What Did Benito Mussolini do with WOMEN? *Warning REAL FOOTAGE

When Benito Mussolini came to power,  he told Italian women they were the backbone of his new nation. But behind  that message was a much darker reality. What he actually did to them started  long before he ever held any authority, and it followed a pattern that would repeat  itself, again and again, for the next two decades.

In 1909, Benito Mussolini was still a nobody.  He was twenty-six years old, unemployed, and known mostly as a loud, radical socialist  journalist. Because of his extreme political views, many newspapers refused to hire him. Around  this time, either in the city of Trento or Milan, he met a woman named Ida Dalser. Ida  was the daughter of a small-town mayor.

She had studied cosmetic medicine in Paris before  opening her own successful beauty salon in Milan. Her business made her financially independent at a  time when very few women earned their own living. She and Mussolini soon began a relationship.  Since he struggled to find steady work, Ida used money from her business to support  him financially and eventually helped pay for his early journalism, giving him a  chance to build his political career.

According to several historical accounts, their  relationship became serious enough that they married in 1914. The following year, in 1915, Ida  gave birth to their son, Benito Albino Mussolini. Mussolini officially recognized the child as  his son and, for a time, paid child support. This was also the period when his political  career was beginning to grow quickly.

After serving as a soldier during World War I,  he returned to Italy in 1917. Two years later, in 1919, he founded the Fasci Italiani di  Combattimento, a nationalist movement made up largely of armed veterans and supporters. In 1921,  the movement became the National Fascist Party, and in the same year Mussolini won a seat in  Italy’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies.

As Mussolini became more powerful, Ida  Dalser was slowly pushed out of his life. Instead, he married another woman, Rachele  Guidi, who came from his hometown. She became his official wife for the rest of his life and  the mother of his five legitimate children. Mussolini never publicly admitted that Ida had  been his wife.

 Once his political career took off, he no longer wanted a working-class beauty  salon owner connected to his past because she could damage the carefully controlled  public image he was trying to create. But Ida was not the only woman who entered  Mussolini’s life during these years. In 1911, while working as editor of the socialist  newspaper Avanti!, he met Margherita Sarfatti, a wealthy, highly educated art critic  who also wrote for the newspaper.

Sarfatti came from a completely  different background than Ida. She was born in 1880 into a  rich Jewish family in Venice, grew up in a private palace  overlooking the Grand Canal, and was educated by private tutors. At eighteen,  she married a Jewish lawyer named Cesare Sarfatti, and together they became part of Milan’s wealthy  social circles, regularly hosting famous artists, writers, and intellectuals. Sarfatti  and Mussolini also began a relationship.

But she did far more than simply  have a relationship with Mussolini. As his political movement grew  in the years after World War I, she became one of his closest advisers.  Many historians now describe her as one of the key architects of early fascism rather  than just his mistress.

 She is even credited with helping plan the March on Rome, which took  place on October 28, 1922. During this event, tens of thousands of Mussolini’s armed  supporters, known as the Blackshirts, marched toward Italy’s capital. Fearing  that the country could fall into civil war, King Victor Emmanuel III decided not to use the  army against them and instead appointed Mussolini as Italy’s prime minister. That decision marked  the real beginning of fascist rule in Italy.

After her husband, Cesare Sarfatti, died in 1924, Margherita moved to Rome and became even more  involved in building Mussolini’s public image. In 1925, she published an authorized  biography called The Life of Benito Mussolini. The book was translated into eighteen  languages and helped spread the image of Mussolini as “Il Duce,” meaning “the  leader,” a title he proudly gave himself.

For many years, Sarfatti had remarkable influence.  From 1922 until 1938, she helped shape not only Mussolini’s public image but also influenced  parts of Italy’s cultural and even foreign policy. No other woman in fascist Italy ever came  close to having that level of political access. But this is where the story becomes deeply ironic.

While one woman was helping build the fascist  government from the inside, that same government was already passing laws that took away the  rights of almost every other woman in Italy. In 1923, only a year after Mussolini came  to power, women were banned from serving as principals of state secondary schools. In  1926, the restrictions became even stricter.

Women were no longer allowed to teach subjects  such as Italian language, history, philosophy, or Latin in high schools because the regime claimed  women did not have enough authority to teach male students these important subjects. These early  laws showed exactly how fascism viewed women. Individual women could be useful if they  helped powerful men, as Sarfatti did, but women as a whole were expected to stay  out of public life and positions of authority.

Ordinary women who openly challenged  fascism were punished without mercy. In 1930, anti-fascist activist Camilla Ravera, one  of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, was arrested and sentenced to fifteen  years in prison simply for organizing political opposition against Mussolini’s regime. It was during this same period  of growing political control that Ida Dalser’s story became even darker.

 In  1926, four years after Mussolini came to power, she was forced into a psychiatric hospital against  her will. She had never stopped publicly saying that she was Mussolini’s real wife. By  then, fascist officials were actively searching for and destroying documents that  proved their relationship had ever existed. Later, she was transferred to an isolated mental  asylum on the island of San Clemente, near Venice, where she remained for the rest of her life.

  Hospital records from that time described her as calm, rational, and mentally clear, not  delusional. But by then, calling her insane had already achieved its political purpose  by discrediting her and keeping her silent. While Ida Dalser remained locked away, Mussolini  turned his attention to something much larger. He wanted the government to control the  reproductive lives of every woman in Italy.

In May 1927, he gave a major speech explaining why  he believed Italy needed a much larger population. At the time, Italy had around 40 million people.  Mussolini compared this to Germany’s population of about 90 million and the hundreds of millions  of people living under the colonial empires of Britain and France.

 He believed that if  Italy wanted to become a great world power, it needed many more workers, settlers  for future colonies, and soldiers. He announced an ambitious goal of increasing Italy’s  population from 40 million to 60 million by 1950. This campaign became known as the “Battle  for Births” and lasted from 1927 until 1938. The government introduced many rewards to  encourage women to have large families.

Parents received tax benefits for having more  children. Mothers with more than five children were given medals and publicly honored  by the regime. Fascist authorities also organized large public ceremonies  celebrating families with many children. In December 1940, for example, the government  held an event called the Sagra della Nuzialit , or “Festival of Marriage.

” Eighty married couples,  who together had 1,544 children, were presented before Mussolini as examples for the nation,  almost as if they were prize-winning animals at a livestock fair. The government had already  created a special organization in 1925 called the Opera Nazionale Maternit e Infanzia, or ONMI.  Its job was to oversee programs for mothers and young children, giving the fascist state direct  influence over family life and child raising.

But these rewards were matched with harsh  punishments. In 1926, the same year Ida Dalser was locked away, the government completely  banned both contraception and abortion, officially calling them “crimes against the race.”  S*x education was also outlawed. At the same time, the legal age of consent and the minimum  age for marriage were both lowered, making it much easier for very young girls to  be pushed into early marriage and motherhood before they were old enough to make  those decisions for themselves.

Despite all of this pressure, the campaign failed.  Birth rates continued to fall throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. The main reason was  simple. Most ordinary Italian families were poor. Low wages, unemployment, and difficult  living conditions made it almost impossible to raise large families, no matter how many  medals or rewards the government offered.

By 1941, Italy’s population had only reached about  44.4 million people, far below Mussolini’s goal. In 1927, Mussolini introduced another  policy called the tassa sul celibato, or the “bachelor tax.” This law forced unmarried  men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five to pay an extra tax simply because they were  single. The government had two clear goals.

First, it wanted to raise between forty  and fifty million lira every year, Italy s currency at the time. Second, it  wanted to pressure men into getting married and starting families as early as possible.  The tax started at about seventy lira a year for men in their late twenties and thirties and  increased to one hundred lira for men over fifty, with extra charges depending on how much  money a man earned.

 By 1936, unmarried men were paying almost twice as much income tax as  married men simply because they had not married. Although the law officially targeted men, it also  increased the pressure on women. As it became more expensive for men to stay single, families and  society expected women to marry much sooner. A woman who wanted to finish school, build  a career, or simply wait until she found the right husband was now seen as delaying  a man’s chance to avoid paying extra taxes.

As the 1930s continued, Mussolini’s government  steadily introduced more laws limiting where women could legally work. In 1934, Law No. 221 gave  government departments the power to set limits on how many women they could hire or even refuse  to hire women at all for certain public sector jobs. Four years later, on October 5, 1938, the  restrictions became even harsher with Law No. 228.

This law limited women to just 10 percent of all  available jobs across both the public and private sectors. In simple terms, nine out of every ten  jobs in Italy were now legally reserved for men. The government openly explained why it supported  these policies. Italy’s Minister of Education, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, publicly  argued that women did not have the mental ability or moral authority needed to teach  and guide the country’s future leaders.

Under his leadership, new rules reduced the number  of women who could become school inspectors. The Ministry of Postal Service, one of  Italy’s biggest employers of office workers, was also instructed to prevent women from  reaching its highest management positions. For ordinary working families, these laws  had serious consequences.

 In many homes, a wife’s income was the difference between  having enough food and struggling to survive. Mussolini’s idea that women should stay home and  raise children only worked for wealthy families. Most Italians simply could not  afford to live on one income. Since the new laws made it easier to dismiss  female workers, many employers fired women and replaced them with men doing exactly the same  jobs, often for similarly low wages.

 As a result, these policies not only hurt women but also  kept wages low across much of the workforce. While the fascist government was forcing women  out of paid jobs, it was also creating new organizations to keep them busy, loyal to the  regime, and completely under political control. The biggest of these organizations was the Fasci  Femminili, which served as the official women’s branch of the Fascist Party.

 Another group, called  the Massaie Rurali, focused on women living in the countryside. It trained peasant women to  become better supporters of the fascist state, whether by producing more food on their  farms or by having and raising more children. On paper, these organizations gave hundreds of  thousands of women activities to take part in. They organized classes on running a household,  public health campaigns, charity work during difficult times, and other community programs  that reached even remote villages across Italy.

In reality, however, these organizations were  never meant to give women any real political power. Back in 1924, women inside the Fascist  Party had tried to gain more independence and a stronger voice in party decisions. Their effort  failed completely, and the leadership made sure it would never happen again.

 After 1930, the Fasci  Femminili often did not even have a permanent leader. The position remained empty for years.  Then, beginning in 1937, leadership duties were divided among several people, but none of them  had any real influence over government policy. At the same time, Margherita Sarfatti was  beginning to lose her own influence over Mussolini.

 By 1930, he had started  openly pursuing younger women, and Sarfatti slowly lost both his attention  and her political importance. Then, in 1932, another woman entered Mussolini’s life. She was  only twenty years old, and before long she would become the most important woman in the dictator’s  private life. Her name was Clara Petacci. Clara Petacci, often called Claretta, was born in  Rome in 1912 into a wealthy and deeply religious family.

 In April 1932, she was travelling with  members of her family near the coastal town of Ostia. By chance, Mussolini’s car drove past  theirs. Clara called out to him, and he ordered his driver to stop. That unexpected meeting  marked the beginning of their relationship. She was twenty-eight years younger than him. Unlike Margherita Sarfatti, Clara had  almost no influence over government policy.

The year 1937 quietly brought one part  of this story to an end. On December 3, Ida Dalser died inside the San Clemente mental  asylum near Venice. The official cause of death was a brain hemorrhage. For more than a decade,  the fascist government had dismissed her as mentally ill because she kept insisting that she  had been Mussolini’s wife.

 Yet hospital records from the time suggest she remained clear-minded  and understood exactly what had happened to her. The following year, in 1938, events  took an even darker turn across Italy. Mussolini’s government introduced  the infamous racial laws, which were closely based on the laws  already in force in Nazi Germany.

By this point, Mussolini was becoming more  closely allied with Adolf Hitler and increasingly adopting Nazi policies. The new laws stripped  Jewish Italians of many of their civil rights. For Jewish women, these laws created a  double burden. Earlier that same year, Law No. 228 had already limited women to  only 10 percent of the country’s jobs.

Now the racial laws placed even more restrictions  on them, blocking them from universities, research positions, and many professional careers  regardless of their education or qualifications. But then when Italy officially entered World  War II in June 1940 as an ally of Nazi Germany, and the casualties grew, the government eventually  called around 1.

63 million Italian men into military service. With so many men leaving for  the front lines, factories, government offices, farms, and businesses across the country  suddenly faced a severe labor shortage. There simply were not enough workers  left to keep the economy functioning. Because of this, the fascist government  quietly put aside the same employment restrictions it had imposed on women  only two years earlier under Law No. 228.

This was not because the regime  had changed its views about women. It was simply because the war left them with no  other choice. Women went to work in munitions factories making weapons and ammunition,  filled office and administrative jobs, and kept many essential services running while  millions of men fought on the front lines.

By 1943, Mussolini’s military failures  could no longer be hidden. That summer, Allied forces invaded the island of Sicily,  bringing the war directly onto Italian soil. Soon afterward, the Fascist Grand Council, the  highest governing body of the Fascist Party, voted to remove Mussolini from power. King  Victor Emmanuel III then ordered his arrest.

A short time later, Germany launched a daring  rescue operation and freed him from captivity. Adolf Hitler then placed Mussolini in  charge of the Italian Social Republic, a much smaller fascist state in northern  Italy that survived only because German troops protected it.

 The man who had once dreamed  of ruling a powerful empire of 60 million Italians now depended almost entirely on Hitler  and had very little real power of his own. During the final collapse of fascist Italy,  Clara Petacci never left Mussolini’s side. In April 1945, as Allied armies advanced  through northern Italy and his puppet government fell apart, both of them tried to  escape toward the Swiss border on April 25.

On April 27, 1945, Italian partisan  fighters, members of the resistance who had spent years fighting against  fascist rule and the German occupation, captured the pair near Lake  Como in northern Italy. The following day, April 28, 1945,  both Mussolini and Clara Petacci were executed.

 Some historical accounts suggest  that Clara was not originally meant to be killed and that she died while trying to shield  Mussolini from the gunfire during his execution. That same night, the bodies of Mussolini, Petacci,  and several other executed fascist officials were taken to Milan and dumped in Piazzale Loreto,  a public square chosen for a very specific reason. In August 1944, fascist forces had executed  fifteen Italian partisans in that same square and left their bodies on display as a warning  to anyone thinking of resisting the regime.

Now, less than a year later, Mussolini’s  own body was brought back to the same place. By the next morning, thousands of people had  gathered. Angry crowds kicked the bodies, spat on them, and beat them. Eventually, the  bodies of Mussolini, Petacci, and several other fascist leaders were hung upside down by their  feet from the metal frame of a nearby gas station.

Photographs of the scene quickly spread through  newspapers around the world, becoming one of the most famous images of World War II and  the final symbol of Mussolini’s downfall. To protect her body from further abuse, Clara  Petacci was first buried under a false name. Over the following years, her remains were exhumed  and reburied several times.

 Finally, in 1956, more than eleven years after her death, she was laid  to rest permanently in her family’s tomb in Rome.