‘Believe, Obey, Cook!' Educating girls and women for war in Fascist Italy: From domestic virtues to public duties of a modern housewife (1929-1944)

As the Second World War approached, the combatant nations launched campaigns to recruit women to serve on the home front as managers of household savings in times of food shortage. In Italy, this phenomenon took on distinct features within an even more widespread and comprehensive educational system focused on nationalizing and militarizing future Fascist men and women, which had already been implemented by the regime a decade before the war began. The transformation of the traditional and modern domestic virtues of housewives into patriotic, social, and public duties laid the foundation for a form of war pedagogy for women aimed at preparing them for the possible descent into war and indoctrinating them as regime-loyal housewives. An integral part of this women’s education was the promotion of the traditional female role of childcare and household management, but above all the spread of the policy of ‘alimentary sovereignty’ in Italian families, which emphasized a model of consumption based on restraint, limits, and resistance, especially about food. The aim of this research is to analyse how the pervasiveness of Fascist war pedagogy for women ingrained a cultural model that persisted beyond the Fascist era and significantly shaped the vision of food of Italian families.