ITALY: Top Woman

Benito Mussolini has woman’s role in Fascist Italy all figured out. To teach it to Italian women is the chief function of the women’s section of the Fascist Party, the Fasci Femminili (Women’s Groups). Its presidency is Italy’s top political job for women. Last week Mussolini gave the Fasci Femminili a new president: Countess Bianca Pio di Savoia.

She will boss the chairwomen of Italy’s 12,000 female fasci. The prime tangible duty of their 200,000 members is to help run 50,000 Maternita e Infanzia clinics and many a hospital, which the Government subsidizes. To the poor women who come to the clinics and hospitals the women Fascists pass on Italy’s peculiar kind of “feminism.” Politically aggressive in other countries, feminism in Italy is politically self-effacing, advertises the beauties of motherhood and domesticity. It advises women factory workers to quit their jobs if possible, all women to grow “healthfully buxom,” “give strong, healthy children to the country.”

As chief of this propaganda, Countess Bianca, 35, is slim, aggressive and ambitious. She manages to dress smartly in clothes designed by Italian dressmakers. She spends part of every year with her Spanish-born mother-in-law in Madrid. Longtime head of the fascio in the Garbatella slum district of Rome, she helps many a poor family out of her own purse.