Accomplishing «the silent mission of Italian women at war». The fascist “pedagogy of war” for women: from the kitchen front to the war garden

This paper aims to analyse how, against the emergence of World War II, the countries involved in the conflict implemented an educational-propagandistic campaign aimed at mobilizing women in wartime. Both in democratic countries (such as Great Britain and the United States) and dictatorial regimes, this propaganda assumed similar forms and women’s mobilization took the shape of a real call to fight on the domestic front, in its two dimensions of the «kitchen front» and the «war garden». As a result, there was a boom – also in Italy – in training courses, cookbooks, textbooks and popular texts, articles and columns in women’s and general magazines etc. that focused on domestic savings, the fight against food waste, and the production of home-grown vegetables. The paper outlines the features of this pervasive ideological, propagandistic and educational machine targeted at Italian women, which was clearly based on the contingent need to support the Nation; nevertheless, it was used by the regime to defend a traditional model of the woman (as housewife, thrifty woman, exemplary mother and wife). A model that was destined to disintegrate in the post-war period, and paradoxically in virtue of the new self-awareness that women assumed with their active engagement during wartime.