The "Average Housewife" in Post-World War II Italy

This article examines the figure of the housewife and domestic work in post-World War II Italy. Fascism promoted two images of the housewife: the middle-class, urban homemaker inspired by American conceptions of "home economics," and the "rural farmwife" destined to prevail during the thirties. These two images offer both continuity and disjuncture with the image of the housewife in the post-1945 period. The social and economic context in postwar Italy favored the diffusion of the image of the full-time homemaker, an effect of the family policies promoted by the two principal political parties. Instruction manuals on home economics appeared in great numbers during the 1950s and 1960s. Examining these manuals prompts the following questions: How was the role of the woman in the home defined? What was her relationship with the world beyond the family? How was she supposed to perform her work? Domestic work expands in these decades to a few ultimate practices, becoming a totalizing mission and a value in itself, but resulting in the exclusion of women from any large-scale participation and activity in the life of the nation.