The role of women in Italy during World War I. When Italy entered World War I on May 24, 1915, it fought the Austrians and Germans in the mountainous region of the southern Tyrol and along the Isonzo River. Despite the emigration of more than 2.5 million in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italy mobilized more than 5 million of its nearly 9 million men between the ages of 18 and 65.
Intellectual middle-class women were among those who vociferously advocated Italian intervention in the war as early as the autumn of 1914. The Fede nuova (New Faith) was a review devoted to promulgating the principles of Giuseppe Mazzini, the apostle of Italian nationalism, and had as its president Signora Alvina Al-bini Tondi. Along with Virginia Pincellotti Pace, a journalist and poet, and Professor Theresa Labriola of the University of Rome, Tondi formed the National Committee for Italian Intervention. In December 1917, it called on Italian women to support the war effort in any way they could. Its appeal was echoed by the National Woman Suffrage Federation.
The women of Italy were called on to support the war effort in many ways. Yet female workers in the armaments factories and other war industries were, in comparison to their allies, appallingly paid and labored under horrible conditions. As industrial cities grew to accommodate the influx of workers, overcrowding became a problem. Food shortages eventually led to strikes, often fronted by women, for whom the threat to send strikers to the front held no real terror. Peasant women, on the other hand, whose lives were traditionally harsh, were actually less affected by the food shortages that plagued their urban sisters. While they had to take up the work their men left behind including public transactions, many peasant families benefited from the increased inflation that allowed them to pay off their debts to absentee landowners. Women in Perugia were praised for yielding a better harvest in 1916—1917 than had been reaped in the preceding year.
Women also went to work in offices, asylums, and hospitals. They were employed as railroad ticket agents, street sweepers, conductors on street cars, and telegraph operators. The Italian gas mask was said to have been devised by a woman from Bologna. In Verona, 80 refugee women in workrooms and 1,000 women in their homes produced more than 19,000 field tents and 125,000 articles of clothing for soldiers (Wannamaker 1923, 35). One workroom in Milan sent 43,000 garments to the front in the first 2 years (Wannamaker 1923, 31). In Palermo, Messina, and Como, female telephone operators alternated their regular work with making garments.
Women of the middle and upper classes organized voluntary work. The Citizen Relief Committees dealt with various needs from soldiers’ clothes to the distribution of milk to needy children. The first state provisions for the war needy were instituted in May 1915 for the families of recalled servicemen and were later extended to all draftees.
The Central Bureau of News was established by Countess Lina Cavazza in Bologna in May 1915 and ultimately employed 25,000 women who sent messages from the wounded soldiers to their families (Wannamaker 1923, 36). These aristocratic women visitors also delivered sweets and collected information for the News Bureau. The Ufficio Notizie Militari (Office of Military News) was another female-managed conduit for the interchange and distribution of news between soldiers and their families. Other women managed rest houses and canteens for soldiers. One, the Casa del Soldato (Soldiers’ Home) in Genoa, was founded and maintained exclusively by the women’s association Pro Patria.
The professional nurse was a new phenomenon in Italy, the first school for training opening only in 1908. Like women elsewhere, however, Italian women were eager to enroll once war was declared. In one Milan school, the enrollment was 54 in 1913-1914 but 704 in 1914-1915. By 1917, the Red Cross in Italy had 10,000 nurses, 600 of whom served in the war zone. Nine died of disease contracted during their service, and it was reported in one contemporary memoir that 15 Italian nurses had volunteered to permit grafts from their skin for the treatment of wounded men (Wannamaker 1923, 39).
In the mountainous terrain of the Italian front, women were essential in the work of clearing the roads of snow and in carrying materials and food to the soldiers. They also transported concrete and wire for the trenches. Some were decorated for their bravery. Maria Brighenti was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor for having nursed the wounded during a siege at Tarhuna in July 1915. Her remains were not found until 1924. Maria Boso was awarded the Silver Medal of Civic Virtue for having helped her soldier brother in the Austrian army escape to Italy. She was captured by the Austrians and died in prison.
The thousands of ordinary widows and grieving mothers were venerated in national mourning organized by the patriotic Associazione Madri e Vedove dei Caduti in Guerra (Association of Mothers and Widows of the Fallen), founded in Milan in 1917. The new woman, who may have felt energized by the possibilities of wartime employment, was, by contrast, subject to a conservative backlash. New opportunities, experienced mainly by urban middle-class women, were short-lived.
