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Femininity in the form of the donna-crisi , or “crisis-woman,” was a fixture of fascist propaganda in the early 1930s. A uniquely Italian representation of the modern woman, she was cosmopolitan, dangerously thin, and childless, the antithesis of the fascist feminine ideal – the flashpoint for a range of anxieties that included everything from the changing social roles of urban women to the slippage of stable racial boundaries between the Italian nation and its colonies. Using a rich assortment of scientific, medical, and popular literature, Natasha V. Chang’s The Crisis-Woman examines the donna-crisi ’s position within the gendered body politics of fascist Italy. Challenging analyses of the era which treat modern and transgressive women as points of resistance to fascist power, Chang argues that the crisis-woman was an object of negativity within a gendered narrative of fascist modernity that pitted a sterile and decadent modernity against a healthy and fertile fascist one.

Peasant women were the largest female occupational group in Italy between the wars. They led lives characterised by great poverty and heavy workloads, but Fascist propaganda extolled them as the mothers of the nation and the guardians of the rural worlds, the most praiseworthy of Italian women. This study is the first published history of the Massaie Rurali , the Fascist Party's section for peasant women, which, with three million members by 1943, became one of the largest of the regime's mass mobilizing organizations. The section played a key role in such core fascist campaigns as nation-building and ruralization. Perry Willson draws on a wide range of archival and contemporary press sources to investigate the nature of the Massaie Rurali and the dynamics of class and gender that lay at its heart. She explores the organization's political message, its propaganda and the reasons why so many women joined it.

Peasant women were the largest female occupational group in Italy between the wars. They led lives characterised by great poverty and heavy workloads, but Fascist propaganda extolled them as the mothers of the nation and the guardians of the rural worlds, the most praiseworthy of Italian women. This study is the first published history of the Massaie Rurali , the Fascist Party's section for peasant women, which, with three million members by 1943, became one of the largest of the regime's mass mobilizing organizations. The section played a key role in such core fascist campaigns as nation-building and ruralization. Perry Willson draws on a wide range of archival and contemporary press sources to investigate the nature of the Massaie Rurali and the dynamics of class and gender that lay at its heart. She explores the organization's political message, its propaganda and the reasons why so many women joined it.

Using as his example post-World War I Italy and the government's interest in the size, growth rate, and \"vitality\" of its national population, David Horn suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for technological intervention and political contestation.Social Bodieslooks at how population and reproductive bodies came to be the objects of new sciences, technologies, and government policies during this period. It examines the linked scientific constructions of Italian society as a body threatened by the \"disease\" of infertility, and of women and men associalbodies--located neither in nature nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. Situated at the intersection of anthropology, cultural studies, and feminist studies of science, the book explores the interrelated factors that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning. David Horn draws on many sources to analyze the discourses and practices of \"social experts,\" the resistance these encountered, and the often unintended effects of the new objectification of bodies and populations. He shows how science, while affirming that maternity was part of woman's \"nature,\" also worked to remove reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of technological intervention. This reconstitution of bodies through the sciences and technologies of the social, Horn argues, continues to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West.

This article addresses the issue of Italian feminists’ acquiescence to fascism during the early postwar years. What process drove the liberal feminists into the orbit of a reactionary movement hardly likely to promote women’s emancipation? At the heart of the problem lies a myth of war elaborated during the conflict. Feminists came to consider the World War as a process of national regeneration, a gender revolution: the war educated women to citizenship, asking for the contribution of women in all fields. Perceiving the war as the cradle of a “new Italy” brought feminists close to nationalist rhetoric, making difficult the defense of women’s rights vis-à-vis the aggressive campaign of right-wing politicians and veterans against women’s work. Eventually feminists found themselves complicit in a regime which stifled their movement and remained hostile to most forms of women’s emancipation.

This article examines how the American conception of female beauty introduced new and distinct understandings of beauty and femininity to postwar Italy. In analysing beauty product advertisements from one of the most popular women’s magazines of the period, Annabella, the article articulates the components of the American beauty ideal and illustrates how these notions broke with previous Italian ideas of beauty. Moreover, the article also examines how this new ideal promoted democratic consumer capitalist values – freedom of choice, individualism, and affluence – which had an important political and cultural significance in Italy’s Cold War struggle. In light of this struggle and the country’s postwar redevelopment, the American beauty ideal sought to influence the women who read Annabella and the way in which they fashioned and identified themselves – as the Italian ‘Mrs Consumer.’ Questo articolo esamina come la concezione americana di bellezza femminile abbia introdotto nuovi e distinti significati di bellezza e di femminilità in Italia nei primi decenni del secondo dopoguerra. Attraverso l’analisi della pubblicità dei prodotti di bellezza apparsa su una delle più popolari riviste per donne del periodo, Annabella, l’articolo definisce le componenti della ‘bellezza ideale americana’ e chiarisce come queste componenti abbiano introdotto radicali elementi di discontinuità con le precedenti idee italiane di bellezza. Inoltre, l’articolo esamina come questo nuovo ideale abbia incentivato quei valori della democrazia capitalista e consumista – la libertà di scelta, l’individualismo, la ricchezza materiale – che ebbero un significato politico e culturale importante negli anni della guerra fredda. Nel contesto di questa lotta e della ricostruzione e dello sviluppo del paese nel dopoguerra, la ‘bellezza ideale americana’ tentò di influenzare le lettrici di Annabella e il modo in cui esse si formavano e si identificavano – creando la ‘Mrs Consumer’ italiana.

A contribution to histories of women in the interwar transnational antifascist movement, particularly radical exiles, we focus on Virgilia D’Andrea, a noted Italian anarchist exile from fascist Italy who spent her final exile in New York, 1928–33. An intellectual, writer-poet, and orator belonging to a small but influential group of Italian radical subversives, her New York speeches and lecture tours across the United States helped rejuvenate the depleted ranks of Italian American radical circles in an era of state repression. She also connected emotionally with her working-class audiences. An analysis of her speeches and lectures reveals that the concept of betrayal, and the pain but also political consciousness it aroused, and the belief that adherence to anarchist ideals and humanist internationalism offered a way out of the crippling effects of capitalism, imperialism, and dictatorship, framed D’Andrea’s life narrative and antifascist politics. An analysis of their historical, cultural, and political themes is also offered.