Primary Sources
Gaetano Salvemini, "Do Italian Women Obey Mussolini?," Birth Control Review 17 (1933): 64-66.
This article outlines a great deal of anecdotal and statistical evidence that bolsters Victoria De Grazia's argument both for the limited agency of Italian women and the contradictory aims of the Italian Fascist government. It begins by quoting Mussolini’s “Speech of the Ascension,” in which he outlined a rapidly falling Italian birthrate and its danger to the future of Italy: “If our number declines, gentlemen, we shall not be found an empire, we shall be degraded to a colony” (64). Mussolini’s subsequent attempt to legislate procreation with the rallying cry that “In order to be of importance in the world, Italy must begin the second half of the present century with at least sixty million inhabitants: (64). Gaetano Salvemini goes on to present further evidence supporting De Grazia’s argument for a continued measure of female agency even in the midst of an invasive Fascist regime that vilified non-procreators. “Since 1926,” he notes, “the dissemination of contraceptive information has been considered a crime, and is punishable by law,” yet total births in 1929 amounted to 34,269 less than the previous year (64). Due to this evidence, It seems that De Grazia is right in suggesting that women did in fact exercise some agency over their own lives in Fascist Italy. In addition, the end of the article references another piece of De Grazia's argument, the self-contradictory aims of the Fascist government toward modernizing and domesticating women, when it discusses how "the ideal for the Fascist is now the huge woman, weighing at least 300 pounds," since fat women generally had more children (66).
"Despite Mussolini's Campaign Italian Birthrate Fails to Rise," The Register News-Pictorial (Adelaide, SA: 1929).
Even after Mussolini threatened, “We must despise them. We must make the bachelors and those who desert the nuptial bed ashamed… It is necessary to make them bow their foreheads into the dust,” the birthrate continued to drop in Italy. Indeed, this article recognizes that “taking a number of large cities – for example, Trieste, Fiume, [and] Bologna… the vital statistics in recent months showed that the population was stationary, or even declining.” Though women were certainly oppressed and stunted in political and social growth by Fascism, the sheer widespread nature of these statistics seems to indicate a certain measure of female agency in procreation. It must be recognized, of course, that there are numerous factors at work in the variations of growth rates, and that female sexual autonomy would have been only one piece in a much larger puzzle. However, this particular document seems to be in line with De Grazia’s argument that women were not simply the oppressed victims of Mussolini’s government.