With this book Natasha V. Chang has issued an important corrective to our knowledge about gender history and Fascist thought during the regime. As she notes, many scholars of Fascism have used the term ‘crisis woman’ in their discussions of the relationship of women to the Fascist state, treating it as a widespread image and phenomenon. Yet Chang’s contribution is to have actually tracked down the primary sources in which the donna crisi appeared, and to have investigated the usage of the concept precisely.

Chang shows that the regime conducted an actual campaign against the crisis woman only from 1931–1934, issuing orders to the press to combat the dangerous trend of women slimming to comply with elegant foreign fashions, to the point of sterility and masculinisation. Accordingly, the book’s central chapters deal with the primary sources Chang found which directly and explicitly name and shame the donna crisi. Chapter 1 examines the press, especially women’s and fashion magazines; Chapter 2 surveys the medico-scientific literature (predominantly Lombrosian in inspiration) on the female body, deviance, and reproduction; and Chapter 3 analyses satirical publications, especially cartoons. Chang is a sensitive and closely observant reader of her primary sources, and she efficiently and competently contextualises them with the relevant historical and theoretical literature. The book contains multiple reproductions of the images under analysis; Chang tracked down many extremely intriguing sources and it is a generosity to the reader that they are reproduced large and detailed enough to sustain one’s own close examination of the evidence.

In the Introduction, Chapter 4, and a short conclusion, Chang takes up more directly the larger issues concerning the body politic, gender ideology, and the totalitarian aspiration to social control which the figure of the crisis woman necessarily evokes – and which motivate the widespread reference to it among scholars of these questions. Chang does not substantially reject or revise the historical and ideological significance ascribed to the donna crisi by previous authors; she too argues that it was a necessary abject Other, to be opposed to such positive representations of femininity as the prolific mother, the exemplary spouse, and the New Woman during an interwar period that saw upheavals in the gender order and panic in other contexts about flappers or garçonnes. She also agrees that the fears of demographic decline and of racial degeneration were targeted at women and were contained in the concept of the donna crisi, and shows how combating it was a crucial aspect of the demographic campaign. Chang emphasises in particular that the main characteristic of the ‘crisis woman’ was her extreme thinness, implying her desexualisation and sterility.

Chang recognises and forcefully articulates the significance of the crisis woman to our understanding of the centrality of sexual order to Fascist ideology. She also pursues a very interesting line of thought concerning the importance of ‘crisis’ itself as a concept and a way of both manufacturing and then defeating multiple, recurrent threats as perhaps the fundamental mode of operation for the Fascist regime. She makes a strong case for the crisis woman as the crux of an ideological fantasy of social homogeniety and control (as well as its inevitable failure) at the very heart of Fascism: ‘a nexus of fascist ideological fantasies in which the corporeal, the modern, and the national interlock’ (105). Yet she insists on the narrowness of the scope of the primary sources. To do so she actually excludes all those images of thin, elegant, fashionable women being autonomous in public, enjoying non-traditionally feminine pursuits like sport and driving, even smoking and drinking and donning men’s attire, as not images of the crisis woman, labelling them instead ‘modern woman’ (10–13 and throughout Chapter 2). Chang contends that modern woman was distinct from crisis woman because she was not unambiguously coded as negative in Fascist thought. But she accepts that the crisis woman represented both Fascism’s problem with controlling women and its problem with controlling modernisation (35). Further, the very title of the book links crisis and modern woman – though I recognise that the title is not always an author’s decision to make – demonstrating that other scholars may have some grounds for identifying the image of the crisis woman more frequently than Chang accepts. Chang also avoids the question of resistance/compliance with these figures in the lived experience of actual women, though she notes how historians have shown that Fascism’s calls to women to have more babies met little co-operation (104–105). Though this occasionally impedes the fullest possible reading of gender operations it is clear that Chang rigorously respected the contours of her chosen source base.

Overall, the book will be a very useful contribution for scholars of Fascism, both those interested in its body and gender politics, and those concerned with how ideology operated by tactical use of ‘crisis’. It both corrects the archival record and reinforces some of the most important analytical insights about this period.