Italiane al lavoro 1914-1920.

Italiane al lavoro 1914-1920. By Barbara Curli (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1998. 338 pp.).

This book is a needed contribution to the study of the impact of the Great War and of war demobilization on female employment in Italy. It is based on a wealth of different sources from general population censuses to the statistics of the Ministry for Weapons and Admunitions and of the regional industrial mobilization committees, from the data on wages and personnel of single companies to reports on and reactions to women's work in the press of the period. Curli knows well the literature on the same phenomenon in other European countries and places the Italian case in this larger historiographical picture.

Closer to those historians who see more continuities than changes in the history of women's employment in this period, but also keen on avoiding simple dichotomies, the author debunks the myth of substitution (i.e. the idea that women took over the jobs of the men who went to the front), a myth which was fostered in part by the greater social visibility of women workers. At the same time she also points out that the war economy did offer women new job opportunities--especially in clerical jobs--and these did not disappear after the end of the war. Indeed the feminization of office work remained as a lasting legacy of the war economy. Moreover, the new social visibility of the women who entered new sectors of the labor force contributed to the postwar debate surrounding the issue of women's citizenship. One must notice at the outset that when the author speaks of work she refers almost exclusively to factory or white collar jobs: female work in agriculture or in domestic industry--still, as Curli recognizes, t he most important sectors of female employment during the war--is briefly referred to at the beginning of the volume, but it is not the object of any detailed investigation. In other words, this book focuses only on those jobs which had a high social visibility and were at the center of the myth of substitution.

The book is divided in two parts: in the first one Curli examines the economic mobilization of the war period and the processes of mobility which concerned the female work force. Here single chapters are devoted to general trends, to the arms and munitions sectors, to the women employed in the Pirelli factories, and finally to those in urban public transportation (tramways). In the second part of the book Curli examines in detail the new army of white-collar women employed in the Genoese firm Ansaldo and in several important banks (such as Banca Commerciale, Banco di Roma, Banca d'Italia), and makes some general observations on the consequences of the war changes.

The war economy offered new opportunities to young rural females willing to migrate to cities like Milan, and many of the workers hired by munitions factories and by large concerns such as Pirelli fitted this social profile. However, the overall increase in the number of women workers in Italian factories was limited and the female participation in the industrial labor force appears to have been inferior to that of the other belligerent countries both in absolute and in relative terms. More substantial was the increase of white-collar women: it was in fact during the war that women for the first time entered the offices of Ansaldo (whose size doubled over the war years) and of several large banks. It was however the incipient tertiarization of the economy that explains the doubling of the number of these workers between the censuses of 1911 and 1921.

Although subject to the usual sexual differential, wages in factories provisioning the army were generally better than in that traditional bastion of female employment, the textile sector. The greater continuity of employment, moreover, compensated for the wartime decline in real wages. While women's wages were lower than men's, there was an exception: the women who went to work on tramways benefited from the strength of the unions, which did not want any dangerous precedent to be set. They received wages which were almost like those of men's, but they were also the only women workers who truly replaced men (and there were thus no doubts about the temporary character of their presence in the work force). On the other hand, women clerical workers, who were often the relatives of office employees and had middle-classe origin, accepted wages which were at times even inferior to those of blue collar workers in exchange for a "clean job" which could fit their social status.

Beside providing a picture of women's employment during the war years, Curli tries to determine what exactly accounted for the dismissals of women workers after the end of the war. She argues that in spite of frequent calls to throw women out of the labor force, the demobilization of women was in the short term an "economic and organizational" issue, having to do with the difficult conversion to a peace production, more than an "ideological" issue. She notices how in many cases women were not immediately dismissed especially if they had acquired some specific skill. While women tram-workers encountered criticism and hostility among their male colleagues and the bourgeois public (and the sources neatly reveal both the observers' prejudices and the "unruly" behavior of the women), the work of white-collar women was generally appreciated. Considering its low cost and reliability, it is indeed not surprising that after the war banks institutionalized the figure of the female office worker. But the price for this recognition was the inscription of its subalternity and subordination into the new work regulations: beside wage differentials and career blockages, a particularly significant marker of this inferiority was the dismissal of female employees when they married. A timid opposition by the unions was not enough to stop this discrimination.

Amidst an account focused on economic trends and at times weighed down by the amount of statistical data, the use of the personnel files preserved in the firms' archives allows the author to illustrate the variety of individual and group experiences and to offer a glimpse at women's work identities. She is able to show, for example, the often considerable length of female employment, thus countering a commonplace about its subordination to the needs and requirements of family life. Curli also illustrates well the experiences of the signorine, the young women of the middle classes who looked for a clerical job in a bank not only out of need but also because of the social mobility it offered. Besides being a "clean job," employment in a bank provided a certain amount of social prestige, one of the few occupations open to women to do so. This is one reason why quite a few women chose to keep their jobs all their life in spite of the frustration they experienced due to the total lack of career prospects.

Curli's choice of organizing the presentation of her findings by type of industry has the advantage of showing clearly the variety of situations faced by women who worked outside the home. The different evolution of each sector or firm demonstrates the complexity of the factors shaping the gendered workplace. But this choice has also some disadvantages. The very structure of the volume involves a certain repetitiveness and at times a subordination of the argument to the wealth of the sources used. Also one could have wished for a better integration of the comparative context (often confined to the footnotes) into the text. Finally some relevant issues which bear directly on the role of gender ideology in women's demobilization after the war deserved more attention: for example the position of unions and leftist political organizations with respect to the question of women's work. The statements reported from the socialist press of the period reveal such a blatant embrace of the wife-and-mother model that they beg for some more discussion and contextualization. Nonetheless this is a well-researched volume which provides a solid economic history of women's employment in a crucial period of the Italian twentieth century.