ABSTRACT
Modernization involves a transformation of society, a shift to urban existence, industrial and service sector employment, female emancipation, the individualization of existence, the questioning of traditional values, and frequently a waning of religion. Modernization also usually produces new demands about what political institutions should do to help in the realization of the new vision of humanity. The period of Benito Mussolini’s regime, far from representing a “developmental dictatorship”, actually saw the poorest performance of the Italian economy in the twentieth century. The misapprehension about modernization that gripped many people in the twentieth century is that it involved an entrapment or a fundamentally inhuman dynamic of the greater control of individuals by the resources that they might want. Great disruptions such as the two world wars accelerated developments that were occurring anyway. The largest employment of female labor at the beginning of the twentieth century was in domestic labor.
