The Great War centenary commemorations have prompted historians to undertake new research on the participation of Italian women on the ‘home front’. Emma Schiavon's Dentro la guerra. Le italiane dal 1915 al 1918 represents an assessment of Italian historiography which, starting from the 1980s, first analysed women's work and protest in the countryside and in factories, then examined war violence (occupation, refugees, internees), and more recently has explored patriotic efforts and political issues (pacifism, interventionism, struggle for suffrage). Accordingly, the questions raised by historians have shifted from rebellion to emancipation, from victimhood to nationalisation and citizenship.

In order to examine both realities and wartime stereotypes, the book is divided into two parts which deal respectively with mobilisation, and the images of women in wartime public discourse. In the first part, the author underlines the considerable expansion of job opportunities and the social and economic changes brought about by ‘total’ war. New wartime activities challenged the traditional sexual division of labour and changed family situations and roles. In the countryside, young and peasant women contributed to maintaining agricultural production levels until 1917. They migrated in large numbers to the urban war industry (about 198,000 in 1918); they actively participated in logistical jobs behind the front (10,000–20,000); they sewed military equipment at home (600,000); they became tramway drivers (3,000) or postwomen. Wealthy and middle-class women served in military hospitals as Red Cross nurses (20,000) and constituted the backbone of the patriotic effort on the ‘home front’ in urban patriotic committees (comitati di assistenza civile), which undertook propaganda, fundraising, assistance to soldiers and their families, journalistic activities, and childcare. This wide mobilisation allowed young middle-class women to escape from the bourgeois conception of respectability which in prewar times had confined them to the domestic sphere. As war dragged on, the ‘home front’ was more and more divided: women of the popular classes had opposed the war in 1914–1915 and in 1916–1917 were protagonists of anti-war riots, whereas bourgeois women and part of the feminist movement sided with interventionism and saw patriotic activism as a means to promote the recognition of political rights.

The second part of the book is devoted to the recurrent female symbols in public discourse. Through the examination of books, newspapers, postcards and leaflets, the author highlights how war shaped images and collective memories; the male gaze prevailed and created stereotypes which were functional to the ‘home front’ resistance or to the defence of traditional gender roles. Exploiting traditional and pre-existing cultural issues, propaganda exalted the images of the ‘soldier's mother’ or the auxiliary service of Red Cross nurses, while in 1917–1918, with the aim of fuelling national resistance after the Caporetto defeat, women who had been raped in the occupied territories became symbols of the ‘body of the nation’. Collective wartime imagery was also populated by ‘dangerous’ and ‘immoral’ women (female German spies, unfaithful and greedy fiancées, dancers, tramway drivers, prostitutes) who were stigmatised as they allegedly threatened sexual hierarchies and home-front morality. This part of the book is written with care and a steady hand, because the author is able not only to underline the masculine matrix of these images and their rhetorical aims, but also to re-subjectivise and reconnect these stereotyped symbols within the wartime framework.

On the whole, the war did not favour emancipation and represented a painful experience, especially among mothers who were at the same time workers and housewives. Despite their new visibility, in many cases women of the popular classes were underpaid and exploited. Nevertheless, young girls and working women were able to experience autonomy and develop new skills; in particular, although without career opportunities, even after the end of the war many middle-class women were able to work in hospitals and government and private offices (between 1911 and 1921 the female office workforce rose from 40,000 to 117,000). In assessing female experiences, the author points out that the postwar gender backlash in Italy was very marked: demobilisation and anti-female prejudices contributed to marginalise women from the public sphere, and claims for suffrage advanced by female interventionists were isolated in the political turmoil; the autonomy and visibility of widows and mothers of the fallen were short-lived; the experiences of nurses, female workers and refugees were soon relegated to oblivion in favour of the myths of ‘victory’ and the ‘male nation in arms’.

Offering copious data, an updated bibliography, specific comparisons with other belligerent countries and an accurate depiction of women's mobilisation and its cultural representations, this book will be of value to all scholars and students of the First World War and its aftermath in Italy.