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Gender trouble: Women and the making of Italy's‘active population’, 1861‐1936Silvana Patriarca aa Department of History , Columbia UniversityPublished online: 25 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Silvana Patriarca (1998) Gender trouble: Women and the making of Italy's ‘active population’, 1861‐1936,Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3:2, 144-163, DOI: 10.1080/13545719808454973

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Gender trouble: women and the making of Italy's'active population', 1861-1936

Silvana Patriarca

Department of History, Columbia University

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the complex socioculturaland ideological reasons that lay behind the well-known fall in the number of womenworkers in the Italian population censuses from the post-Unification period toFascism. This was a time when the statisticians of the whole 'civilized' world wereengaged in the definition of the modern statistical notion of 'active population'.Through an examination of material published by Italian as well as non-Italianstatistical institutions and of the debates on women's work at the turn of the century,the article shows how the statisticians sought to make their data comparable to thoseof other, more modem countries and argues that an important turning point in thechanging statistical representations of women's work in Italy occurred with the censusof 1901. This coincided with growing interest in the question of women's work andthe campaign for the introduction of legislation 'protecting' women workers. As stateconstructions, the censuses clearly contributed to the production of a more masculi-nized image of the labor force, an image which, however, eventually became toodistant from reality even for the statisticians themselves.

Keywords

Population censuses, occupational classifications, gender variations, ideology ofdomesticity, protective labor legislation.

The problematic nature of Italian occupational statistics is well known tostudents of Italian history. The 'vagueness' of the categories employed in thefirst censuses, the inconsistency of the criteria of classification adopted in thewhole census series, and the undercounting or overcounting of certain sectionsof the population have been often denounced — though this has not preventedthe same numbers from being repeatedly quoted. Writing in the early 1970s,Stefano Merli dismissed the census figures as a bourgeois production of slightvalue — while in fact making extensive use of them.1 Taking a different ap-proach, in his study of social groups in liberal Italy, Pasquale Villani pointed outmore sensitively a few yean later how the vagueness and categorical instability ofthe statistics in fact reflected both the complexity and viscosity of the transfor-mations of the Italian economy, and the changing ideologies of census officials.2

© 1998 Routledge 1354-571XJournal of Modern Italian Studies 3(2)1998: 144-163

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As well as the historians and social scientists who have studied the economicdevelopment of Italy, the very compilers of the census reports themselves wereaware that the figures they collected often gave a highly distorted representationof reality. The misrepresentation was particularly blatant in the case of women,and at a meeting of the Consiglio superiore di statdstica in November 1920 thestatistician Corrado Gini asked provocatively whether it would not be better toeliminate altogether the questions on women since information collected aboutthem up to that time was virtually useless.3 Gini did not of course question thevery notion of occupation itself which was a major source of the trouble. Themultifarious nature of women's activity meant that their work was difficult totranslate into a single 'occupation', as the modern census requires, although thisis an artificial operation and one singularly inadequate to describe in particular anon-modern economy and the complexity of roles in which the subaltern classesengaged in order to make a living. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, peasant and working-class women participated in various ways inwhat historians have called the 'family economy' and the 'family wage econ-omy'5 and could have described themselves in many different ways. In fact, whatwe find in the Italian censuses is that women's work becomes increasinglyinvisible. The percentage of'active' women plunged from 51.8 in 1881 to 41.2in 1900 to 29.9 in 1936,6 while at the same time the percentage of'housewives'rose from 33.7 in 1881 to 50.7 in 1900 to 56.1 in 1936.7

The statistician Omello Vitali demonstrated in a well-known study publishedalmost thirty years ago that the dramatic reduction in the percentage of'active'females related primarily to women classified as active in agriculture (who fell asa percentage from 27.3 in 1881 to 24.9 in 1901 to 13.8 in 1936)8 and to a lesserextent (for the period after 1900) to women employed in industry: thepercentages here were 16.6 in 1881, 9.6 in 1901 and 7.6 in 1936.9 The changeswould be even more striking if one were to include in the comparison the firsttwo censuses of 1861 and 1871 which are generally not considered by statis-ticians because they do not specify any age limits for the question aboutoccupation. But they reveal even higher rates of women's employment. As it isunlikely that women just stopped working in peasant farms to devote themselvesentirely to the care 'of their families or households, the change clearly reflectschanges that were occurring primarily at the level of representation and self-representation. We face a more complex situation when it comes to trends in themanufacturing sector, but even in this respect rates of female employment, as wewill see, are more likely to hide than to reveal real conditions when women areconcerned.10

While Vitali skillfully dissected the figures and provided adjusted rates offemale employment in agriculture (by equating the numbers of women em-ployed on family-run farms to the corresponding males similarly employed),11 asa statistician he was naturally less interested in explaining the dramatic decreasein the female population active in agriculture, and simply repeated the com-ment1; already made by some contemporary observers, who suggested that there

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were (largely unspecified) 'psychological' and fiscal reasons to explain whywomen (or whoever gave information about them) chose to represent them-selves as housewives.12 Similarly Pasquale Villani also assumed that men'semployment was more representative and relevant for an analysis of generaleconomic and social trends than women's (and more indicative of the moder-nizing of the economy), and by focusing his analysis on variations of maleoccupations he did not explore in a detailed fashion the treatment of womenworkers in the censuses.

Thanks to the growing literature on women and gender there have beenmore sophisticated attempts to explain the specific sociocultural reasons (asdistinct from the economic) that brought about the decrease in the number of'active' women in the Italian censuses. Alessandra Pescarolo has argued that thenarrower views of what constituted the economy that emerged in the latenineteenth century, together with increasingly rigid distinctions between the'employed' and the 'non-employed', caused the productive activities carried outby women in the home and indeed the whole model of the family economy tobe devalued long before their actual decline. This resulted in low rates of femaleactivity which can only in part be explained by the actual changes in theeconomy (or economies, given the regional and local variations that existed inlate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy).1 Simonetta Ortaggi Cam-marosano has also claimed that beginning with the census of 1881 Italian womenworkers became a casualty of the attempts by Italian statisticians (and laterhistorians) to identify and separate what was 'modern' in the economy and todistinguish 'real' industrial workers from such hybrid social figures as peasant-workers or worker-peasants.14

Similar trends have been noticed in other countries. In the case of Britain,Edward Higgs has observed that while women doing unpaid work at homewere recognized as productive workers in the censuses before 1881, in that yearthey began to be placed in a residual 'unoccupied' category, which the author linksto the 'increasing pressure to reconstruct the occupational census in a form moreacceptable to economists and social scientists'.15 Nancy Folbre and MarjorieAbel have argued that the diffusion of an ideology of domesticity (wherebywomen's 'proper place' was in the 'private sphere' of the home) substantiallyreduced women's presence among the 'gainful occupations' in the censuses ofthe USA in the second half of the nineteenth and at the beginning of thetwentieth century.16 For Australia, Desley Deacon has pointed out that anunderestimate of women's contribution to the economy followed the adoptionin 1891 by census officials of a breadwinner/dependant distinction constructedin gender terms and modeled after the census of England and Wales.17 Theundercounting of women also occurred in France, although it appears to havebeen limited primarily to the agricultural sector before 1896 when new criteriawere introduced.

Allowing for variations, these studies suggest that the construction of'active'populations in modern statistical censuses occurred in different countries in

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roupjily similar ways and at about the same time (between 1880 and 1905).While the consolidation of the paradigm of the modern economy certainly helpsexpbin why the work of women became increasingly invisible in Italiancensuses, the reasons that explain the changing criteria for counting and classi-fying occupations in population censuses were more complex. In order tounderstand what they were we have to consider more closely the work of thestatisticians who manned the Direzione generale di statistica (General StatisticalOffice, which was replaced in 1926 by the Istituto centrale di statistica, orISTAT) and the Consiglio superiore di statistica, the advisory committeewhich supervised the work of the Direzione. The debates that took place inthese institutions and the decisions that were eventually made on how toproceed in 'problematic' cases, and in particular with respect to the 'trouble-some' category of women, reveal that other processes converged to bring aboutthe invisibility of women's work and to transform working women into 'house-wives'.

One of these was the international growth of administrative statistics in thesecond half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centurieswhich gave rise to international organizations bent on making statistics moreuniform across nations. Another factor was the statisticians' desire to make theirstatistics more comparable internationally. The construction of the modern (andmostly statistical) notion of'active population' was a collective effort and almosteverywhere this construction implied a certain marginalization of womenworkers.. But this marginalization also reflected the contemporaneous spread ofthe ideology of female domesticity, which assumed that the 'proper' position ofwomen was in the home. Appeals to strengthen the maternal function ofwomen and women's duty to the 'race' underwrote the 'protective' legislationintroduced in most European countries in the last decades of the nineteenthcentury. An explicit attempt to impose this ideology on women of the workingclasses occurred only late in the nineteenth century in Italy, and coincided withthe political mobilization of working women and with the debate on 'protec-tive' labor legislation. To be properly understood, the rising numbers of'house-wives' and consequently the masculinization of the 'active' population in theItalian censuses have to be placed in the context of all these processes. This is notto say that this was exclusively the result-of intervention from above — women,as we will see, must have contributed to the change too — or that the statisticians'conspired' against women. Although no planning was involved, the changefitted well within a process of regendering of society taking place if not in realitycertainly in its representations.

Beginnings

The pre-Unification Italian states made some attempt to classify their popu-lations by occupation when they took their first censuses in the 1830s—1850s.Those early attempts produced few reliable numbers, but a great array of systems

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of classifications which, together with those of private statisticians, tell us a greatdeal about the perceptions of the social structure and about the ideologicalmodels shared by civil servants, lawyers and physicians. The old physiocraticdistinction between the productive and 'sterile' class was still popular in the1850s19 and many compilers of statistics grouped classes of people along the linesof a passive/active distinction which had more to do with moral values thanproduction.20 Most of these schemes, as might be expected, presented an imageof society that was still far from industrialized. For example, as late as 1861 awriter from Reggio Emilia and nostalgic admirer of Napoleon, David Rabbeno,proposed a scheme of four classes (agricultural class, manufacturing class, liberalprofessions, 'inferior' class) with no mention of industrial workers.21

Despite their diversity, the one thing that all these schemes shared was anunmistakable gender bias. Since in this period classifiers had no fixed or con-solidated categories, gender bias took different shapes. The social devaluation ofwomen's work led to the neglect of its registration in demographic censuses. Forexample, the instructions for the Tuscan census of 1841 told the clergymenresponsible for collecting the information not to bother with indicating theoccupation of women and children in families of farmers and artisans unless theiractivity 'brings a clear gain to the domestic economy'22 (some of the priests,however, did bother, and as a result revealed the very high numbers of womeninvolved in domestic production).23

Some of the concerns behind these early initiatives still informed the makersof the first census of unified Italy. For the first director of the Italian statisticaloffice, Pietro Maestri, classifying the population by occupation was a means togauge the state and structure of the economy, and hence obtain some indirectindication of the wealth of the nation.. Maestri was a self-trained writer onmatters of political economy, a former patriot of democratic and federalistleanings who had been a main exponent of the genre of 'patriotic statistics'before Unification. In the official reports containing the results of the first census(taken in December 1861) occupations were grouped according to majoreconomic sectors (emphasis being placed on the type of work done and thematerial used) and by function and rank. There were twelve large categories:'agricultural industry' (subdivided into 'vegetable', 'animal' and 'the like'),'mineral industry', 'manufacturing industry', 'commercial industry', 'liberalprofessions', 'religion [culto]', 'public administration', 'internal and externalsecurity', 'property owners', 'domestic servants \domestidtS\\ 'the poor', and'without occupation [senzaprofessione]', a category which also included 'house-wives [dontte di casa], children, the elderly, the sick, etc.'24 Like most of theclassifications produced in the early decades of the nineteenth century, this onecentered on a traditional and all-inclusive conception of industry in whichagriculture was still the main component and in which the workshop was thebasic unit of the manufacturing sector (consequently no other distinctionbeyond that between master and apprentice existed for classifying the work-force).

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The census instructions stipulated that married women be classified in thecategory 'non-poor without occupation [professione]'; there were no 'productivehousewives', that is housewives included among the employed, 'because theirwork was recognized as contributing to the wealth of the country', as was thecase in the censuses of England and Wales of the mid-nineteenth century and inthose of Massachusetts before the turn of the century.25 But women's contri-bution to the economy was not hidden and the percentage of women who wereregistered as having an occupation was in fact very high, and indeed among themanufacturing and artisan population (these two terms were interchangeable)they were more numerous than men (1,692,740 versus 1,379,505). This did notseem to surprise the writer of the summary report (in all likelihood Maestri),although other findings generated doubts about the reliability of the censusoperations, one example being the huge regional discrepancies in the percen-tages of women employed in agriculture (for every 100 men there were 80.9women in Piedmont and only 8.2 in Sardinia), which Maestri attributed both todifferent structures of landownership and land management and to the differentcriteria used by the enumerators in the assignment of occupations to women.Some of these, the census report concluded, had probably included women whowere actually 'housewives' in the agricultural population, while others hadprobably done the opposite.26 Maestri also found it necessary to explain whythe percentage of people (and especially women) in the manufacturing sectorproved higher in the southern than in the northern regions.27

An image that presented women and the southern regions as more industrialthan men and the northern regions did not seem quite 'right' to Maestri, but hedid not try to change it. This image was, however, to be 'normalized' in latercensuses by being made to conform to a standardized view of the occupationalstructure of a modern country. The history of this normalization is the history ofthe construction of the modern conception of'active population'.28

The path toward greater 'accuracy'

Although censuses were already classifying people by occupation in the first halfof the nineteenth century, in most European states and in the United States aconcern to produce more 'accurate' and comparable occupational classificationsbecame evident only in the last two decades of the century. In those years theInternational Statistical Institute offered guidelines to its members for drawing auniform classification of occupations for census purposes. At the InternationalStatistical Congress held in St Petersburg in 1872 a classification of occupationshad already been proposed and circulated among the delegates, but no resol-ution was taken. It was only at the second session of the International StatisticalInstitute held in Paris in September 1889 that the French statistician JacquesBerrillon re-proposed using ten major categories in which all occupationsshould be grouped, with ranking for each occupation.29 Although uniformityremained — and still remains - yet another statisticians' impossible dream, as

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shown in their frequent complaints, the statisticians of various countries did notignore these directions. Models circulated and were exchanged and differentsocioeconomic realities were made to fit, with varying degrees of success, thestandard models.

Italian statisticians too felt the need to conform and began anxiously com-paring their own and other countries' systems of classifications and the datacontained in them. After Maestri's death in 1871, the new director of the Italianstatistical service from 1872 to 1898, Luigi Bodio, introduced some changes tothe system of classification. In contrast to Maestri, who did not have a specializedtraining either in statistics or in economics (although he was in contact with theprominent state statisticians of his time), Bodio had studied law in Pavia and Pisaand political economy in France, and had successively taught political economy,geography and statistics in various technical high schools and at the Regia scuolasuperiore di commercio of Venice. Comparing the results of the census of 1871with that of 1861, Bodio explained that the Italian office of statistics had adopteda modified version of the classification proposed at the International Congress ofStatistics held in St Petersburg in 1872.30 The choice had been motivated onlyby a desire for more reliable international comparisons and not because of theintrinsic superiority of the new classification system. This classification wasinformed by the 'economic concept of production', which in practice meant asharper separation between those who derived their means of subsistence from acertain activity or from their capital and those who depended on the formerbecause they were unable to produce income. This meant adding some newgeneral categories, shuffling some people around, and in particular the numer-ous women who were without a designated occupation while the housewives,previously grouped in the general category 'without occupation' (senza prqfes-sione), were now included in a very large category defined as 'People providedfor by others [a carico altrut] and with unspecified occupation' which includedchildren, the elderly and individuals unable to work and thus dependent onothers for their survival. The new category contained nearly four million morepeople than the previous one because students, who previously constituted acategory of their own, were also included in it. Noticing that this new classifi-cation meant that 'the majority of our mothers and wives and daughters andsisters' were now in the dependent category, Bodio conceded that they 'couldnot be considered as a purely passive element in the budget of our domesticeconomy' even when they were neither 'workers in a manufacture, nor dom-estic seamstresses nor milliners'.

The criteria of classification again changed slightly with the following census(1881). In his report, Bodio observed that this time the Direzione di statisticahad decided to give 'more importance to the activity of the woman as houseurife[massaia di casa]' (my emphasis). Women who in previous censuses had usuallylacked a designated occupation were now mainly identified as attendenti le curedomestiche, that is housewives. This does not mean that women's work in thehome was now considered to be a real occupation; on the contrary, it meant that

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women went from having an unspecified occupation to having no occupation atall, but simply a 'condition' (no definition of it was offered), that of a 'house-wife'. The reference to their 'dependence' disappeared and they were nowincluded in the general category of those 'without occupation'. In the categoryof those with an 'unspecified occupation', Bodio explained, remained 'only thefemales who were ill, chronically sick and who had not indicated any occu-pation [on the census form]'.

In spite of this change women who were employed in a manufacturingactivity of a domestic kind might still appear as employed because the statis-ticians operated with a fairly comprehensive notion of the economy, and wereconcerned to. identify all those who participated, no matter in what role or towhat extent. The question on the census form explicitly asked for both 'princi-pal* and 'secondary' (accessoria) occupations, and if both an occupation and acondition were indicated, only the former was to be counted. Therefore if awoman appeared as a housewife and a spinner, only the latter designation wascounted. This shows that what Villani has called the 'industrialist' ideology ofthe early statisticians33 still overruled whatever ideas they had about women's'proper place'.

The question of dual occupation (or occupation and condition) had beenintroduced in the census of 1871 to give a more accurate picture of theoccupational structure of a country in which the division of labor was not veryfar advanced and where there were many individuals with more than oneoccupation.34 The minutes of the meetings between Bodio and his collaboratorsreveal the endless difficulties and frustrations they experienced in the pursuit ofthe elusive goal of accuracy. Not only had they to wrestle with the diversity oflocal terms for occupations (in many cases the occupational titles reported by theenumerators in the local dialect could not even be translated into Italian), butthey were also aware of the wide range of different forms of self-representationavailable to respondents. Bodio observed that there were young women quali-fied an elementary teachers but not actually teaching who still described them-selves as teachers because of the prestige of the profession. People with morethan one occupation also tended to select the one that carried more prestige.Many elderly people who were no longer working gave the occupation theypreviously were engaged in to avoid the impression that they were a 'deadweight' on their families.35 Motives of status and prestige and idealized self-representations therefore interfered with the quantifiers' desire for an 'objective'picture of the occupational structure of the country. But the enumerators whotook to classifying hundreds of different occupations into larger categories alsooften used personal and arbitrary criteria. There was no single logic thatnaturally led to amalgamating a great variety of occupations into a given set ofcategories. Bodio believed that the enumerators needed to be informed aboutwhat the Direzione di statistica wanted to know about occupations and he alsoinsisted that they should alter the respondents' returns when these did notcorrespond to the purposes of the census. The statisticians, in other words,

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were well aware of the constructed nature of occupational classifications, whichserved as ordering tools, not mirrors of reality.

In the census of 1901 (no census was taken in 1891), the criterion by whichoccupation overruled 'condition' in cases of dual self-description continued toapply to men, but not to women. The census report stated:

whoever declares himself to be at the same time priest and property owner,'or capitalist and lawyer, or pensioner and clerk or accountant, appearsrespectively under the entry of priests or lawyers or accountants and not inthat of property owners or capitalists or pensioners, which consequently willbe wanting. By contrast, if a woman had declared herself to be a housewifeand as a secondary occupation gives the activity of spinning or weaving linenor hemp or wool or sewing for herself or for others, the former has beenconsidered the principal occupation and the latter appears only in the classi-fication of secondary professions.38

The reasons for the different treatment of women were not made explicit,but were in part related to the statisticians' desire to identify those groups in theworking population which really were part of a modern industrial economy andto distinguish social classes. In preparatory studies, it had been noticed that thecensus of 1881 had failed to identify 'workers [operai] in the proper sense of theword, namely those who live off a wage obtained in exchange for labor inindustrial activities done for others'.39 This was what they now tried to do bydistinguishing real 'workers' from 'women engaged in spinning, or weaving, orsewing only on their own and for a few hours a day'. This also meant avoidingthe mixing of people who worked 'on their own' and owners of opifici (work-shops or factories). In the statisticians' perspective, manufacturing productiondone at home was definitely not modem, and those who engaged in it were notreal 'workers', and therefore the regions in which this type of activity was morewidespread were not really industrialized.4

Since the previous censuses had mistakenly made the southern regions lookmore industrialized than the north, the makers of the census of 1901 adoptedmore detailed categories. In the earlier censuses the categories of master andworker appeared with no indication of the setting and the nature (manual vs.non-manual) of this work. Now five new categories gave information inrelation to the ownership of the means of production and the nature of thework performed: (1) masters and managers; (2) clerks and accountants; (3)independent artisans; (4) factory workers; and (5) workers in domestic industry.These new categories showed that even if the southern regions still had a greaternumber of people employed in the textile industry than the north, now most ofthese were classified as 'independent artisans'.41

This inevitably also affected the ways in which women workers were classi-fied, but the outcome we might expect (a larger number of women in thecategory of'domestic industry workers') is not exacdy what we actually find. Infact the statisticians now maintained that for 'a large number of women who are

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engaged in spinning, or weaving, or sewing only on their own and for a fewhours a day' the 'principal occupation' was that of'taking care of the home'.42

How did the statisticians know this to be true? Certainly not on the basis ofempirical evidence, as they mentioned the example of other nations such asBritain and the Netherlands which were already applying these criteria.Women, in other words, were placed in their 'proper sphere' because this waswhat other countries were doing.

The explanations given by the statisticians themselves show that the changesin the occupational classifications of women in the Italian census at the turn ofthe century reflected the desire to single out what was truly industrial and thusmodern in the economy and at the same time to follow procedures adopted inother countries. The industrial working class was assumed to be mainly male andemployed in large factories and had to be separated from the great mass of otherworkers, most of whom were women, who continued to be engaged in more'primitive' forms of manufacturing production that took place mosdy in thehome and on a discontinuous and seasonal basis. What Simonetta OrtaggiCaminarosano attributed to the census of 1881 in fact occurred to a full extentonly later in the census of 1901, which dramatically reduced the percentage of'active' women while at the same time increasing considerably the percentage of'housewives'. The earlier census had distinguished housewives from other'dependants' and included them among those 'without occupation'. Thecensus of 1901 used the paradigm of the modern economy to 'normalize' thecensus data and to impose the status of housewives on working women eventhough they continued to contribute to the family and the market economy in avariety of forms. The idea of economic modernity itself was not gender neutraland was closely intertwined with the middle-class ideal of female domesticitywhich in the final decade of the century also began to be imposed on working-class women in Italy.

The 'victory' of the housewife category in the censuses was ironic since soonafter a number of surveys and studies would argue that domestic industry was adistinctly 'modern' and not a residual phenomenon, and that the 'traditional'idea of the worker had to be redefined to include large masses of workers activein their homes but integrated within modern capitalist enterprises. FedericoMarconcini, a student of the economist Achille Loria and author of one of thesestudies (published in 1914), observed: '[In terms of common opinion] [t]heworker [operaio] is the metalworker, the construction worker, the miner, thespinner, etc. Many people have no idea that ouside the factory or the workshopthere exists another mass of workers.'44 A new term had to be coined to refer tothis new type of productive activity and Marconcini called it 'waged domesticindustry', drawing attention to the degrading conditions in which most dom-estic workers had to operate. To be sure, these studies were referring tooutwork, namely work performed at home in die context of the putting-outsystem, and not to just any kind of manufacturing done within the domesticwalls, but they were accurate in pointing out the dominant tendency to identify

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the 'real' worker with the male. As we will see, some other contemporaneoustrends were contributing to this identification.

Occupational statistics and 'protective' legislation

In two articles which appeared in Nuova Antobgia in 1893 and in La RiformaSotiak in 1894, Carlo Francesco Ferraris (1850-1924), a professor of statistics atthe University of Padua and a member of the Consiglio superiore di statistica, setout the criteria for an accurate measurement of 'occupations {profession!] andclasses'. For an activity to be an occupation, it had to take place outside thedomestic environment, it had to have a 'moral' and 'juridical' nature (heprobably meant that it had to have some kind of legal recognition), it had to beexercised on a continuous (at least theoretically) basis, it had to be the result of achoice and not of coercion, and it had to be pursued for the purpose of monetarygain. Since they lacked one or more of these requirements, housewives,prostitutes, beggars and soldiers were all excluded from the privilege of havinga real occupation or profession. Ferraris thereby gave theoretical justification to apractice (excluding housewives from the realm of production) that had alwaysbeen in existence. But Ferraris also maintained not only that an accurateoccupational census was indispensable for scientific purposes, but also that itwas an essential tool for the modem state in implementing urgent social reforms.A clearer distinction of occupations by sex would make it possible in particular:

to single out woman's participation in social life, to reveal those sectors ofproduction where her activity is predominant and those where it is onlysecondary [accessoria], to show where she is in competition with maleworkers, to establish in what sectors her participation contributes to moraland economic progress, and those by contrast where her participation con-stitutes a loss and a throwback, and to identify the sectors in which thestruggle for life is heavier for her and requires more intervention on the partof the state.45

The language of the quotation evokes some of the issues in the contemporarydebate on women's work and on the issue of the introduction of 'protective'labor legislation that was raging in Italy in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Reformers who favored the adoption of labor and, more generally, sociallegislation wanted more accurate occupational statistics to identify the type andnumber of workers in need and who would benefit from the protectivemeasures. As one of these reformers, Ferraris considered it indispensable toclarify the distinction between 'occupation' and 'condition'. Ferraris wasinfluenced by the program of the German Kathedersozialismus and in numerouspublications (he was a regular contributor to La Riforma Sodale, the journalfounded by Luigi Roux and Francesco Saverio Nitti in 1894) he repeatedlyargued that the challenge to the liberal order posed by the social question couldonly be met through a well-directed state intervention which presupposed the

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existence of an extensive knowledge base of a statistical type.46 Another socialreformer whose intellectual background was similar to that of Ferraris,Napolcone Colajanni, saw the same fundamental connection between occu-pational statistics and social intervention, remarking that 'when he enteredresolutely on the road of state socialism in 1882, Bismarck ordered a census ofoccupations; he did well. Social legislation is not possible without statistics ofoccupations.' The author of a popular treatise on statistics, GiuseppeTammco, also emphasized the role of occupational statistics for the solution ofthe 'social question'.

The terms of this debate in which middle-class reformers of diverse politicalbackground developed similar positions and demands add a further dimension tothe changes in the occupational classification of women's work. These changeswere not only a matter of misrepresentation resulting from comparative pre-occupations and the adoption of a model of economic modernity imbued withgendered assumptions, but also paralleled new forms of state intervention toregulate the 'problem' of women's work that was at the center of the social andpolitical debate of the turn of the century. The definitive reclassification of alarge number of women into housewives in the census of 1901 occurred at atime when the campaign for legislative measures 'protecting' women workerswas finally taking shape. While in 1898 a law on mandatory insurance againstwork accidents was passed (Ferraris wrote the text that inspired this law),49 at thestart of the Giolittian era in 1902 the Italian parliament passed the first law'protecting' women workers, the Carcano law, which ruled that women andchildren could not be employed in jobs which took place 'underground' andthat underage women (minorennt) could not work at night, and introducedmandatory maternity leave without pay. In 1907 further provisions outlawednight work for women altogether, followed in 1911 by the establishment of anational maternity leave fund.

An image of women that stressed their dependence and maternal rolesdominated the rhetoric of those who supported these reforms, and was evidenteven in the Socialist Party which had changed its strategy in 1900 to make theprotection of women workers part of its program, with Anna Kuliscioff at theforefront of this campaign. The debate that preceded the introduction of the lawshowed that groups within the Italian middle classes and government elites wereimposing their ideas of female domesticity on •working-class women at amoment when women workers had shown they could be as militant as men.Alessandra Pescarolo has shown in the case of the Tuscan trecciaiole (straw-plaiters) how working women of the lower classes were increasingly stigmatizedin the 1890s by middle-class observers (Pasquale Villari being just the bestknown of them) for devoting too much time to a badly paid occupation whileneglecting their duties as wives and mothers.50 Even the Socialists had somecomplicity in this and as Franca Pieroni Bortolotti observed some years ago,while the campaign in favor of protective legislation for women was going on,the socialist press avoided reference to the major struggles in which peasant

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women in particular had been involved and the party in many cases did notsupport women's strikes.51

Feminist historians have convincingly argued that 'protective' legislationconstituted a contribution given by the state in the regendering of modernsociety.52 The modern welfare state was in most cases constructed along genderlines, though in ways that varied from country to country. Joan W. Scott hasargued that protective legislation aimed at women and children tended torepresent 'all women as inevitably dependent and women wage earners as anunusual and vulnerable group necessarily restricted to certain kinds of jobs'.53

In light of these changes, the changes in the population censuses I havedescribed in this article acquire new significance. They clearly reflected a greaterwillingness on the part of middle-class and even working-class men to apply toworking-class women the model of domesticity, and conveyed an image ofwomen as primarily belonging to the 'private sphere' of the home. Therefore,through the adoption of narrower and more exclusive definitions of whoqualified as a worker, the population census too contributed to the regenderingof society.

A role reversal

Italian women who were engaged in the battle for women's emancipation didnot protest against the classifications and categories used by state statisticians,unlike their American counterparts who in 1878 wrote to the United StatesCongress 'praying that the tenth census may contain a just enumeration ofwomen as laborers and producers'.54 But one of the pioneers of nineteenth-century Italian feminism, Anna Maria Mozzoni, was a consistent critic of the'obsession with classifications' ('mania delle classificazioni') and of the anti-female use of this instrument. She was also strongly opposed to 'protective'legislation supported by liberal-conservative social reformers and by the SocialistParty; in her view this legislation, far from solving women's predicaments,discriminated against them in other ways and was likely to throw them backinto the 'prison' of the home. Feminists like Valeria Benetti Brunelli were onsolid ground in ignoring census figures and in claiming that the female laborforce, in Italy as elsewhere, was growing and that women 'purely passive in thefamily economy' existed 'only in small numbers in the petty and middlebourgeoisie'.56

Complaints about the census counts of women workers came from differentand unexpected quarters, however. As the percentages of employed femaleskept falling in the censuses of 1911 and 1921, criticism of the ways in whichwomen were counted was most forcefully articulated after the war by conserva-tive (and subsequently Fascist) scholars and politicians intent on constructing theimage of a rural Italy. In 1921 Francesco Coletti, a professor of statistics at theUniversity of Pavia and, like Ferraris, a member of the Consiglio superioredi statistica, observed that many women who were actually employed in

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agriculture simply did not appear in the censuses, and he proceeded in one of hisstudies to correct the figures by assigning agricultural employment to all womenwho belonged to families of farmers. The statisticians of the central officeappear to have shared the same concerns and the instructions for the 1921 censusspecified that if a woman worked at home as an operaia (worker) or in the fieldswhile also taking care of the home, she should be classified as worker and not ashousewife. However, the census again showed a decline in the percentages of'active* women, both in industry and in agriculture. Even worse returns were tocome with the census of 1931 when the number of women employed inagriculture had fallen by more than half with respect to 1921 (from 19.7 to 9.3percent).

Coletti's analysis was subsequently defined as 'masterly' by the statisticians ofISTAT (created by Mussolini in 1926). These even suggested that massaie(housewives), the producers of children and hence the great resource of thenation, should be also included in the 'active' population,59 a view similar to thatof the French natalists of the 1920s and 1930s who considered the menagere(housewife) to be a mitier (profession).60 The statisticians of ISTAT did notactually apply these views, but the census of 1936 showed a percentage ofwomen active in agriculture (13.8 percent) higher than the census of 1931(which had recorded the lowest rate ever of women employed in agriculture,namely 9.3 percent). This was the outcome of new criteria explicitly adopted inorder to produce higher returns of women employed in the agricultural sector:in 1936 the enumerators were told that women who were prevalently engaged inagricultural work had to be classified as employed even if they were not so at thetime of the census.

In an ironic reversal of roles, which contrasts with the regime's attempts tolimit women's participation in the labor force,62 it was now the statisticiansthemselves who were trying to reintroduce into the representation of the workforce the large numbers of women who had ended up outside of it. But why didwomen continue to appear outside of the active population even when thestatisticians were willing and actually trying to get them back into it? The reporton the disastrous census of 1931 put forward a number of possible reasons:factors of a psychological nature ('since taking care of the home, even ifexercised as a part-time activity, is considered loftier than a manual occupation,and often constitutes the favorite occupation'), fear of taxation and of having topay dues to the state syndicates or to the mandatory system of social security, andthe current economic crisis, which, by creating more unemployment amongwomen, could have induced some of them to describe themselves as house-wives. They also suggested that it might have been in part the result of the actualwording of the question about occupation.63 In the first agricultural censusconducted in 1930, household heads of farms were asked to declare the numberof their 'helpers' and working women turned out to be more numerous than inthe population census of the following year which left it to the women todefine their occupation. This kind of explanation, however, is based on the

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unwarranted assumption that the women themselves always chose their occu-pational designation. Franca Pieroni Bortolotti was probably closer to the truthwhen she observed that since the instructions for the 1931 census required thatonly women without marital support should be included in the 'unemployed'category if they did not have a job, the local enumerators may have believed thatthey were interpreting the desire of the ISTAT officials if they returned highnumbers of housewives.64

In spite of their biases, there was some truth in the remarks made by theISTAT statisticians. Federico Marconcini who studied the wage-earning dom-estic workers in the 1910s had observed how difficult it was to count theseworkers since they were often women 'who because of their social condition aswives or daughters of small landowners or professionals had absolutely to hidetheir condition as wage workers'.65 Certainly the women themselves (or thosewho assigned them an occupation in census forms) must also have contributed,for a variety of complex reasons, to the masculinization of the 'active' popu-lation. Although it is clearly impossible to know the extent to which thishappened, an examination of the changing self-perceptions and work identitiesof Italian women would be necessary if we want to account fully for the changesexamined in this article. But that will be the topic of another essay.

Conclusion

Economic historians are concerned to make quantitative data as homogeneousas possible, to establish meaningful comparisons across time and space. From acertain standpoint, one cannot deny that they are justified; common sense tellsyou that you should not compare apples and oranges. But if we consider thateconomies and societies in history are highly diverse, we need to be critical ofthe procedures that result in homogeneous data, and in particular we should payattention to those who are excluded in these operations. In this article Idescribed one such attempt to create an 'accurate' and possibly more uniformpicture of the occupational structure of Italy between 1861 and 1936 and Iargued that the considerable decrease in the presence of women in the 'activepopulation' was in part a product of the ways in which this particular statisticalcategory was constructed (in a context which was not exclusively Italian) and ofgendered assumptions that had little to do with real changes in the occupationalstructure of the country and in its economy. The increasing masculinization ofthe labor force in censuses coincided with efforts in many quarters to impose amore 'domestic' view of women. This study has thus shown that occupationalclassifications are mainly arbitrary (although socially conditioned) constructions.This does not mean, however, that they are all equivalent. Paradoxically, insome cases, a seemingly less 'accurate' classification can reveal more than a more'accurate' one. The census of 1861 was a case in point, since it representedwomen's involvement in the economy to an extent that was never repeated inthe period that followed.

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Notes

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Social ScienceHistory Association in Atlanta in October 1994 and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes enSciences Sociales in Paris in May 1996.1 would like to thank Nancy Folbre and MaurizioGribaudi for their comments on those versions, and the editors of this journal for theirinvaluable editing work on the final version.

1 S. Merli, Proletariate di fahbrica e capitalismo industriale (Florence: La Nuova Italia,1972). G. Procacci had already criticized Merli's reliance (in earlier works) on whatthe latter called 'bourgeois' statistics in La lotta di classe in Italia agli inizi del secolo XX(Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1970), p. 3 (note).

2 P. Villani, 'Gruppi sociali e classe dirigente all'indomani dell'Unità', Storia d'ltalia,vol. 1: Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 881-978 (quote isfrom p. 938).

3 See Annali di Statistica, s. 5, vol. 11: Lavori preparatori del VI censimento generate dellapopolazione: Atti del Consiglio superiore di statistica (Roma, 1925), p. 49 (meeting of 22November 1920).

4 For a critical discussion of the notion of occupation see A. Abbot, 'The sociology ofwork and occupations', Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1993): 187-209.

5 On these notions see L. A. Tilly and J. W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (NewYork and London: Routledge, 1989).

6 See N. Federici, 'Evoluzione e caratteristiche del lavoro femminile in Italia', Statistica21 (1961): 70; and N. Federici, 'L'inserimento della donna nel mondo del lavoro', inL'emancipazione femminile in Italia: Un secolo di discussioni, 1861-1961 (Florence: LaNuova Italia, 1963), p. 93.

7 These figures come from O. Vitali, La popolazione attiva in agricoltura attraverso icensimenti italiani (1881-1961) (Rome: Tip. Failli, 1968), p. 99. One may also lookat ISTAT, Sommario di statistiche storiche dell'Italia 1861-1965 (Rome, 1968), pp. 12-13.

8 Vitali, La popolazione attiva, p. 99.9 O. Vitali, Aspetti dello sviluppo economico italiano alla luce della ricostruzione della

popolazione attiva (Rome: Tip. Failli, 1970), p. 65.10 For a recent critical discussion of the fundamental trends, see A. Pescarolo, 'Il lavoro e

le risorse delle donne in eta contemporanea', in A. Groppi (ed.) Il lavoro delle donne(Bari: Laterza, 1996), pp. 299-344. Vitali (Aspetti dello sviluppo economico) is confidentabout the accuracy of census data on females employed in the manufacturing sector inparticular for the period after 1900. He provides also percentages disaggregated bymacro-regions (northern, central and southern Italy) which show that the greatestdecline occurred in the south, while the north knew a relative stability. These datareflect the conventional picture of the economic development of the country, but Iam inclined to be less confident than Vitali about the accuracy of the data with respectto the south. I should also mention at this point the agricultural and industrialcensuses. As known, they cannot really be compared with the population censusessince their unit of observation and counting is not the household, but the workshopand the factory (and the peasant family in the case of agricultural censuses). Womenworkers seem to have been less likely to 'disappear' in these censuses.

11 Vitali, La popolazione attiva, pp. 140-6. Thanks to this adjustment the female rate ofactivity in agriculture in 1931 rises from 7.3 to 23.7 percent (see table on p. 183).

12 Vitali has recently reiterated this explanation in 'I censimenti e la composizionesociale dell'agricoltura italiana', in Storia dell'agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea,ed. P. Bevilacqua, vol. 2: Uomini e classi (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), pp. 377-414. Thisis, to be sure, part of the explanation although much remains hidden behind that

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vague term 'psychological' — a whole history in fact, still to be written for the mostpart, concerning the shaping and reshaping of Italian women's identities in the lastcentury and a half.

13 Alessandra Pescarolo, 'I mestieri femminili. Continuità e spostamenti di confine nelcorso dell'industrializzazione', Memoria. Rivista di Storia delle Donne 30 (1990): 55-68;and Alessandra Pescarolo, 'L'identità ambivalente: le trecciaiole toscane', Annalidell'Istituto Alcide Cervi 12 (1990): 147-64.

14 S. Ortaggi Cammarosano, 'Labouring women in northern and central Italy in thenineteenth century', in J. A. Davis and P. Ginsborg (eds) Society and Politics in the Ageof the Risorgimento (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 152-83 (thequote is from p. 157).

15 Edward Higgs, 'Women, occupations and work in the nineteenth century censuses',History Workshop 23 (1987): 59-80.

16 Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Abel, 'Women's work and women's households: genderbias in the U.S. census', Social Research 56 (1989): 545-69; see also N. Folbre, 'Theunproductive housewife: her evolution in nineteenth-century economic thought',Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1991): 463-84, which has alsocomparative data on England; and M. A. Conk, The United States Census and LaborForce Change. A History of Occupation Statistics, 1870-1940 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMIResearch Press, 1978).

17 Desley Deacon, 'Political arithmetic: the nineteenth-century Australian census andthe construction of the dependent woman', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture andSociety 11 (1985): 27-47.

18 In that year, the classification of the active population was organized around theétablissement (any production collective) and not the individual; also all the wives offarmers who did not declare a specific occupation began to be automatically countedinto the active population: see J.-C. Toutain, La Population de la France de 1700 à1959 (Paris: Cahiers de l'Institut de Science Economique Appliquée, 1963), pp. 85and 101. Consequently, the female activity rate of France was higher than in otherEuropean countries, as O. Marchand and C. Thélot observe in Deux siècles de travail enFrance. Population active et structure sociale, durée et productivité du travail (Paris: INSEE,1991), pp. 11ff. (although they also think that the difference is not completelyexplained by the peculiarity of French criteria of classification).

19 C. Roncaglia, Statistica generate degli Stati Estensi (Modena: Tip. di Carlo Vincenzi,1849-50).

20 G. Salari, Statistica generale della regia città e provincia di Milano (Milan: Bernardoni,1840).

21 D. Rabbeno, Delle condizioni della statistica nell'Italia centrale e delle commissioni distatistica nell'Emilia istituite con legge 28 gennaio 1860 operazioni e organizzazione di essecon un saggio di statistica comunitativa del Comune Parmense di Salsomaggiore (Parma: Tip.Rossi-Ubaldi, 1861).

22 See A. Doveri, 'Aggregato domestico e pluriattività nella provincia pisana di metàottocento attraverso i dati del censimento toscano del 1841', Annali dell'htituto AlcideCervi' 11 (1989): 159-78 (quote is from p. 160).

23 ibid.24 Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Popolazione. Censimento generate (31

dicembre 1861) (Florence, 1867).25 See Folbre, 'The unproductive housewife'.26 Ministero di Agricoltura, Popolazione. Censimento generale (31 dicembre 1861), pp.

82-3.27 ibid., p. 90.28 I will consider only the period between 1861 and 1936 because that marks the

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emergence and consolidation of the notion of 'active population'. Although thenotion existed before, its explicit definition occurred only with the populationcensus of 1936.

29 Bulletin de l'Institut International de Statistique 4 (1889): 252-62 ('Communication deM. le docteur J. Bertillon sur le classement des professions dans le dénombrementde la population'). For the proceedings of the International Congress of Statisticsof St Petersburg, see Huitième Session du Congrès International de Statistique de StPetersburg (St Petersburg, 1872).

30 Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Statistica del Regno d'Italia, Annalidel Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio 10 (1877).

31 ibid., p. 58.32 Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Direzione di statistica, Annali di

statistica, 3rd s., 14 (1885), pp. 94-137 (quote from p. 100). Thanks to this change, thecategory 'unspecified occupation' went from 4,067,449 in 1871 to 393,039 in 1881.

33 Villani, 'Gruppi sociali', p. 938.34 Also the International Statistical Congress held in St Petersburg had recommended

this kind of survey (Huitieme Session du Congrès, p. 21).35 Annali di statistica (1885), p. 101.36 On the mechanisms of classification in census taking and more generally statistical

operations, see A. Desrosières and L. Thévenot (1988) Les Catégories socio-prqfessionnelles (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1988), and Conk, The United StatesCensus.

37 Annali di statistica (1885), p. 132.38 Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Censimento della popolazione del

Regno d'Italia al 10 febbraio 1901, vol. 5 (Rome, 1904), p. lxxviii.39 Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Direzione generale della statistica,

Studi preparatori per l'esecuzione del IV Censimento decennale della popolazione del Regno(Rome, 1892), p. 20.

40 A (partial) survey of industry taken in 1876 had already produced a figure for femaletextile workers much lower than the returns of the population census by restricting itscoverage to factories (and thus excluding domestic workers and artisans). SeeMinistero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, Notizie statistiche sopra alcuneIndustrie (Rome: Tip. Eredi Botta, 1878).

41 Sec Ministero di Agricoltura, Censimento della popolazione 1901, table on p. Ixxxviii.42 Ministero di Agricoltura, Studi preparatori, p. 20.43 A. Pescarolo has shown this in her analysis of the Tuscan straw plaiters. See Pescarolo,

'L'identità ambivalente', pp. 154-5.44 F. Marconcini, L'industria domestica salariata net rapporti intemi e intemazionali (Turin:

Bertinatti, 1914), p. 39. Another example of this literature is A. Schiavi, Saggio diun 'inchiesta sul lavoro a domicilio in Milano e Resoconto della discussione nel 'Museo Sociale'(Turin: Società Tipografico-Editrice Nazionale, 1911).

45 C. F. Ferraris, 'Il censimento delle professioni', Nuova Antologia 3rd s., 47 (1893):27-48 (the quote is from p. 40). In this article the author also established a positivecorrelation between the percentage of non-working wives and children and thedegree of affluency of a country (the higher the former the higher the latter) (p. 36).The essay in ha Riforma Sociale. Rassegna di Scienze Sociali e Politiche was entitled'Professioni e classi e loro rilevanza statistica', and was published in volume 1:616-31.

46 See for example Socialismo e riforma sodale nel morente e nel nascente secolo (Verona:Fratelli Drucker, 1900).

47 N. Colajanni, Manuale di demografia (Naples: Luigi Pierro: 1904), pp. 128-9. Fromtheir German colleagues, these writers and statesmen adopted not only a philosophy,

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but also some of the actual criteria and categories for the classification of professions.Ferraris, as well as other Italian statisticians, referred to the German census ofprofessions of 1882 as the 'most perfect ever made' ('Il censimento delle professioni',p. 34). In this census wives and children were classified as 'passive persons'.

48 G. Tammeo, La statistica (Turin, 1896), p. 241.49 On this law and more generally the history of social security in Italy, see A.

Cherubini, Storia della previdenza sociale in Italia (1860-1960) (Rome: EditoriRiuniti, 1977), pp. 101 ff.

50 Pescarolo, 'L'identità ambivalente'. Villari's article 'Le trecciaiole' appeared in NuovaAntologia, 1 August 1896.

51 F. Pieroni Bortolotti, Socialismo e questione femminile in Italia 1892-1922 (Milan:Mazzotta, 1974), p. 80.

52 See for example S. Soldani, 'Lo stato e il lavoro delle donne nell'Italia liberale', Passatoe presente 9 (1990): 23-72. The literature on the subject in other countries is vast. For arecent useful overview with a host of comparative cases, see U. Wikander, A. Kessler-Harris and J. Lewis (eds) Protecting Women. Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States,and Australia, 1880-1920 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

53 J. W. Scott, 'The woman worker', in A History of Women in the West, vol. 4: EmergingFeminism from Revolution to World War, ed. G. Fraisse and M. Perrot (Cambridge,Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 1993), p. 409.

54 The letter is reported in Folbre and Abel, 'Women's work', pp. 566-7.55 The critique of classifications is in A. M. Mozzoni, La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali

(Milan, 1864), in F. Pieroni Bortolotti (ed.) La liberazione della donna (Milan:Mazzotta, 1975), p. 67. As for statistics, see La donna nella famiglia, nella città e nellostato (Bologna, 1890), in ibid., p. 167. An article by Stephanie Jed called my attentionto these texts ('Riorganizzare il sapere: la storia, gli archivi e la nascita dello statomoderno', Agenda 13-14 (1995): 16-22).

56 V. Benedetti Brunelli, 'Il problema del lavoro femminile in Italia', Nuova Antologia, 1March 1913, p. 113.

57 F. Coletti, 'Quanta è la popolazione rurale in Italia? Ricostruzione della popolazionerurale in base al censimento 1911', in F. Coletti, La popolazione rurale in Italia e i suoicaratteri demografici, psicologici e sociali. Raaolta di studi (Piacenza: Federazione italianadei consorzi agrari, 1925, but originally published in Rivista di Economia e Finanze 1(1921). On this essay see also Villani, 'Gruppi sociali', pp. 932-3.

58 'Istruzioni ministeriali per 1'esecuzione del VI censimento generale della popolazionedel Regno', in Istituto centrale di statistica, Censimento della popolazione del regnod'Italia al 1 dicembre 1921 (Rome, 1928).

59 Istituto centrale di statistica del Regno d'ltalia, VIII Censimento generale della popola-zione 21 aprile 1936-XIV, vol. 4 (Rome: Tip. Failli, 1939), p. 9.

60 M. Martin, 'Menagère: une profession? Les dilemmes de l'entre-deux-guerres', LeMouvement Social 140 (1987): 89-106.

61 Istituto centrale di statistica del Regno d'ltalia, VIII Censimento generale della popola-zione 21 Aprile 1936-XIV, vol. 1: Atti del Censimento (Rome: Tip. Failli, 1939), p.37. The instructions also stressed that 'it is absolutely indispensable that we obtainfrom the census the [measure of the] actual efficiency of the labor force on the land[forze lavoratrici della terra] including also the women who are prevalently employed inagricultural works' (ibid.).

62 For a recent account see V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women. Italy, 1922-1945(Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 6.

63 Istituto centrale di statistica del Regno d'ltalia, VII Censimento generale della popola-zione 21 Aprile 1931 - IX, vol. IV: Relazione generale. Parte I (Rome: Tip. Failli,1935), pp. 106-7.

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64 F. P. Bortolotti, 'Osservazioni sull'occupazione femminile durante il fascismo', in F.Pieroni Bortolotti, Sul movimento politico delle donne. Scritti inediti, ed. A. Buttafuoco(Rome: Utopia, 1987), pp. 184-5.

65 Marconcini, L'Industria domestics salariata, p. 40.

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