Women as the Family: the Foundation of a New Italy?

Abstract

This chapter argues that it is through understanding the legacy of the past, particularly the immediately preceding 20 years, that we can more clearly see how the Italian liberal democratic state has attended to women. It stresses the attempts to establish women as a separate constituency fundamental to the construction of a new Italian nation, a nation distinctively different from that aspired to by fascism. It argues that all women were to be legislated for and attended to as part of the progressive stamp of the new republic; at the same time they were, in their traditional familial role, and above all as mothers, to be enlisted in the building of this new nation. By reference to statements from the 1943–8 period, it aims to show some of the problems involved in the new state, fundamentally adhering to traditional understandings of women’s needs, obligations, rights and duties, while at the same time endorsing aspirations for progressive legislative reforms in their favour.