Abstract
ONMI began to implement the new legislation and policy towards illegitimates, riconosciuti, and their mothers in August 1927. ONMI’s president, Professor Gian Alberto Blanc, and director-general, Doctor Attilio Lo Monaco, decided to launch a pilot scheme in Rome as a model for the other 91 provincial federations. With the approval of Mussolini and ONMI’s national leaders, Professor Sante De Sanctis, the renowned psychiatrist who presided over the organization’s provincial federation in Rome, placed the Contessa Daisy di Robilant in charge of this experimental social programme. In some ways, the countess’ rise to a position of such prominence was hardly surprising. She had already gained entry into ONMI’s emergent welfare bureaucracy by being appointed to the vice-presidency of the organization’s newly established provincial federation in Rome in November 1926.1 With over twenty years of concrete experience in the field of maternal and infant welfare provision, Daisy di Robilant undoubtedly possessed the right credentials for the job as overseer of this important project which, officials hoped, would successfully showcase the pioneering and progressive spirit of fascism.
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Notes
On the rise of this newly-titled family by means of state service in eighteenth-century Piedmont, see A. L. Cardoza, Aristocrats in Bourgeois Italy: The Piedmontese Nobility, 1861–1930 (Cambridge, 1997), intro. esp. p. 18.
See, for example, J. Lewis, ‘The Working-Class Wife and Mother and State Intervention’, in Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940, ed. J. Lewis ed. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 99–120, on Britain’s system of home visiting. On the rise of social work and nursing in Imperial Germany, see P. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, pp. 206–8, 282 et passim. And, on the involvement of American women in the building of the welfare state, see T. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, esp. pt III.
See the essays by G. Bini and M. Moretti on female schoolteachers in L’educazione delle donne: Scuole e modelli femminili nell’Italia dell’ottocento, ed. S. Soldani (Milan, 1981), pp. 331–62 and 497–530.
A downward trend in the crude marriage rate and in the probability of marriage continued, with minor fluctuations, until 1936: see D. V. Glass, Population Policies and Movements in Europe (1940; reprinted. New York, 1968), p. 261–4. The number of nuns rose from 71 000 in 1921 to 129 000 in 1936, according to M. Clark, Modern Italy, p. 256.
See I. Vaccari, La donna nel ventennio fascista, 1919–1943 (Milan, 1978), pp. 114–15; S. Pivato, ‘L’organizzazione cattolica della cultura di massa durante il fascismo’, Italia contemporanea, 30: 132 (July–September, 1978), pp. 3–25.
Min. Interno, Esercizio ostetrico delle levatrici, regolamento, istruzioni techniche, relazione illustrativo (Rome, 1930), pp. 25–33 et passim.
M. Fraddosio, ‘Le donne e il fascismo: Ricerche e problemi di interpretazione’, Storia contemporanea, xvii:1 (February, 1986), pp. 95–135, 133; P. Meldini, Sposa e madre esemplare: Ideologia e politica della donna e della famiglia durante il fascismo (Rimini and Florence, 1975), p. 19.
See, M. Ostenc, ‘La conception de la femme dans l’Italie mussolinienne’, Risorgimento, 3 (1983), pp. 155–74. To maintain that, by limiting women’s public roles to that of assistenti sociali, fascism deprived them of all power and influence would also be inaccurate. This view simply sees women as victims of fascism with no agency or autonomy. Daisy di Robilant, for example, attempted to use her new position of social leadership to advance her own feminist agenda.
See C. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (1986; pb edn London, 1988). Although Koonz is primarily concerned with exploring how German women willingly gave their support to a ruthless, anti-feminist regime, she also documents the pressures they faced to conform.
G. D’Ormeo, ‘Asilo infantile “Vincenzo Macchi di Cellere”’, MI, 2 (January, 1927), pp. 40–54, 43.
Ibid., pp. 46–7.
V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, pp. 62–3; on Teruzzi’s leadership of the former National Union of Socialist Women, see F. Pieroni Bortolotti, Sul movimento politico delle donne: Scritti inediti, ed. A. Buttafuoco (Rome, 1987), pp. 49, 260.
S. Fabbri, Direttive e chiarimenti intorno allo spirito informatore della legislazione riguardante l’ ONMI e alle sua pratiche applicazioni, pp. 24–44; C. Bergamaschi, L’ ONMI – Motivi e proposte di riforma, pp. 19–21.
G. Giannini, ‘Il convegno nazionale dei delegati provinciali dell’ONMI’, MI, 6 (July, 1932), pp. 629–51, esp. 632–6.
S. Fabbri, Prospettive assistenziali della prima infanzia, pp. 23–6.; and his Direttive e chiarimenti, p. 44–5.
F. Rasi, ‘Stato attuale delle istituzioni I.P.A.I. in Italia’, I cosidetti illegittimi, pp. 10–39, 19.
G. G. Alessandri, ‘La delinquenza nei minorenni’, MI, 2 (January, 1927), pp. 30–3.
Ministero di Grazia e Guistizia, Lavori preparativi del codice penale e del codice di procedura penale, vol. v (Rome, 1929), p. 8; N. Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco nella dottrina e nel diritto della rivoluzione fascista (Rome, 1930), pp. 14–20.
Documenti ufficiali, ‘I centri di osservazioni per minorenni nelle direttive dell’ ONMI’, MI, 10 (May, 1935), p. 18.
C. Saraceno, ‘Women, Family, and the Law, 1750–1942’, Journal of Family History, 15:4 (1990), pp. 427–42, 436.
P. Ungari, Storia del diritto di famiglia in Italia (Bologna, 1974), pp. 229–32.
G. Maranini, ‘Gli illegittimi nel progetto del nuovo codice civile’, MI 12 (May-June, 1938), pp. 188–93, 189.
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© 2002 Maria Sophia Quine
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Quine, M.S. (2002). From Public Beneficence to Public Welfare: The Roman Experiment, 1927–1938. In: Italy’s Social Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919793_10
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