"Italy has been made; now we need to make the Italians," goes a familiar Italian saying. Mussolini was the first head of state to include women in this mandate. How the fascist dictatorship defined the place of women in modern Italy and how women experienced the Duce's rule are the subjects of Victoria de Grazia's new work. De Grazia draws on an array of sources—memoirs and novels, the images, songs, and events of mass culture, as well as government statistics and archival reports. She offers a broad yet detailed characterization of Italian women's ambiguous and ambivalent experience of a regime that promised modernity, yet denied women emancipation. Always attentive to the great diversity among women and careful to distinguish fascist rhetoric from the practices that really shaped daily existence, the author moves with ease from the public discourse about femininity to the images of women in propaganda and commercial culture. She analyzes fascist attempts to organize women and the ways in which Mussolini's intentions were received by women as social actors. The first study of women's experience under Italian fascism, this is also a history of the making of contemporary Italian society.

The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history.

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.

Investigates the role of women and gender in fascist and non-fascist movements of the extreme right. The text re-examines the nature of the extreme right in the light of research in the field of women's and gender studies, offering an accessible overview of developments in Europe.

A collection of essays comparing key aspects of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Compares the formation and development of the political movements in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, describing their leadership, cultural policies, and relationship with each other.

An examination of the ways in which women challenged the British educational, employment and welfare systems after the franchise. Helen Jones explores how women adapted their strategies to confront the system from within, and what constraints were imposed on them. She also examines the active role that British women played in Continental Europe, and an important comparative chapter looks at the experience of women in France, Germany, Italy, Australia and the USA.

When Benito Mussolini proclaimed that "Cinema is the strongest weapon," he was telling only half the story. In reality, very few feature films during the Fascist period can be labeled as propaganda. Re-viewing Fascism considers the many films that failed as "weapons" in creating cultural consensus and instead came to reflect the complexities and contradictions of Fascist culture. The volume also examines the connection between cinema of the Fascist period and neorealism—ties that many scholars previously had denied in an attempt to view Fascism as an unfortunate deviation in Italian history. The postwar directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica all had important roots in the Fascist era, as did the Venice Film Festival. While government censorship loomed over Italian filmmaking, it did not prevent frank depictions of sexuality and representations of men and women that challenged official gender policies. Re-viewing Fascism brings together scholars from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds as it offers an engaging and innovative look into Italian cinema, Fascist culture, and society.

This book explores the day-to-day 'lived experience' of fascism in Venice during the 1930s, charting the attempts of the fascist regime to infiltrate and reshape Venetians' everyday lives and their responses to the intrusions of the fascist state.

This book focuses on the autobiographical poetry of early twentieth century author Antonia Pozzi and her lifelong friend and fellow poet, Vittorio Sereni. Antonia Pozzi, an author whose popularity in Italy has increased dramatically in the past few years, was a young girl during the First World War. She was born into a wealthy and influential family, and, after the rise of Fascism, her father was a prominent state official. In 1938 Pozzi committed suicide at the age of twenty-six. Her major collection of poems, Parole, was published posthumously. Pozzi’s best friend, "brother" and most devoted confidant, Vittorio Sereni, is a more recognizable figure in Italian literary history. Born in 1913, a year after Pozzi, he served in the Italian Army during World War II, and was held in an allied prison camp in Algeria during the last years of the war. While Sereni is by far the better-known author, his response to the war experience and, particularly, to imprisonment recalls Pozzi’s work on a number of levels. In the “diaries” of both authors, autobiography functions as a means of constantly reasserting the self as a unique and separate individual against the totalizing forces of Fascist propaganda.