastically applauding the invasion.¹³ Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia under Mussolini in 1935–1936 was condemned internationally by the League of Nations’ economic sanctions, while at home the Duce stood at the height of his popularity, yet by the outbreak of World War II Fascist brutality had still not fully succeeded in subduing the Ethiopian population.¹⁴

Under Liberal government capitalist forces, frequently under tariff shelter, ruled the economy. In agriculture, which constituted a substantial part of the Italian economy, John Pollard notes the persistent dualism of small-scale subsistence alongside large-scale capitalist farming, as well as the emergence of a rural, agrarian proletariat. Similarly, in the last two decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century a large-scale manufacturing industry coexisted alongside “backward” forms of production. The development of the industrial triangle of Milan, Turin and Genoa contrasted with the underdeveloped south.¹⁵ In the early stages of industrialization, the textile industry, especially silk production, was the leading sector of Italy’s economic development.¹⁶ The “second wind” of industrialization, in the years 1896–1913, featured the large-scale use of new materials (steel and chemical products), the introduction of new sources of energy (hydroelectric power), the expansion of assemblage industries, the development of steel machine tools and the manufacture of new consumer goods such as typewriters, bicycles and automobiles.¹⁷ But the traditional industries still employed 60 per cent of the 1.5 million workers in manufacturing (1911 census).¹⁸ The continuing importance of the textile industry was highlighted by the fact that in the pre-World War I period it was the country’s sole big export industry, making up some 40 per cent of the total value of Italy’s exports, and was the source of employment for approximately a third of the manufacturing labour (1911 census).¹⁹ According to official statistics, textiles, together with foodstuffs and other agricultural–manufacturing industries, still accounted for 60 per cent of the total added value of the manufacturing industries in 1913.²⁰ Because of the various forms of industrialization, the northern cities had a huge demand for labour, resulting in big population shifts from rural to urban areas, and from the south to the north of Italy. The census data for 1911 show, however, that the percentage of the total population employed in secondary industry did not constitute more than 4.7 per cent for the country as a whole, and even for the industrial triangle it was only 9.6 per cent.²¹

While economic transformation was under way, the Liberal governments – reflecting the attitudes of nineteenth-century liberalism – intervened minimally to correct the operation of market forces in the workplace to protect weaker members of society. New jobs were filled in increasing numbers by women and children, with minimal government control. Some social legislation was eventually passed, starting with a voluntary industrial workers’ compensation scheme in 1883. In 1886 it limited the working day of children aged less than 12 to 8 hours and forbade the employment of children aged less than 9 in industry, less than 10 underground, and less than 15 in dangerous or unhealthy occupations.²² With the 1898 legislation, workers’ compensation became the employer’s full responsibility, and a voluntary disability and old-age pension scheme was introduced.²³ In 1902 the Giolitti government passed laws specifically aimed at the protection of female and child labour. Enacted at the behest of the Socialist Party, this minimal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Italian State, the Catholic Church and Women
• 2. The Cultural, Political and Ideological Context of Femminismo Cristiano
• 3. Femminismo Cristiano
• 4. The Radicalization of Femminismo Cristiano in Elisa Salerno
• 5. The Conservative Catholic Women’s Movements
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index