Men and Women in Fascism

Fascism reorganized Italian society according to a corporate order structured by function, gender, and generations. The individual lost his singularity to be functional to the totalitarian state. The chapter illustrates how the male population has been progressively disciplined, starting with the organization of World War I veterans. Men and their families had been channeled into political machine designed to organize consensus around the war experience, through a series of associations controlled directly by the state. Mutilated soldiers, mothers, and widows of fallen soldiers, war orphans, and those decorated for valor thus came firmly under the control of the new regime, frequently playing the part of extras in the official celebrations. In addition, fascism abandoned some of its previous secular and radical demographic ideas in favor of a distinctly anti-Malthusian position, which it shared with the nationalist right and Catholic fundamentalism. Fascism placed the family at the center of the regime’s welfare policy, launching a demographic campaign for increasing the birthrate. In the patriarchal conception of the family, the husband-father held control and civic responsibility to his relatives and to the state. The new family was conceived as a social and political institution, designed to serve the needs of the state. While the responsibility of forming the family nucleus and ensuring procreation were assigned to the masculine and virile father role the responsibility of birth itself was assigned to an ideal mother and bride. For this reason, women were removed from many public and private jobs and placed on state assistance through an agency for maternity and childhood. Also the female fasces were tasked with maternity and childcare duties as part of the complex welfare machine set up by the regime; however, their mandate was insufficient to involve all women. By proclaiming the incompatibility of women’s nature and maternal duties with political activity and the working world, fascism camouflaged thousands of women working in industry and land cultivation in two associations ostensibly aimed at non-working women: the rural housewives’ association and the female homeworkers’ sections. At the end, the fascist commitment to social health was bland and in fact often quite contradictory to the full-throated demographic propaganda. This half-formed focus on preventive medicine is one clear example of the regime's attitude toward social policies and public morality. This attitude can also be seen in the more specific and circumscribed fields of homosexuality and delinquency, where regime chose the convenience of keeping silence rather than work to address it. Despite the vast campaign for population growth, Italy still had some of the highest rates of social diseases, premature births, and miscarriages in the Western world.