La Donna Fascista: A National Servant, Wife and Mother

Abstract

The subject of this article is the attitude of Italian fascism towards women. It outlines the  social roles that were announced to  women in  propaganda texts and to which they were supposed to submit. The author describes the position of Italian women, referring to the specific decalogues of women and families that appeared in the fascist press in the 1920s. A woman-mother was the basic and most important figure that bound the family together but also built the power of  the  state. Bearing children and raising them to  be righteous members of the nation and submitting to the will of men were to ensure women universal respect and recognition. According to fascist ideology, reproduction was also a precondition for recognising a union as a family, a man and a woman staying together. The next part of the article is devoted to this issue. It describes the obligations imposed by  fascist ideologues also on  men. Both sexes were stripped of individualism, personal needs and desires in this political reproductive puzzle, albeit unevenly and with the preservation of patriarchal patterns. The state and its leader – Benito Mussolini – became a god and a source of laws.