Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States votes.

In the wake of World War I, Italy’s coalition government, faced with rampant inflation and factional infighting, left a leadership vacuum. That void would be filled by an ex-socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini and his fasci di combattimento (“fighting leagues”)—which, years later, would become far better known simply as the first fascists.

When Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome in 1922 and subsequently assumed control, the National Fascist Party and its manifesto initially endorsed a patchwork of progressive political platforms, including “the vote for women and equality of salary for all sexes.” Many Italian women at this time believed that a halcyon period of gender equality was now at hand.

In the wake of World War I, Italy’s coalition government, faced with rampant inflation and factional infighting, left a leadership vacuum. That void would be filled by an ex-socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini and his fasci di combattimento (“fighting leagues”)—which, years later, would become far better known simply as the first fascists.

When Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome in 1922 and subsequently assumed control, the National Fascist Party and its manifesto initially endorsed a patchwork of progressive political platforms, including “the vote for women and equality of salary for all sexes.” Many Italian women at this time believed that a halcyon period of gender equality was now at hand.

During World War I, Italy had become very dependent on the women who propped up the economy during the war effort, but after the conflict, a perception emerged that they had stolen employment from men. The fascists also recognized that they had to co-opt the Catholic Church and manipulate traditional teachings on family in order to rule in a religious country—so the National Fascist Party pivoted, and the donna fascista, or “fascist woman,” would soon be defined in far less enlightened terms.

Proclaiming low birthrates to be the “problem of problems,” historian Perry Wilson writes in Women in Twentieth Century Italy that “motherhood was elevated into a national mission,” and the new administration enacted policies to tax bachelorhood and award benefits to large families.

The fascists’ motherhood agenda was specifically designed to have dominion over women’s bodies, including through bans on abortion and contraception—and thus, hostility to women’s rights became inextricably linked to fascist ideology.

Because of Italian military defeats and a feeling of lost masculinity, the fascists contrived a demographic crisis that tried to relegate women once again to a prison of patriarchy—and for a time, it worked. Italian women did not get the right to vote until 1945.

When motherhood is promoted in the context of a duty as it was in fascist Italy, it becomes a form of misogyny—and ideas now circulating across the Atlantic are reminiscent of such authoritarian regimes in the past.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion care, many Republican Party representatives are doubling down by opposing contraception, and the Alabama state........

© Foreign Policy