ABSTRACT
A standard view of inter-war culture is of two decades of largely obeisant acquiescence to the Fascist regime, installed in 1922 and consolidated in 1926 after the murder of the Socialist parliamentary deputy Giacomo Matteotti. Fascism also attracted a number of men and women who saw it as a movement whose vigorous radicalism held out the possibility of modernization at social as well as political and economic levels. Futurist polemic was directed less at individual women than at woman as constructed and embalmed by a conservative tradition. While Futurist women attacked the institution of the family, maternity remained, nonetheless, a sticking point and came to be defended as the sublime mission of women - a position barely different from that of Fascist rhetoric. Numerous writers, such as Maria Chiappelli, wrote domestic dramas centred on the woman's role as mother. Maria Zef her novel from 1936, was a runaway bestseller, even while it offered a highly unflattering portrait of rural Italy.
