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Whereas Swedish social democracy's progressive positions were linked to strong traditions of liberal feminism, a well-integrated agricultural sector, and a relatively homogeneous civil culture and sexual custom, fascist patriarchalism had its roots in the weakness of newly unified Italy's liberalism and the unsettled public opinion of a belatedly and very unevenly industrializing society. The Italian women's movement emerged around the turn of the century but remained small and divided, with its middle-class and Catholic components staying clear of the public piazza, applying themselves to good works on behalf of poor women and children. Yet the "woman question" loomed large nonetheless. In part this was because the liberal elites had moved in a desultory way to integrate Italian men into a national society following Italy's patched-together unification in 1859. At the turn of the century, class, regional, and civic-cultural splits were, if anything, greater than a half-century before, aggravated not only by the lagging development of the Italian South, but also by the patent inequality of tax levies, a stunted public education system, and the postponement until 1912 of any significant suffrage reform. The "woman question" was further complicated by overlapping with the "social question"; Italian socialism, broad-based and militant, gathered a big following among working women and frustrated middle-class reformers. Moreover, Italian Catholicism was unabatingly hostile to the liberal system until 1904. Its antimodernist culture, intolerant of individualist philosophies generally, was hostile to female emancipation. Yet the Church was paternalistically protective toward women and championed itself as the chief guardian of family values.
More specifically, the liberal state's treatment of women presented certain anomalies that the fascist government would later exploit. The liberal government was laissez-faire to an unusual degree, a feature that Mussolini's propagandists later denounced to legitimate fascism's claim to be a force for reform. The 1865 Pisaneill Law was a step backward with respect to the family legislation governing Austrian Italy. Like other family codes of Napoleonic inspiration, it affirmed the state's interest in the family by reinforcing the authority of male heads of household. Women were debarred from most commercial and legal acts without their husbands' consent, prevented from acting as children's guardians, and even excluded from the "family councils" that until 1942 were legally empowered, if the father was dead or incapacitated, to dispose of collective family patrimonies, inheritance, and dowry settlement. Other family laws displayed Italian liberalism's haphazard policy. In the interest of keeping family property intact, the state disinherited the offspring of adulterous and incestuous unions, made adultery a crime for women only, and prohibited all forms of paternity suits. At the same time, liberal Italy recognized only civil marriages, though every year thousands of Italian marriages were contracted with religious rites or without any official imprimatur. The offspring of such marriages were illegitimate in the eyes of government.
By 1900 governments elsewhere were likewise becoming more paternalistic, passing reforms to protect females and children if only to safeguard male wages and racial fitness. In Italy as much as 30 percent of the industrial workforce was female at the time. Yet no factory laws spoke to the issue of women's work until the Carcano Law was passed in 1902 setting a twelve-hour maximum work day for women and minors and barring women from returning to work for a month after childbirth. Predictably, it was riddled with exceptions and hard to police.
In light of this legacy of neglect, the nascent Italian women's movement - and perhaps women generally - developed an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship toward liberal ideology and institutions. Some groups, the oldest ones, influenced by the egalitarianism of the radical democrat Anna Maria Mozzoni, sympathized with the burgeoning socialist movement and built ties with working-class women. In their view, female emancipation was inconceivable without thoroughgoing political and economic democratization. Other groups, which became more cohesive after 1908, were tied to the Catholic Church; they defended family and other conservative values along with women's right to organize themselves as a public presence. After 1900 increasing numbers of middle-class women were involved in so-called practical feminism. Their main organizational reference point was the National Council of Italian Women (Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane) founded in 1903. Unlike Anglo-American feminists, who emphasized equal rights, Italian bourgeois feminists little trusted market forces or the suffrage to deliver emancipation. Self-abnegating, with the familistic outlooks and patriotic fervor typical of Italy's middle classes, they regarded self-sacrifice in philanthropic endeavors as a preliminary to being granted citizenship rights. Chary of mass politics, they sought social and state recognition of women’s special maternal mission in modern society. Inevitably, many proved susceptible to Mussolini's resounding claims that this had been achieved in the fascist epoch.
That this small, fragmented, and rarely militant feminist movement should have incited widespread antagonism would be inexplicable without some further remarks on liberal Italy's weak national civic culture. Emancipated female behaviors were highly conspicuous in this half-industrial, half-rural society, which, in addition to modern industrial and commercial centers like Milan or Turin, still had over 50 percent of the population living off agricultural pursuits. The liberal elites themselves abetted antifeminist attitudes, not least of all by denying women the vote. In addition, they showed little appreciation of the social services rendered by women who, guided by their belief that their "maternal sensibility" was indispensable to "temper and complete the political order," sought to cure social ills and calm working-class unrest by means of philanthropic undertakings. Failing to take action in this domain themselves, the liberal elites missed the opportunity to recognize women's volunteer work and did not have the vision to subject working-class mutualism and Catholic charity to central government authority. Conversely, this was one opportunity that the fascists did not fail to seize. In the name of their "national reconstruction," they excoriated liberal "neglect," imposed "discipline" on local associations, and mobilized tens of thousands of middle-class women volunteers in fascist associations.
Fascism was also able to tap the exasperated masculinism of Italian men. A whole study could be devoted to the social-psychological origins of the virilist posturing of Italian intellectuals after the turn of the century and to its myriad manifestations - from the erotic sensibility of the decadentist writer Gabriele D'Annunzio and the antifeminist metaphor of the influential Florentine literary review, La Voce, to the Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti's notorious protestations of "scorn for women" (disprezzo per la donna). In Italy, mere "latin" sexism was apparently aggravated both by male frustration at being left out of the narrowly based liberal "gerontocracy" and embarrassment at Italy's modest international status at a time when male honor was staked on the outcome of imperialist exploits. Fears of demographic exhaustion added another element, though Italian fertility rates of thirty per thousand were the highest in Europe after Spain and Romania. Apparently, anxieties about sexual disorder and racial decline were aggravated by other factors: the drain on Italian manhood caused by emigration (500,000 persons departed annually on the eve of the Great War); the importance attributed to sheer numbers of hands in a capital-scarce economic environment; the startling diversity of sexual behaviors in such an unevenly developing society; and finally, the pervasive influence of positivist scientific hypotheses and Catholic doctrines in matters regarding fertility.
By the eve of war, what we might call a neo-paternalistic politics was emerging in Italy. Starting around 1910, moral zealots launched campaigns against the degeneration of family life, joining forces with Catholic leagues to blame declining birthrates on urbanization, women's emancipation, and radically inspired neo-Malthusian practices. Liberal elites, although ever reluctant to intervene in social policy, were inclined to subscribe to what the prescient liberal social theorist Vilfredo Pareto denounced as the "virtuist" myths of moral reformers, hence to abandon laissez-faire and anticlerical principles in order to legislate on sexual reforms. With Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto of 1909, modernist culture too rallied: "We want to tear down museums and libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all the opportunist and utilitarian forms of cowardice."
This neo-paternalistic attitude hardly added up to a new program of ruling women, however. Nor did it lay out any clear position on the population issue, which from the mid-1920s onward would provide the intellectual and political framework within which an antifeminist program would be conceptualized and implemented. Rather, what bears emphasis here is that the fascist regime inherited a legacy of outlooks and institutions related to the "woman question." Some positions, like those of the Church, would at once support the regime and compete with it. Others, such as demographic engineering and racial attitudes, fascism freely exploited in pursuit of its own strategies of state-building. Above all, the regime was able to decry liberalism's "agnosticism" as regards the family, children, and maternity to stake its claim as a pioneering force. Not least of all, the Duce exploited the patriotic ardor, spirit of self-sacrifice, and pent-up desire for recognition on the part of many middle-class women, including numerous former feminists.
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