Il fascismo e le donne: Imposizione e accettazione della “Mistica della maternità”

Abstract

The fascist dictatorship imposed on Italian women the role of “exemplary wife and mother”, a role which well served specific political goals, and especially the demographic campaign led by Mussolini in 1926. In this essay the author attempts to reconstruct the reasons underlying the acceptance by women of a political design that denied them individual value, and thus excluded them from being protagonists in history. The author identifies as a salient mechanism the effectiveness of the heavy fascist propaganda which transformed the limitation of the biological-reproductive destiny of women into a fundamental value: women, by giving life to, and taking care of the “New Italians”, were granted a fundamental function in the new, strong Italy that fascism was proposing to create.