Assisting the ‘Legitimate Family’: International Social Work in Fascist Italy

The International Migration Service (IMS) was created in the aftermath of WWI to assist families separated by international migration and to improve national and international legislation. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, and composed of women social workers, the IMS had branches in a few countries and correspondents in others; it used the casework method, entailing the detailed treatment of individual cases. In the 1920s, the IMS-US dealt with needy Italian American families and, in 1932, the fascist Italian Red Cross created the International Secretariat of Private Information (SIIP). Acting as the IMS correspondent in Italy, the SIIP first assisted prisoners of war from WWI, Italian American families, and a few foreigners, and then Italian POWs of the Italo-Ethiopian War and fascist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. By relying on untapped archival sources, which frame together institutions, social workers, and the persons assisted, this chapter asks why the IMS made families its target, how this declined in Italy after the signing of the Concordat between the church and fascism, and why the SIIP moved from peacetime to wartime activities. It suggests that international social work embodied care, control, and subversion and that family models declined in ways that the IMS and the SIIP could hardly predict.