Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity [Course Book ed.] 9781400821457

Citation preview

Social Bodies ✼

Social Bodies SCIENCE, REPRODUCTION, AND ITALIAN MODERNITY ✼

DAVID G. HORN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright  1995 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Horn, David G., 1958– Social bodies : science, reproduction, and Italian modernity / David G. Horn. p. cm. — (Princeton studies in culture/power/history) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Body, Human—Social aspects—Italy. 2. Body, Human—Italy— Symbolic aspects. 3. Fertility, Human—Government policy—Italy. 4. Fascism and culture—Italy. 5. Fascism and women—Italy. 6. Human reproductive technology—Italy—History—20th century. 7. Italy—Politics and government—1914–1945. I. Title. II. Series. GN298.H67 1994 eISBN 1-4008-0381-0 304.6′32—dc20 94-19052 This book has been composed in Palatino Cover illustration: After a poster by Marcello Dudovich commemorating Mothers’ and Infants’ Day, commissioned by the Opera Nazionale Maternità, 1937

FOR VICTORIA AND GRAHAM ✼

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Contents

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Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

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CHAPTER I Technologies of Reproduction

3

CHAPTER II Social Bodies

18

CHAPTER III The Power of Numbers

46

CHAPTER IV Governing Reproduction

66

CHAPTER V The Sterile City

95

CHAPTER VI Beyond Public and Private

123

Notes

129

References Cited

159

Index

183

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Acknowledgments

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HE IDEA for a book on social technologies of reproduction in interwar Italy first took shape in a seminar on arts of government given by Michel Foucault at Berkeley in 1983. Since then my work has taken me in several directions, many of them unexpected, and I have benefited from the generosity and critical insights of others along the way. Paul Rabinow, Susanna Barrows, Stanley Brandes, and Richard A. Webster supervised my dissertation and afforded me the space to work between disciplines. Jacqueline Urla, Stephen Kotkin, and Keith Gandal helped me early on to clarify and focus my readings of social technologies. A first trip to Rome and Milan in the summer of 1983 was funded by a Pre-Dissertation Fellowship from the Council for European Studies. My doctoral research, from August 1984 to August 1985, was supported by a grant under the FulbrightHays Act and by an International Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Two further visits to Italy were made possible by the Istituto Lombardo per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia. While in Italy, I received gracious assistance from the staffs of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome; the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, especially Marina Giannetto; the Archivio di Stato di Milano; the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli; the Istituto Antonio Gramsci, especially Marcello Forti; the Fondazione Lelio Basso; and the Istituto Milanese per la Storia della Resistenza e del Movimento Operaio. Several people provided valuable advice on archives, including Victoria de Grazia, Renzo De Felice, Alberto Aquarone, Piero Melograni, Luisa Passerini, Simona Colarizi, Emilio Gentile, and Timothy Mason. My research in Milan was especially facilitated by Giorgio Rumi, Giulio Sapelli, Ada Marchetti, Ivano Granata, Luisa Dodi Osnaghi, Graziella Tonon, Duccio Bigazzi, Luigi Bruti Liberati, Edoardo Bressan, Giuliana Cislaghi, and Gianfranco Petrillo. ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all who generously shared their memories of the period with me, and especially Giovanni Brambilla, Giuliana Gadola Beltrami, Mario Invernicci, Sileno Fabbri and Vittorio Emanuele Fabbri, Giuliano Magnoni, and Ferdinando Feliciani. I have benefited enormously from the collegial interdisciplinarity of the Division of Comparative Studies at Ohio State, and particularly from the support of Sabra Webber and from conversations with Jennifer Terry and Eugene Holland. I am grateful to the American Anthropological Association for permission to reprint portions of Chapter V, originally published as “Constructing the Sterile City: Pronatalism and Social Sciences in Interwar Italy,” in American Ethnologist 18:3, 1991. Victoria de Grazia, Sylvia Yanagisako, Michael Herzfeld, and Valerie Hartouni read the entire manuscript and made many valuable suggestions. Though this is not the book any of them might have written, it is stronger for their constructive critiques. I am grateful to Mary Murrell at Princeton for her interest in work at the borders and for her support throughout the production of this book, and to Marta Steele for her editing work. Finally, thanks to Victoria for her sustaining friendship, and to Graham for being here.

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ACS ASM EOA ICPM ISTAT OND ONMI PNF PS SPD

Abbreviations

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Archivio Centrale dello Stato Archivio di Stato di Milano, Gabinetto della Prefettura Ente Opere Assistenziali Istituto per le Case Popolari di Milano Istituto Centrale di Statistica Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro Opera Nazionale di Maternità ed Infanzia Partito Nazionale Fascista Pubblica Sicurezza Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato (1922–43)

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Social Bodies ✼

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CHAPTER I ✼

Technologies of Reproduction

I

N THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the status of the “social” as an object of scientific knowledge (including anthropological knowledge) and of technical interventions is so familiar as to risk being taken for granted. We speak unproblematically of social problems, of social sciences, and of agents of social intervention: social workers, social assistants, social engineers. And yet, we have learned to be suspicious of all that passes for common sense: the objects of social sciences and technologies are not to be found “in society” any more than the objects of the natural sciences are to be found “in nature” (Knorr-Cetina 1983; Latour 1983). The domain of the social is, in fact, a relatively recent and culturally specific construction, linked to the development in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States of particular kinds of knowledge, particular practices of power and government, and particular forms of social struggle and resistance. Social Bodies looks at the constitution of reproduction and welfare as objects of these new sciences, technologies, and arts of government in 1920s and 1930s Italy. In the years following the First World War, nationalists, fascists, and others were concerned to increase the size, rate of growth, and “vitality” of the nation’s population and took steps to manage the reproductive capacities and procreative practices of Italian women and men. This book highlights the role played by the social sciences in the identification of the Italian population as an object of knowledge and management. And it details the emergence of new social technologies—including censuses, social insurance, practices of urban planning, housing projects, and social work visits—intended to confront the “problem” of declining fertility at the level of the city, the home, the family, and the reproductive body. The book is organized around the linked scientific constructions of the Italian nation as a body threatened by the “disease” of declining fertility, and of the bodies of women and men as 3

CHAPTER I

social bodies—located neither “in nature” nor in the private sphere, but in that modern domain of knowledge and intervention carved out by statistics, sociology, social hygiene, and social work. The book is intended as a contribution to feminist and cultural studies of science and technology, and to what some have called the “anthropology of modernity” (Rabinow 1988): it seeks to analyze one of the cultural matrices that produced the practices of reason we call social science and social planning, and it suggests a genealogy for our present understanding of procreation as a site for certain kinds of techno-scientific intervention and political contestation. More recently deployed, biomedical technologies of reproduction (in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, genetic screening, ultrasonography) have appeared to many to inaugurate a new politics of the body, and to collapse in ways that are both productive and dangerous the categories of the natural and artificial, the normal and the pathological, and the public and the private (Hartouni 1991, Strathern 1992). The discourses that produce and contain these reproductive technologies—discourses as diverse as reproductive endocrinology, civil law, feminist theory, and philosophy of science—have worked to make the technologically mediated, “infertile” female body a site for transgressions and renegotiations of boundaries, and for the articulation of a gendered aesthetics and politics of artifice.1 The glossing of techniques and social arrangements as varied as mechanical insemination, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy as modes of “artificial” reproduction has historically served a variety of political purposes: from marking these practices as “against” or contrary to Nature, and therefore deserving of moral reprobation or juridical regulation, to celebrating their power, novelty, and promise—their ability to correct, simulate, or even replace Nature. The promises and dangers of the technological displacement of the natural have figured prominently in feminist evaluations of the new modes of reproduction and have had practical consequences for scientific research on fertilization. Feminist and cultural studies have highlighted the (masculine) pleasures of boundary transgression that have attended and shaped the new discourses and interventions. In an effort to unsettle further the terms of these debates, I propose to examine here the emergence in the early twentieth 4

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century of reproduction as a taken-for-granted object of scientific knowledge and technological intervention. I want to call attention to the stabilization in the 1920s and 1930s of a new problematization of reproduction.2 Declining fertility and a range of other procreative practices were constructed as social problems, requiring the urgent attention of new social sciences and the application of social technologies of reproduction: a range of techniques of management and arts of government that were developed and deployed to know, manage, and promote fertility and welfare. The broader aims of this book are two. At one level I wish to describe in a particular time and space what I take to be an important aspect of modernity. I propose that the distinctively modern concerns with reproduction, welfare, and social planning—and the practices these concerns engendered in Italy and elsewhere—have shaped not only arts of government and the human sciences, but also the ways individual women and men experience social life and constitute themselves as subjects.3 At another level I hope to make apparent the constructed and struggled-for nature of scientific knowledge, and in particular of social-scientific knowledge. The cultural and historical peculiarity of the ongoing attempts to know social bodies has, until recently, escaped the attention even of anthropologists, for whom the population, society, and “the social” have too often appeared as transcultural, transhistorical objects. And yet it would be a mistake to regard the social as a natural category, as something given, as a scientific object waiting to be discovered in the nineteenth century. Though by now familiar, the social can be made unfamiliar by reconstituting it as an ethnographic object.4 The project of a reflexive anthropology that examines (in part) the construction of its own discourses and practices seems to invite an inevitable circularity. To speak, for example, of the social construction of the social requires, at the very least, a certain ironic stance. Indeed, as Donna Haraway has suggested, we must begin to question the privileging of the artifactual that is implicit in our use of the metaphor of construction (Haraway 1992).5 Like all metaphors (including those of “discovery” and “invention”), this one has its limits as well as possibilities, and its own practical consequences.6 But the point is not to deprive 5

CHAPTER I

us of a language; it is rather to stimulate an ongoing attention to the implications of the categories we choose and the histories that have made those choices possible. For me, much of the impetus for this kind of reflexivity comes from feminist and cultural studies of science, which have shown us the artifactual nature of Nature, the rhetorical strategies that stabilize “facts,” and the messy contingency of “science in the making.” Ironically, the history of the social sciences has for the most part been kept separate from the history of science “proper.” Where the genealogies of the social and natural sciences are shown to intersect, it is often to demonstrate an illegitimate descent (the link between the theory of natural selection and social Darwinism, for example), or a kinship that is imagined to be more fictive than real (the relation of genetics to eugenics). All too often, we are left without a discussion of the role played by social science in the construction of scientific objects and in the building of modernity. I therefore wish instead to take seriously the claims of the social sciences (made with special earnestness in the early part of this century) to the status of science: to study social sciences and social technologies in positive terms, and to examine their real discursive, practical, and political consequences. I should point out that I (following the usage of the “natives”) define social science rather broadly, to embrace those sciences that, beginning in the nineteenth century, identified the social domain as their object. These included not only anthropology and sociology, but also demography and urbanism, and such hybrid fields as social hygiene and social medicine, the goals of which were to diagnose, cure, and prevent diseases that threatened the “social body.” I also wish to emphasize that it makes little sense to examine scientific discourse about the social without also looking at the practices that this discourse depended on, generated, and supported. This does not mean that there was ever a perfect correspondence between words and deeds—far from it. There were often gaps and delays, unintended consequences, and unanticipated resistance to the deployment of both social sciences and social technologies. The account that follows is a partial one, in both senses of the term, and it is important to speak about the ways my own text is constructed and the choices it embodies. The questions raised about 1920s Italy are in part stimulated by the unfoldings of re6

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productive and welfare politics in a different time and place, and in part by an intellectual commitment (made at an intersection of anthropology, feminism, and cultural studies) to reopen the black boxes of “the social,” “the body,” and “the population.” These are constructs whose status as taken-for-granted scientific objects continues to inform our self-understandings as well as our critiques of technologies of reproduction and welfare. My interests and commitments led me to Italy and to the period between the First and Second World Wars, although they might just as well have led elsewhere: for example, to the rise of eugenics in the Anglo-American world, or even to Malthus’s writings on population and poverty in the eighteenth century. However, interwar Italy offers an opportunity to examine concretely the processes by which the construction of scientific problems and the elaboration of governmental practices come to be linked. Though not a case of social sciences “in the making,” to paraphrase Bruno Latour (1987), this is a period when “social” facts have become stabilized and can be enlisted in new kinds of political and technical projects. It is clear that the story might begin earlier: if people in the 1920s and 1930s can speak confidently and matter-of-factly of social problems and statistical laws, the reason is that they occupied a space opened up in the nineteenth century by new sciences and institutional practices—indeed, one could trace many of the developments back to the emergence of probability, or to the first elaborations of what Foucault has termed “biopolitics” (See Hacking 1990, Foucault 1978b).7 My goal is not, however, to construct an exhaustive or seamless history, but to examine what Hacking has called “the public life of concepts and the ways in which they gain authority” (1990:7), and to track an array of techniques that today often pass unnoticed but that in the interwar period still seemed promising, problematic, and revolutionary. Social experts talked of reinventing Italian society and of fashioning new types of women and men. And they pointed to the relatively young sciences and technologies of the social as essential to modern arts of government. Social experts in other parts of Europe shared this excitement and confidence, but Italians channeled it in particular directions. In Italy the deployment of social scientific discourses and practices was shaped both directly and indirectly by the politi7

CHAPTER I

cal and social objectives of the fascist regime. Thus, for example, fascism’s concern to stimulate the growth and colonial expansion of the Italian population gave prominence to the statistical models of national decline developed by French and Italian demographers, just as the effort to construct a uniform and “rural” identity for Italy fostered the development of a particular tradition of folklore studies (Simeone 1978).8 At the same time, and in a variety of ways, fascism took up the language of the medical and social sciences in a self-conscious effort to constitute itself as a modern form of government.9 However, it would be unwarranted to characterize as fascist the new discourses and practices that took the Italian population as their object. They were part of a modern rethinking of society and the social in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that tended to cut across both national and political boundaries. Before Italian fascism displaced democracy as a political regime in 1922, new governmental logics and practices had begun to destabilize the political rationality called liberalism, and to challenge its organizing assumptions about individuals and societies.10 The investigations and interventions of social Catholics, socialists, nationalists, and even some “liberals” had called into question the notions that society could be best understood as a collection of autonomous actors, that the functions of law and morality were necessarily opposed, that the family and property were to be defended against intrusions by the state. To be sure, some Italian writers defined as identical the aims of fascism and a true science of the social. They constructed both in opposition to liberalism and socialism, which were imagined to be intimately linked to the social pathologies requiring diagnosis and cure. However, the professional careers of Italian social scientists and social planners, as well as the relative durability of scientific and technical practices after the Second World War (censuses, principles of urban planning, models of public housing, social work techniques), testify to important continuities that blur the opposition of left and right.11 At the same time, it is clear that the particular forms taken by social technologies during the interwar period in Italy can only be described as the result of a convergence of a wide number of forces: the growth of Italian nationalism in the wake of the First World War, the fortunes and misfortunes of Italian liberalism 8

TECHNOLOGIES OF REPRODUCTION

and socialism, a changing global and local economy.12 My choice to focus on the role played by social sciences and technologies is made (necessarily) at the expense of detailed analysis of other important cultural and social forces. Similarly, though a focus on social technologies of reproduction makes it possible to explore important ways in which bodies were rethought and refashioned, Italians’ bodies were more than objects of social sciences and technologies. They were also, of course, objects of violence, of ritual enactments of state power, as well as sources and sites of pleasure and desire. The voices in this book are, for the most part, those of social experts: scientists, physicians, planners, engineers, jurists, and social workers. Though some (such as the statistician Corrado Gini and the jurist Alfredo Rocco) gained an international reputation or figure prominently in other histories of interwar Italy, many others can only be described, to borrow Hacking’s felicitous phrase, as “the mildly distinguished in their day” (1990:8). At times others voices intrude: in particular the voice of Mussolini is frequently too loud (and important) to go unheard. For the most part, Mussolini participates here only when he speaks, as he often did, as a social or medical “authority,” a role that marked the particular convergence of social knowledge and new arts of government characteristic of the interwar period. The voices in this book are also predominantly male. Though women were closely tied to the spaces and technologies of the social, it was (with some interesting exceptions) men who articulated the sciences of this domain and who specified the objects for the penetrating gaze of the investigator and social worker. Throughout the book many other voices are absent, and a whole range of stories about bodies and reproduction are not told. Many of these narratives were actively silenced during the 1920s and 1930s; others were displaced by the sciences of the social. But many are now being “recovered” in publications filled with the voices of women and men who speak with power about Nature, cities, welfare, families, sex, reproduction, and the body. Social Bodies draws on a wide range of sources—including archival documents in Rome and Milan, government publications, scientific journals, proceedings of scholarly conferences, and 9

CHAPTER I

social work manuals—to explore the discourses and practices of the “social experts” and the often unintended effects of the new objectifications of bodies and populations. These sources give only a partial glimpse, however, of the resistance these discourses and practices encountered and occasioned, of the ways that technocratic strategies were engaged by what Michel de Certeau called the “transverse tactics” of everyday life, the “countless ways of ‘making do’ ” (1984:29). Indeed, if measured in terms of its intended effects, fascist demographic politics may seem unworthy of our serious attention; today Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. But social technologies of reproduction were not without their durable effects. Throughout the book I demonstrate the erosion of the very boundaries experts had hoped to shore up or reconstitute: the boundaries between the private and the public, the male and the female, and the natural and the artificial. I argue, for example, that although social scientific discourse affirmed that maternity was part of woman’s “nature,” it also worked to subvert this story by removing reproduction from the domain of the natural, making it an object of social management, of political struggle, and later of “choice” (cf. Strathern 1992; de Grazia 1992:2). Efforts to reinforce the borders between private and public were similarly undermined, I suggest, by the location of women “in the social,” as agents and objects of social technologies and as bearers of new social duties. And yet I argue that despite the “failures” of fascist programs to increase fertility, scientific constructions of reproduction in the interwar period contributed to the stabilization (indeed “naturalization”) of a whole set of assumptions about bodies, populations, and the spaces of technological intervention that continue to operate in contests about reproduction.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL The following chapters explore the building up of a conceptual and practical architecture that we continue to inhabit, with varying degrees of restlessness and discomfort, at the end of the twentieth century. “The social,” born more than a century ago, has come to designate a modern political rationality, a particu10

TECHNOLOGIES OF REPRODUCTION

lar kind of scientific object, and a field of action and technical intervention (Donzelot 1979; Ewald 1986; Squires 1990). The social has at times been made to stand in opposition to “the individual,” and at others to “the natural.” It has disturbed the comfortable pairings of the public and the private, rights and duties, the city and the country, and the female and the male. Seen from different perspectives, the emergence of the social can be said to mark simultaneously a modern way of conceptualizing problems of society, a new partitioning of space, and a (partial) erosion or defamiliarization of established domains and the authority of other categories. As Gilles Deleuze has argued (1979), “the social” is not merely the adjective proper to sociological investigations. Nor is the genealogy of the social identical with that of “civil society,” that object constructed by the discourses and practices of political economy in the eighteenth century. Rather, the social designates a new terrain, a “particular sector” in which, in the course of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of problems came to be grouped together, a “sector comprising specific institutions and an entire body of qualified personnel” (ibid.: ix). In Italy, as elsewhere, these personnel came to include not only “social” assistants and “social” workers, but also a whole range of scientists and technicians of the social, who on the basis of a particular training (most often in medicine and statistics) constituted themselves as experts able to offer diagnoses, assess risks, and construct norms. The birth of the social was tied to emergent practices of quantification, and especially to the growth of statistics (Urla 1993; Hacking 1990; Krüger, Daston, and Heidelberger 1987). This was, of course, an international (or at least Euro-American) phenomenon, though as Hacking points out, each country “went statistical” in its own way (1990:17). Statistics would in time reveal not only that certain undesirable phenomena were on the rise, but, more important, that they were regular and normal. That is, phenomena were constructed as social problems not because they were new problems “of society” (poverty and crime, for example, have much longer histories), or even because they were more extensive than before. They became social problems at the moment that earlier, “liberal” problematizations (of crime as amoral conduct, of poverty as the consequence of a lack of 11

CHAPTER I

foresight) became unable to account for normality of society’s pathologies or to articulate adequate preventive strategies. The crisis of the political rationality called liberalism was (at least in part) a crisis of a way of conceiving (and policing) the relations between wholes and parts, the juridical and the moral, risk and responsibility, and prevention and repression. The social further represented a repartition and hybridization of spaces (Deleuze 1979). It not only modified the parameters of the economic and the juridical and created new relationships of the city and the country, but also reconstituted the limits (and the contents) of the public and the private and effected a kind of hybridization of these domains: “a novel interlacing of interventions and withdrawals of the state, of its charges and discharges” (ibid.:x). The new geography of the social, this new mapping, was characterized by seemingly boundless spaces lacking firm borders. The social, as we will see, crossed the thresholds of the home, the workplace, the hospital, and the nursery. The social was inhabited (although not in the same ways) by normal women, men, and children. It was also a terrain crowded with embodied “others,” indeed with those others who were often positioned outside society: the sick, the criminal, the mad, the unemployed, the infertile. All those newly constructed objects of sciences that called themselves social lived side by side, poorly distinguished one from the other without the aid of statistics and scientific evaluations. The social was, finally, a new space for the articulation of duties. The forms of knowledge and management that invested and reorganized the population, the city, and the family—to “normalize” them and to promote health and fertility—made Italians newly “responsible.” As Denise Riley has suggested for England (1988:44–66), the new responsibilities attached disproportionately to women. Though both paternity and maternity were constructed as “national duties” (Saraceno 1991:201), and the autonomy of both male and female bodies was juridically undermined, women’s bodies were seen as the loci of greater dangers and potentials, and women’s everyday practices were privileged as sites of surveillance and intervention. At the same time, middle- and upper-class women were identified as particularly well suited to the deployment of social technologies, and their traditional roles in philanthropy were 12

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expanded and transformed. As in England, the extension of women’s activities in the social was accompanied by a dislocation and constriction of the masculine spaces of the political. As Riley observes, the political took on “an intensified air of privacy and invulnerability, of ‘high politics’ associated with juridical and governmental power in a restricted manner” (ibid.:51). But it is also important to note that the professionalization of social work often implied women’s participation in masculinist scientific discourses, and some experts suggested a truly rational management of the social would have done away with (women’s) social work altogether. This is not a story, then, of the destruction of the gendered opposition of the public and the private, nor a story of its transcendence. It is rather a story about a blurring or confusion of boundaries (ibid.:49), and about the constitution of terrains that did not map easily onto the old atlases of social and political life. As Donna Haraway (1992) has pointed out, boundary confusions may present both dangers and possibilities, offering tactical alternatives and questioning the authority of certain takenfor-granted categories. To be sure, the social presented its own dangers, its particular forms of knowledge and of power. But, as the example of the family demonstrates, the social also worked to displace “the natural” as a privileged category. The displacement was, of course, never complete. However, at the very moment that fascist social policies, and in particular the politics of reproduction, sought to define women’s “natural” role as that of reproducer and mother, the sciences and technologies of the social worked to undermine all claims to an unmediated Nature. In place of Nature, the social sciences constructed norms, and the family and the bodies it contained were made terrains for tactical, political engagements.

THE ARGUMENT AHEAD In Chapter II I link together the construction of society as an organic body to be defended against threats to its health, virility, and reproductive potential, and the construction of the bodies of women and men as loci of social potentials, risks, and dangers requiring rational management. In the “new organicism” 13

CHAPTER I

elaborated by Italian social sciences, society (as well as the nation and the state) was made an object of knowledge and “treatment” on the model of modern physiology and medicine. The defense of this body was imagined, in both scientific and nationalist discourses, to require the subordination of the needs and interests of its constituent parts, the male and female bodies that constituted its “cells.” At the same time, statistical studies of crime, poverty, and work accidents gave rise to new practices focused on these bodies in the social. I examine the ways in which questions of individual responsibility, foresight, and free will were transformed into questions about dangerous and endangered bodies, now identified as sites for the detection and management of risk. And I trace implications for the (re)construction and (re)location of reproductive bodies as outside Nature and the boundaries of “the private,” and within the domain of social technologies as diverse as architecture, public health measures, and social work. Chapter III proposes a genealogy of efforts to know and manage the size and rate of growth of national populations, and details the social scientific and political constructions in the late 1920s of Italy’s “population problem.” The starting point for this discussion is the 1927 World Population Conference, a scholarly meeting held in Geneva that united demographers, eugenicists, physicians, anthropologists, feminist activists, and others from Europe, the United States, and Japan. Underlying the political and disciplinary divisions that marked the conference, I argue, was a shared set of assumptions: about the regularity of phenomena of birth, death, migration, marriage, and their susceptibility to quantitative study and rational management; about the need for further data, including more detailed censuses; and about the necessary role of the natural and social sciences in the formulation of modern governmental policies designed to confront “internal pathologies.” The conference also marked the emergence, however tentatively, of a pronatalist, “Italian” position on population matters. In the remainder of the chapter, I examine the ways in which a social scientific concern with population size came to be joined to a political anxiety about Italy’s colonial future. I sketch the practical efforts undertaken to know Italy’s population, ranging from the creation in 1926 of a new Central Institute of Statistics 14

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(ISTAT), to the proliferation of journals devoted to social hygiene and political medicine, to the organization of further conferences on science and population. And I explore Italian social planners’ rejection (supported by the church) of the eugenical practices developed in Germany, England, and the United States. Citing a concern with population increase rather than “purity,” social experts proposed pronatalist and “euthenical” measures: techniques of social hygiene and family management meant to assure the health and welfare of pregnant women and infants. Chapter IV focuses on efforts to govern the reproductive practices of Italian women and men. The chapter begins with a discussion of the family, law, and the unstable boundaries of the public and the private. I follow debates in Italian jurisprudence about the “place” of the family in the law—debates that ran parallel to, and at times informed, social scientific constructions of reproduction as an object of knowledge and management. In the 1930s fascist and nationalist jurists argued against the liberal and Catholic notions that the family was a “natural” institution and was thus immune from governmental regulation and social technical intervention. In place of the natural family, confined within the domain of “private law,” these jurists offered a construction of the family as social: a component of the social organism, a potential (indeed necessary) target of technical management, and the object of a new field of jurisprudence—“social law”—described at times as “intermediate” between private and public law. I suggest that at the same time that legal and governmental practices worked to sustain and strengthen the “traditional” patriarchal family, they also worked to denaturalize it, opening up the spaces for a politics of population that would have been unthinkable with the categories of liberalism and private law. Chapter IV also follows the extension of the logic of “social defense” into the domain of reproduction. In the penal code of 1930, inspired in part by the work of criminologist Cesare Lombroso, abortion and contraception were redefined: no longer considered crimes against the person of the fetus, or against public morality, they were identified as demographic dangers and made crimes against the Italian “stock.” In contrast to earlier measures that had seemed consistent with the political 15

CHAPTER I

rationality and the anthropology of liberalism, the new code meant that the bodily autonomy and rights of individuals (including rights protected by physicians’ rules of professional secrecy) would be subordinated to the demographic interests of the nation. Finally, I explore a range of measures enacted by the fascist regime to promote marriage and childbearing. In the 1920s these ranged from new taxes on bachelorhood, defined (over the objections of the church) as a “desertion of paternity” and a form of treason, to prizes and other financial incentives used to reward marriages, births, and large families. In the 1930s financial incentives (some of which have continued until the present) were joined and in part displaced by “preventive” and “prophylactic” measures intended to act on the social body as a whole. Chapter V explores the elaboration of a number of social technical measures focused on the city and urban populations that sought to foster fertility and the family. Using the example of Milan, I trace the construction of the industrial city as a “school of sterility”—a locus and generator of “artificial,” “antinatalist,” and “dysgenic” practices—and the simultaneous construction of rural areas as spaces of health, “normal” gender relations, and “naturally” high fertility. These constructions were seen to require governmental regulations that ranged from efforts to limit migration to cities and to return urban populations to rural or “ruralized” areas, to practices of urban planning and architecture meant to transform the procreative practices of the cities’ inhabitants. Among the consequences of these interventions, I argue, was the erosion (or collapsing) of boundaries of private and public spaces, and the creation of new social spaces, loci for the interventions of census takers, social physicians, hygienists, home economists, and a variety of social workers. Chapter V concludes by exploring the emergence of new forms of social work in the 1930s. I examine shifts in the rationality of assistance, away from a logic of charity meant to transform the moral character of individuals, toward a logic of insurance concerned with a totalizing management of families and populations. And I follow transformations in social work practices, from the philanthropic visits of wealthy “ladies” to the micro-inspections of professional social workers, trained to detect deviations from medico-social norms. The chapter high16

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lights the placing of women in the social (simultaneous with their exclusion from the domain of politics) as both agents of social work and the privileged objects of educational and reforming practices. Finally, Chapter VI returns us to the genealogical project announced above. I consider the ways in which interwar constructions of reproductive bodies as objects of social sciences and technologies might be read against (and work to defamiliarize) ongoing concerns with the techno-scientific management of procreative practices. Some continuities with the present may seem evident: for example, many of the demographic measures enacted by the fascist government remained in effect in Italy until the 1970s. More important and unsettling, I suggest, are the ways in which bodies continue to figure in (and ground) articulations of social duties, and the ways in which newly medicalized social technologies—from artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization—shape further negotiations of the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and the public and the private.

17

✼

CHAPTER II ✼

Social Bodies

T

HE CONSTRUCTION of the social as a domain of scientific knowledge and technical intervention marked a revolution in the history of bodies in the West. The spaces of the social came, over time, to be crowded with the dangerous, injured, needy, diseased, and infertile bodies of women and men—bodies at times identified as “at risk,” and at others as “posing risks” to a more encompassing collectivity. Crime, work accidents, poverty, disease, and infertility—each of which had previously been constructed as extraordinary, irregular, and capricious—came to be understood not only as problems of society but as statistically regular phenomena that could be read, managed, and defended against at the level of individual bodies “in the social.” In each case the construction of the body as a site and sign of risks (part of a more general effort to ground identity, difference, and value in the body) was linked to a new, social problematization, a (partial) disruption of the political rationality of liberalism, and the elaboration of new practical solutions whose logic was insurantial and preventive. Indeed, the new sciences of the social worked not only to reconstruct the problems of crime, work accidents, and low fertility but also to constitute the whole of society as an object of scientific knowledge and prophylactic technologies. At the same time that the bodies of criminals, workers, and women of reproductive age were made “social bodies,” society was reimagined as a body to be defended against itself: an organism whose component parts posed predictable risks to the survival of the whole. Throughout 1920s Europe organismic and corporeal metaphors would come to organize both knowledge of the body of society, and technologies for its effective management and treatment. These metaphors permitted a productive slippage among the discourses of the biological sciences, social sciences, and nationalism, and a blurring of the boundaries of their objects: the biological individual, the population, society, and the nation. Indeed, in Italy such disciplines as criminal anthropology, sociol18

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ogy, and social medicine converged with emergent nationalist discourses to construct new rationalities for “social defense”: from the prevention of crime (including, as we will see later, crimes against the biological population), to the prevention of work accidents, to the promotion of fertility. The fascist regime was not the first Italian government to intervene in the domain of the social, despite the claims of some fascists.1 But the rationality of intervention often differed sharply and explicitly from that of liberalism. In the eyes of nationalist and fascist jurists, biological and social sciences pointed, among other things, to the need for new articulations of individual rights and duties with the imperatives of larger “organisms,” and to a new partitioning of the spaces of law and intervention.

THE BODY OF SOCIETY: SOCIOLOGY, NEO-ORGANICISM, AND NATIONALISM The metaphorical association of social and political human groupings with a living organism predates the interwar period. Even before Plato, philosophers talked of the “social body” and compared the statesman with the doctor. Indeed, organic metaphors have proved very flexible, productive, and powerful, able to tell stories about social cohesion and dissolution, about permissible and impossible forms of change, about hierarchy and community, and about freedom and determinism (See Figlio 1976:53). In the medieval period, for example, corporate and organic metaphors worked to make intelligible (and to legitimate) the sovereignty of the king, the nature of social order, and the domains of temporal and ecclesiastical authority (Kantorowitz 1957; Coker 1967[1910]:12).2 As Carolyn Merchant has observed, organic metaphors remained pervasive in a wide variety of domains and had decisive practical consequences until the triumph of mechanistic metaphors at the time of the scientific revolution (Merchant 1980). More recently, organicism, refigured as the dream of natural community, has appeared to some feminists to offer an alternative to the antagonistic dualisms of modern science and politics (Haraway 1988:86).3 At the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of physiology and the sciences of the social, the metaphors of organism and body once again assumed a particular importance: they 19

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became a privileged way, at least among certain classes of professionals, for conceptualizing “social problems” and for formulating technical or “medical” solutions to those problems.4 The exclusive property of neither the political left nor the right, and central to projects as diverse as Durkheimian sociology and German racial sciences, the “new organicism” (Gini 1927a) marked a new way of conceiving and a program for adjusting the relations between the whole of society and its parts and helped to construct a new nosology of social pathologies. Although ostensibly drawing its lessons “from Nature,” modern organicism would in fact leave little “to Nature”; instead, both individual bodies and social organisms were constructed as sites of active management, engineering, and normalization. This productive convergence of the biological, the social, and the political is exemplified by the life and writings of Corrado Gini, a professional demographer, statistician, and sometime eugenicist who directed Italy’s Central Institute of Statistics from 1926 to 1932.5 Gini identified a “new organicism” as the most promising framework for the emerging discipline of sociology, a field of inquiry that in 1927 did not yet enjoy a “good reputation” in Italian academic circles (ibid.:5).6 Indeed, it is not surprising that Gini’s most detailed discussion of organicism came in a lecture that inaugurated a new program of study in sociology at the University of Rome. Gini’s project was twofold: to know society on the model of the biological organism, and to shore up the claims of the young sciences of the social with the support of the increasingly prestigious field of physiology. In his lecture Gini suggested that the elaboration of a modern science of the social—a science that might take its place alongside those that studied the biology of the individual—depended less on the resurrection of earlier organic metaphors than on their thorough reconstruction. Indeed, organicism, Gini was quick to note, was considered outmoded by most scholars in the 1920s—once “fashionable,” organic metaphors seemed to many to have proved “artificial” and of little scientific value (ibid.:9). For Gini, this evaluation was in large part justified: earlier organic models had generated a great number of ingenious but ultimately unproductive analogies. Some analogies had worked to fix and naturalize social arrangements by locating “anatomically” the various classes and professions: in one example agri20

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cultural and industrial workers were made to correspond to the innermost layer of the skin, the endoderm; soldiers, who defended external borders, were likened to the ectoderm; and merchants, who provided for the movement of goods between internal and external regions, were compared to the mesoderm (ibid.:10). Other writers had sought to identify the social counterparts of each organ and function: the nervous system and the telegraph network both worked to transmit information, while the vascular system and the railroads both assured circulation. Still others, Gini observed, had compared the merging of nations to sexual union: the active and enterprising nations could be considered “male” and the passive, receptive, and sedentary nations could be considered “female” (ibid.:14).7 For Gini, these examples of an “older” organicism were unsatisfactory for several reasons. First, they were in his view entirely arbitrary and conventional “constructions” (costruzioni): different authors identified different relations of correspondence among the organs and functions of bodies and societies. Some, for example, compared the police force to the body’s excretory system, and others compared them to phagocytes. For some, the “cells” of the social body were constituted by individuals, and for others by the family or the married couple (ibid.:17). Second, and more important for Gini, the analogies elaborated by earlier thinkers had not been “substantial” or “real,” but merely “imaginary” or “formal” (ibid.:19). For Gini, a “real” analogy would permit a sociologist to extend to the social domain the laws that governed natural bodies. Gini dubbed the school of thought that compares the organism and society on the basis of “substantial” analogies “Neoorganicism.” Tracing lines of descent from Auguste Comte and René Worms (though he might also have pointed elsewhere),8 Gini’s neo-organicism promised to provide organic social analysis with a scientific basis, made possible by the linked emergence of modern physiology and the new sciences of the social. Borrowing the method of Worms (Worms 1896; cf. Coker 1967[1910]:170–80), Gini sought to develop a biological definition of the living organism, then to investigate empirically whether society met the same or similar criteria. Ironically, Gini chose as his starting point a definition of the organism that sounds almost post-organic, prefiguring the 21

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cybernetic models of the later twentieth century (Haraway 1989:102–3). Modern physiology had, in Gini’s view, finally provided a “good” definition of the organism as a “system in stationary equilibrium, tending toward self conservation” (1927a:24). The organism was a “system” because it was an ensemble of “bodies” (cells) linked to each other. It was “in stationary equilibrium” because, although not static, it tended to “conserve indefinitely” certain characteristics, even in the face of external disturbances. Indeed, organic and inorganic equilibria could be distinguished by the former’s ability to “re-equilibrate” themselves, as well as by their tendencies to “evolve” or “involve” over time. That societies exhibit similar (even identical) regularities had, in Gini’s view, been established by demography, political economy, and the social sciences. For Gini, the earliest statistical studies by Graunt, Süssmilch, and Quételet had demonstrated (in a “refutation” of Marx) that societies, like organisms, are in dynamic equilibrium: “continual economic, demographic, and cultural variations occur in societies, and yet these exhibit, through such variations, regularities for every characteristic” (ibid.:28). Political economy had brought to light mechanisms of auto-regulation and compensation, “with which the economic organism in equilibrium reacts to disturbing agents, in such a way that it conserves its equilibrium” (ibid.:29). Sociology had discovered internal regularities of society, what Durkheim had called “social facts” (Durkheim 1982[1901]), comparable to those discovered in physiology: the more or less constant proportion of the sexes at birth; the correlations among the population of urban centers, their economic importance, and their altitude above sea level; the tendency of sons to follow in the professions of their fathers; and the correlation between social class and rates of fertility and mortality (1927a:31–34). Finally, statistics made it possible to distinguish scientifically various stages in the evolution of nations, corresponding to the stages of growth of the individual organism. In sum the “reality” of social regularities confirmed the existence of new kinds of scientific objects, including the organic life of societies. According to Gini, societies and nations, like organisms, had life cycles: comparative and historical studies revealed periods of growth, maturity, decline, and death (Gini 1930). So22

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cieties could also be characterized medically as healthy or diseased, normal or pathological—depending, among other things, on the rate of reproduction of the population.9 Social bodies, like physiological bodies, could be cured, defended, and made objects of an ongoing prophylaxis. In fact, in interwar Italy the art of government would increasingly be defined, by Mussolini and others, as a “medical” art.10 It is important to note that although Gini ostensibly worked to “uncover” parallels between two kinds of “natural” objects, a move that lent the support of both Nature and Science to his sociology, he was in fact engaged in comparing the thoroughly constructed objects of two scientific discourses. For Gini, we may suppose, this mattered little: both physiology and sociology were, in his view, sciences that produced reliable information about the natural and social worlds, that designated stable and bounded objects, and that made possible certain kinds of effective intervention. However, as a number of cultural critics of the sciences remind us, each scientific construction of nature and the body has a particular history and is “born in a social womb” (Haraway 1989:58; cf. Figlio 1976). In a general sense, Gini’s notion of “organism” was linked to the recent emergence of “life” as a new and distinct domain of knowledge and intervention (Foucault 1970; Figlio 1976:25). More specifically, the “physiology” on which Gini relied depended in turn on the language and practices of industrial and colonial societies for its understanding of “defense,” “conservation,” “equilibration,” and “systems.” In this sense the “good fit” between biological and social organisms, what Gini called the “substance” of the analogy, should hardly be surprising. But, as in the case of Darwin’s biology (Young 1985), what originated in social paradigms was returned to society with the authority of Nature and Science. Here our attention is focused on what is consequential about a vision of society that both generates and is reinforced by the modern forms of physiology. For the medicalized metaphor of the social body served not only as a basis for political characterizations but also as a framework for specific interventions.11 Just as, for example, medieval theories of correspondence had given rise to specific kinds of medical interventions, here the new organicism engendered techniques of government to invigorate 23

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the social organism, to cure its existing pathologies, and to prevent future threats to its well-being. In the end the reality of neo-organic analogies rested in the efficacy of social-technical interventions. The social and medical sciences charged with the tasks of diagnosis, prevention, and cure included demography, sociology, criminal anthropology, social medicine, social hygiene, urbanism, and political biology.12 These new forms of knowledge and the practices of intervention they supported, in turn redrew the boundaries between the public and the private that had characterized the liberal problematic. In the name of social defense and the promotion of the population, previously private behaviors were made targets of a permanent governmental management.

THE WHOLE AND ITS PARTS: SOCIETY, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND THE STATE In Italy the rise of sociological and organic conceptualizations of society was accompanied by a rethinking in political and legal discourse of the relations between individuals and society—a rethinking that departed from the liberal model, which pictured the individual as prior to society, and social welfare as the result of the play of individual interests and moralities. Instead, in this alternative story, society was defined as primary to the individuals who composed it, and as more than the sum of its parts. The social organism was imagined to have needs and interests that were above and beyond those of individuals and could not even be equated with those of the majority, any more than the statistical regularities of the social realm could be reduced to the sum of individual behaviors. In the political and legal domains, this organic fiction was mobilized to naturalize hierarchies and authoritarian practices, just as it destabilized other origin stories (about social contracts, fundamental individualism, and egalitarianism) and the rights those stories supported. It bears repeating that this neither was nor is the only story of organicism possible—organism is a concept of considerable elasticity (see Figlio 1976:42), and socialist and feminist constructions of the organic, for all their dangers (Haraway 1988:86), point discursively and practically in other directions. Nor was Gini’s “physiology” the only scientific con24

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struction of bodies that could have served as a model for knowledge about, and interventions in, society.13 What matters here is the contingent convergence of scientific and political stories and the practical consequences of this convergence. For Gini, the organicist conception of society accorded well with, or rather made self-evident, the idea of an ongoing national interest surpassing the present interest of the majority, or even the totality of the citizens. Both social and physiological bodies were, in his view, more than the sum of their parts: The organism obviously has requirements that go beyond the present moment, and for which it is often better that the present be sacrificed. Analogously, society may ask, in the interest of its future progress, that its present interests be sacrificed, not to mention the interests of the majority of its citizens—interests which although prevailing in numbers, may not prevail in importance. (Gini 1927a:42–43)

As Gini argued, for this reason the organicist theory of society was well received by the Italian nationalists, who developed its logic in particular directions.14 For example, by appealing to organic metaphors, nationalists redefined the question of individual liberty, which had in their view become increasingly problematic since the time of the French Revolution. The individual was no longer seen to be constitutive of the social order but was instead reduced to “a cell in the social organism” (Pende 1921:72). As Aldo Bertelé explained, this biological conception meant that the problem of liberty was no longer a qualitative or quantitative problem, “but simply a functional problem” (Bertelé 1931:847). At the same time, nationalists suspended the question of equality: in contrast to the liberal model, the organic model offered a way of representing and legitimating inequality. The hierarchy of organic functions could be mapped onto a social hierarchy.

ALFREDO ROCCO AND THE ROOTS OF NATIONALISM Alfredo Rocco, one of the founders of the Italian nationalist movement and, as Justice Minister from 1925 to 1932, a principal architect of the fascist legal system, developed an organic model of society in order to articulate and codify a particular set of 25

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relations between the individual, society, and the State.15 For Rocco, the problem facing Italy, especially after the First World War, was “the problem of the re-organization of Society, no longer on the basis of the atomistic individualism of the philosophy of the French Revolution, but on the basis of an organic vision of Society” (Rocco 1927:782–83). In contrast to the liberal paradigm, which affirmed the individual against “the domination of the collectivity,” Rocco argued for the transcendent imperatives of the social organism: “Certainly, it is an interest of the nation that the individuals who compose it be in good material and moral condition; but only because it is the interest of every organism that its organs live physiologically” (cited in Ungari 1963:26–27). For Rocco, the social contract—and the jurisprudence to which it gave rise—was an unworkable fiction. In its place he told a bio-sociological story: The various human societies . . . exist as a biological concept and a social concept; socially, they are fractions of the human species, having a unitary organization for achieving the inherent ends of the species. . . . And just as the ends of the human species are not the ends of the separate individuals living at a certain moment, and may possibly be in contrast with these, so the ends of the various societies are not the ends of the individuals who compose them at a given moment, and may possibly be in contrast with these. It is well known that the conservation and development of the species may, at times, require the sacrifice of individuals. The phenomenon of war is the greatest example. (1925c:1100–1101)

The role of the state, according to Rocco, was to ensure the pursuit of social and national interests, even at the expense of individuals. In this respect the fascist state represented for Rocco the “truly social State,” the antithesis of the liberal, democratic state (1927:778). The individual did not become a matter of indifference (a body could not, after all, be indifferent to the health of its cells) but was transformed from an “end” to a “means” (1925c:1102). The ostensible goal of any state intervention was the health, welfare, and normal development of the social body as a whole: Fascism, too, believes that it is necessary to guarantee the individual the conditions required for the free development of his facul26

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ties. . . . But not because it recognizes a right of the individual to liberty, superior to the State, to be invoked against the very interest of the State—but rather because it believes that the development of the human personality is an interest of the State. If individuals are infinitesimal and transient elements of the complex and ongoing life of Society, it is clear that a normal development of the individual life is necessary to social development. Necessary, but provided that it be normal: an enormous and disordered development of some individuals and groups of individuals would be for society what an enormous and disordered development of cells is for an animal organism: a fatal disease. (1925c:1103)

To the extent that the interests of individuals and groups did not coincide with those of the collectivity, they constituted a threat to the organism, a social danger to be prevented.16

FROM PENALIZATION TO PREVENTION: THE JURISPRUDENCE OF SOCIAL DEFENSE As we will see in coming chapters, practices were developed in a number of domains ostensibly to defend the social body against the perceived threats of falling birthrates, disease, urbanization, work accidents, and poverty. In the domain of law, a series of juridical and penal practices were put in place in the interwar period to ensure the public order and to regulate work. The rationality of these practices had less to do with the defense of sovereignty or the assignment of responsibility, as under earlier regimes, than with the defense of society itself. In neither case did the emergence of the body of society as an object of concern mean that the bodies of individual women and men disappeared from view. Quite the contrary: these bodies were invested with new kinds of sciences and technologies, the aim of which was to know and manage their dangers, frailties, vulnerabilities, potentials, their growth and decay. The new problematizations of crime, work accidents, poverty, and disease that took hold by the early twentieth century are part of what made possible the location of the reproductive body in a new space of knowledge and intervention, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. This new attention to bodies and their 27

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dangers would, however, take particular forms with the emergence (and triumph) of Italian nationalism and the fascist regime. Particular intersections of the political and the social scientific would subordinate the individual to the collective. Increasingly, the needs and potentials of the bodies of women and men would be read against the background of the needs and potentials of the “body” of society.

CRIME AND DANGEROUS BODIES For much of Western history, crimes were problematized as individual, willful acts that threatened not society but the sovereignty of the king (Foucault 1978a). It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that crime came to be identified as an attack on the integrity of the social body, and that the criminal was evaluated according to the danger or risk he or she represented to the health and well-being of that collectivity. The collection of “moral statistics” in the early nineteenth century had confirmed what many people already suspected, that crime— especially urban crime—was on the rise. But statisticians did more than this: they classified criminals into new categories, correlated rates of criminality with socioeconomic factors, and above all revealed the patterns and regularities of criminal acts. In sum, they transformed the acts of individuals into the indexes of a stable feature of the social landscape—criminality—and designated a new range of objects for scientific scrutiny, including the “criminal body” (Horn forthcoming). The construction of crime as a social fact and problem, and of criminology as a social science, was in fact linked to a new focus on the individuality of the offender, and to new scientific practices of individuation. Cesare Lombroso’s “positive school”17 of criminology was distinguished from its predecessor and rival, the “classical school,” by a shift of objects from the crime to the criminal (Ferri 1968[1901]:60) and by a new anthropology in which “penal man” (homo penalis) was displaced by “criminal man” (homo criminalis) (Pasquino 1980:19–20; cf. Foucault 1978a). The classical school had operated around the triangle of law, crime, and punishment. The problem was to adjust penalties to offenses; the individual to be punished (homo penalis) was 28

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interesting only insofar as his or her identity and legal responsibility (the capacity of free will) were at issue. The new “anthropological” school made crime social and centered instead on the two main poles of the criminal (homo criminalis) and society (Pasquino 1980:20). On the one hand, the anthropologists expressed a new concern with statistical regularities. They complained that the classical school had not been able to explain (and indeed had never thought to explain) why there were 3,000 murders every year in Italy, and not 300 or 300,000 (Ferri 1968[1901]:72). On the other hand, the anthropologists argued it was necessary to take account of the social dangerousness of individual offenders (Foucault 1978a). They proposed replacing the classical school’s typology of crimes, which sociologist Enrico Ferri termed a “juridical anatomy” of deeds (1968 [1901]:71), with a typology of criminals, an anatomy of deviant and dangerous bodies grounded in scientific measurements. In this way they sought to break classical theory’s link between responsibility and practices of punishment. As Lombroso’s collaborator Raffaele Garofalo argued, the social dangerousness of an individual might, in fact, be greatest when his or her legal responsibility was least (Lombroso et al., 1886:197). Indeed, for the first time, one could be a criminal (that is, a danger to society) without having committed a crime (Fletcher 1891:210), something that had been literally unthinkable for the classical school. At the center of this new social science stood the body of the criminal, which in the early writings of the anthropologists was typically male. Attention to bodies, Lombroso argued, promised to deliver criminology from the idealism and “metaphysics” of the classical school. His anthropology shared with other nineteenth-century scientific (and political) projects the assumption that only the body could ground and locate difference (Stocking 1988). In particular a science of bodies promised to make intelligible the “dangerousness” that was the object of the new criminological discourse but threatened to remain invisible. Here Lombroso drew on the sciences of physiognomy and phrenology, which had purported to find signs of interior intellectual and moral states on the body’s surfaces, particularly at the level of the head and the face (See Sekula 1986:11–12).18 However, Lombroso rejected what he termed the “qualitative and deterministic” readings of the phrenologists (Lombroso et al. 1886:5) 29

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in favor of anthropometry: the precise measurement of the dimensions and relations of parts of the body, a practice that had been joined to social statistics by Adolphe Quételet.19 For Lombroso, anthropometry appeared (at least initially) “an ark of salvation” (Lombroso and Ferrero 1895:1) able to fix bodily difference as deviation from statistical norms. Anthropometry promised to make potential dangers both known and manageable, 20 and to specify the social, historical, and evolutionary place of the criminal body. Lombroso argued that the criminal was linked by his abnormal anatomy and physiology to the insane person and the epileptic, as well as to those other “others” who were constituted as the objects of the social sciences: the ape, the child, woman, prehistoric man, and the contemporary savage. For Lombroso, the criminal was, in his body and conduct, an “atavism”—a reemergence of the historical and evolutionary pasts in the present. It is important to note, however, that although the criminal’s physiognomy was seen to make visible and legible (in a relatively unambiguous, unmediated fashion) the degeneration of the race (Lombroso et al. 1886:6),21 it was a sign of the individual’s social dangerousness only in a statistical, probabilistic sense (Horn forthcoming). According to Lombroso, fewer than 40 percent of convicted male criminals had any physical anomalies (Lombroso et al. 1886:12), and still fewer bore the combination of factors (the “criminal type”) that was considered a reliable predictor of dangerous conduct. Indeed, the infinite possible combinations of measurable signs of atavism seemed to frustrate the effort to construct typologies and taxonomies, and Lombroso struggled in his writings to find the appropriate metaphor to capture the relation between physical deviations and dangerousness. In sum, while the criminal may have had a fixed appearance in popular culture, there were no sure anatomical guides to social dangerousness—that is, to that feature that was placed at the center of anthropological discussions of criminality. In the end the criminal anthropologists made everyone potentially (if not equally) dangerous—just as, to use an analogy favored by Enrico Ferri, Pasteur’s studies of disease had made everyone a possible source of microbial contagion (1968[1901]:99). In both cases science pointed to the need for globalized practices of prevention and social hygiene. And in both 30

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cases a dramatic reimagining of society was linked to the expanding power of the experts of the social, who were called on to know and contain social dangers.22 The “social” construction of the problem of criminality implied a new role for judges, who would be required to make minute “anthropological” investigations (Lombroso et al. 1886:197). In the eyes of Ferri, they should “have sufficient knowledge, not of Roman or civil law, but of psychology, anthropology, and psychiatry” (1968[1901]:36). The new construction also implied a regime of governmental practices focused on the prevention rather than the repression of crime. The anthropological problem was to determine “in what manner and to what degree it is necessary for the health of society to limit the rights of delinquents” (Lombroso et al. 1886:201). Remedies and penalties should then give way to practices of surveillance, preventive detention, and parole, and to proposals for making talented criminals “serviceable to civilization” (Lombroso-Ferrero 1972[1911]:212–16). Vagabonds, Lombroso suggested, might be used to colonize wild and unhealthy regions; murderers might perform surgery or serve in the military; and swindlers might pursue police work or journalism (Lombroso 1968[1911]:447). These interventions depended in turn on estimations of the social risks posed by particular kinds of individuals; specific crimes figured merely as “indications” of dangerousness (Lombroso et al. 1886:198). Many of the criminologists’ recommendations were taken up by reformers of Italy’s 1889 Penal Code. The reform of the code began in 1919, with the creation of a commission charged with constructing “a more effective and sure defense against habitual delinquency,” one that was “in harmony with the rational principles and methods for the defense of society against crime in general.”23 The resulting project—a draft for Book I—was directed by Enrico Ferri, a socialist and one of the founders of a positivist school of criminal sociology (Ministero della Giustizia, Commissione Reale per la Riforma delle Leggi Penali 1921).24 The project did no less than propose a new penal order, based on a new punitive rationality. The focus of the new code, consistent with positivist criminology, was no longer the crime but the criminal, not his or her imputability but his or her “dangerousness.” In a parallel fashion, the code abandoned to a significant 31

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extent retributive penalties in favor of preventive measures. The goal of the latter was less deterrence than neutralization of risk and social hygiene: “the sanctions established for the authors of crimes . . . must only provide for the most effective social defense against dangerous offenders, and the most rapid and sure redemption and reutilization of less dangerous offenders, who are the most numerous” (ibid.:14). This project, never completed, was abandoned when the fascists came to power in 1922. But the code authored by Alfredo Rocco eight years later would nevertheless take as its principal object the defense of the body of society against the risks posed by its constituent parts.

THE LEGACY OF LOMBROSO: FROM CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY TO SOCIAL DEFENSE The early years of fascism were characterized almost exclusively by acts of repression—of political dissent, journalistic freedom, and trade unionism. But by the late 1920s the regime had gradually shifted toward a different economy of power that attempted to substitute rigorous and no less harsh practices of prevention for the “excesses” of repressive violence. At one level this shift was marked by the suppression of the violence of fascist squads (squadrismo) in 1925 and the subsequent regulation of the fascist militia (MVSN)—part of a broader campaign of “normalization” and a first step in a subordination of the party to the state advocated by Rocco and other nationalists.25 At another level this transformation was marked by the elaboration of new techniques of intervention, designed less to penalize than to know and contain risks. For example, the theme of prevention is developed in the 1926 Testo unico delle leggi di pubblica sicurezza,26 which grouped together, under the heading “Provisions relative to the public order and public safety,” a series of measures regulating public assemblies, accidents and disasters, and dangerous industries. To be sure, the document gave the police broad powers to repress seditious cries, public demonstrations, and the display of subversive flags. But it also developed a new set of preventive measures focused on “persons dangerous to society,” including juveniles, vagabonds, the mentally ill, former convicts, and po32

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litical opponents of the regime. Perhaps the most important of these measures was internal exile [confino di polizia] from one to five years, which could be imposed on anyone deemed to be a danger to society (Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza 1927).27 As the national police chief Arturo Bocchini explained in a telegram to the prefects, the Testo unico articulated a new conception of the “public order”: [I]n the new law, public order does not have the old merely negative meaning but signifies undisturbed and peaceful life of the positive political social and economic systems that constitute essence of the Regime [.] Whoever attacks this peaceful development must immediately be put in position of doing no harm. (reprinted in Aquarone 1965:423)

This, the jurist Antonello Caprino argued, contrasted with the liberal conception, according to which guaranteeing the public order meant “assuring individuals an indispensable minimum of tranquility in the inevitable conflict of the competing interests of the collectivity” (Caprino 1930:291). Now, in fact, the state’s action was intended to move beyond prevention; it was charged with a positive transformation of the social order: [T]he powers of the State must create a public order which is the effect and proof of the existence of the moral order. Public order, then, is not a mere fact—that is, not the mere result of opportune work of prevention and repression, but the consequence of a superior moral order, to which all the activities of the State contribute, converging in a harmoniously coordinated action. (ibid.)

In sum, public order was to be assured by “policing,” not merely in the repressive sense, but also in the eighteenth-century sense of a technique for developing the strength and quality of the social body.28 The logic of prevention was most fully developed in the Penal Code of 1930. Rocco’s code was in many respects much less “revolutionary” than the project drafted by Ferri in 1921. It presented itself as a “compromise” between the classical and positivist schools of criminology, and, as one commentator put it, between natural and social law (Longhi 1932). But if Rocco was not prepared to abandon the liberal rationality of punishment 33

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completely, his code did mark a dramatic shift toward prevention and social defense. Repression, as Rocco argued in 1925, was “clearly insufficient” to defend the social organism (1925a:216). In the new code, delinquency was to be prevented both by the deterrence of penalties—“a defense against the danger of new offenses committed by the criminal, by the victims and his family members, or by the collectivity” (Rocco 1925b:269)—and by proactive security measures. These included the housing of minors and deaf people in centers for “education and instruction”; the institutionalization of the dangerous mentally ill; the creation of special asylums for habitual drinkers, alcoholics, and drug addicts; the opening of confinement camps for habitual or otherwise incorrigible delinquents, and workhouses for loiterers, vagabonds, and habitual beggars; the experimental use of parole and probation; and the “special vigilance” of the public security forces (Rocco 1925a:222). As Rocco explained in his report to the King on the final version of the new code, “[b]y means of such measures . . . social defense against crime extends its traditional limits.” In medical terms, he argued, these measures represented “rather than therapy, prophylaxis and social hygiene against crime” (1930:9). As we will see in Chapter IV, this new penal rationality, an aspect of a broader rethinking of the social, defined not only new measures but also new targets and goals of intervention. In the name of social defense, the state could now intervene preventively in places where its actions had previously been limited, including the domain of reproduction.

THE LOGIC OF INSURANCE A similar story can be told for work accidents, another obvious consequence of the growth of industrialism. For most of the nineteenth century, the logic of liberalism had made Italian employers and employees responsible for their own conduct at the workplace; the law intervened simply to limit the damage that one person did to another. In both Italy and France, Napoleonic civil codes made this rationality explicit: whenever an action of one person caused damage to another, the first was obliged to 34

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repair it (Ewald 1986:44). In the case of work accidents, this meant that either the worker or the employer was responsible for the event. Otherwise, the accident was intelligible only as an act of god or as part of the dangers of nature. The expansion of industrial production in the nineteenth century meant, however, that accidents multiplied: more and more people lost arms, legs, eyes, and their lives to the machines that modern capitalism introduced. Increasingly, the liberal solution was unable to meet the challenge: employers and employees found themselves pitted against each other in strikes and protracted lawsuits, the goal of which was to determine who was at fault in each individual accident. But the collection of statistics again revealed not only the increased frequency of accidents but also their surprising regularity. Within limits, it did not seem to matter where a factory was located, who ran it, how it was managed, or how much education the workers had. In every textile factory, for example, people lost arms at roughly the same rate, year in and year out (ibid.:17). The work accident, it appeared, was not, in a certain sense, accidental at all: social experts began to construct the accident as the normal byproduct of industrialism and a predictable occurrence. The accident was no longer seen to have its origins in the dangers of nature or (in any interesting way) in the conduct of individuals: it was simply a social fact. Thus, instead of fault, social experts and jurists began to talk about occupational or professional risk, a construct that expressed the statistical probability of events independent of their cause. This was, as François Ewald has argued, nothing less than a new way of thinking about persons, things, and their relations (ibid.:175). This redefinition of the problem of work accidents was accompanied by and made possible a new solution: practices of insurance. Once work accidents were constructed as inevitable and predictable risks of running a business, it was imaginable and necessary to insure against them. By the turn of the century, virtually every country in Europe had passed laws that made insurance against work accidents mandatory for every industrial employer. For liberal thinkers several decades earlier, such laws would have constituted intolerable intrusions of the state. But by 1898 it seemed clear to French, German, and Italian legislators that a regime of “civil responsibility” was not adequate to 35

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address the social problem of work accidents. As Cherubini notes, Italy’s law of 1898 made insurance obligatory for business owners not because they were always at fault but because they created “organisms, which in the normal course of their functioning, may cause injury” (Cherubini 1977:33; cf. Ewald 1986:283). Insurance, of course, has its own history, tied to the emergence of statistics and probability theory, as well as to the history of the transportation industry (Ewald 1986, Hacking 1990). Our concern here, however, is with insurance as a social technology. And it is worth noting that once this model of compulsory insurance was developed in industry, it quickly spread throughout society, taking the form of social insurance. Social insurance was predicated on the existence of calculable and collective risks. Unemployment, poverty, accidents, and disease all came to be seen as risks whose origin and effects were social. Society needed to be defended against itself, against the dangers it inevitably and predictably produced. The extension of this insurantial logic was made evident by transformations in the technologies of welfare elaborated in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Italian social experts and legislators who addressed the problem of social welfare in the 1920s and 1930s frequently distinguished between three forms of intervention: beneficenza (charity), assistenza sociale (social work), and previdenza sociale (social security measures).29 These three forms were distinguished not only by their objectives but also by their techniques of intervention, their targets, and their rationalities. Beneficenza, the earliest form of intervention, was the traditional activity of the church and opere pie, foundations established by individuals to aid the disadvantaged.30 Even in its secular forms, beneficenza grew out of a moral rather than a legal obligation, consistent with the teachings of Catholic religion and with a regime of responsibilities defined by the political rationality of liberalism. Liberalism assigned a negative function to law—which made individuals liable for their own actions and constrained them from hurting others—and a positive function to charity, which arose from the moral obligation of the rich toward the poor. But if the fortunate had a moral obligation to assist the unfortunate—the victims of the inevitable inequalities 36

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produced by free competition—this duty did not correspond to a right to assistance enjoyed by the poor (Cherubini 1977:11). Instead, the poor were responsible for their condition: poverty was a faulty mode of behavior. The goal of charity, in fact, was to transform this defective conduct and to develop the foresight (previdenza) of the assisted person. As Ewald has observed for France, charity established a relationship of tutelage focused on the individual, rather than on poor populations (1986:71–72). Its action had therefore to be individualized, an action of moralization and conversion. And in order that the poor develop foresight and not become dependent on charity, beneficenza had to be limited, discontinuous, and intermittent. Above all, it had to be voluntary: it could not be legally enforced nor become a function of the state. Assistenza sociale, or social assistance, developed in the midnineteenth century as a response to a rather different problem— or rather, to an alternative formulation of the problem of poverty—which represented a transformation of the liberal problematic. With industrialization, and the new objectification of society effected by sociology, poverty and unemployment began to be seen as social problems. As Henri Hatzfeld (1971) has put it, the problem of mendicancy was replaced by the problem of pauperism, which differed in intensity, extension, and origin and represented a new order of social danger.31 Sociologists identified poverty as a natural, statistically regular consequence of social life, with economic, social, and political causes. Social assistance was therefore developed as a technique of social management, rather than individual moral conversion. This is not to say that individuals were no longer responsible for their condition. Rather, as Ewald suggests, the causes of poverty were distinguished from the conditions of poverty. Social scientists and moralists continued to identify the lack of foresight, responsibility, and morality of the poor individual as causes of poverty. But they argued that certain conditions of industrial society—above all, the milieu—favored these behaviors. It was therefore necessary not only to moralize the individual but also to intervene to transform his or her environment, in order to prevent poverty. And in order more fully to protect the individual from these factors, the intermittent, discontinuous action of charity had to give way to a constant, permanent, 37

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regular monitoring and assistance, provided by public as well as private agencies (Ewald 1986:91–92). This gave rise both to new sciences of human behavior and its relation to the environment, including what Le Play called “social economy,” and to new techniques of investigation and assistance, including social work or social service. Finally, previdenza sociale, a set of preventive measures including social insurance, represented a more radical break with the liberal rationality of assistance, a further “sociological decentering.”32 If social work marked the beginnings of a “disqualification of the politics of moralization” (ibid.:166), social insurance marked a radical alternative to the whole regime of fault and criminal and civil liability. The operative category was no longer responsibility, but risk, which expressed the statistical probability of events independent of their cause. And if insurance in general distributed the risks of naturally occurring phenomena, social insurance did so in the name of social defense. For many social experts between the wars, the goal of welfare politics was the substitution of social work for charity, and of social insurance for these other two forms of assistance. Although in practice all three forms continued to coexist during the twenty years of fascist rule, the utopia of an “insurantial society” marked a shift in the discourses, objects, and techniques of social intervention. For Ugo Manunta, neither beneficenza nor assistenza pubblica could effectively guarantee society against the inevitable risks social life produced: “Public assistance must be superseded. . . . [T]he perfection toward which totalitarian states tend is the overcoming of the old relief organizations, including hospitals, in order to transform them into instruments of social security [azione previdenziale]” (Manunta 1939:8). As Manunta explained, the object and scope of social insurance differed substantially not only from that of public assistance, but also from other forms of insurance.33 Its goal was the protection of the social body rather than the individual: “Previdenza refers . . . to goals that transcend egoistical interests. Rather than from the need of the individual to be protected from certain, determined risks, [social insurance] is born from the intention of breaking the chains that bind the ranks of workers to a life of poverty. Its inspiration is social” (ibid.:5). 38

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As we have indicated, obligatory social insurance preceded by several decades the advent of the fascist regime; it was also more comprehensive in other European countries. Nevertheless, Manunta believed its rationality and practices could be developed and extended most fully in “totalitarian” rather than liberal and democratic regimes. Specifically, he suggested compulsory insurance contrasted with the organizing principles of democratic society: “[T]he canons of so-called democracy, affirming the sovereignty of the individual and codifying several pseudo-natural rights, make it impossible to perceive or pursue the true interests of society, of which individual [interests] are a consequence” (ibid.:7). We should not be inclined to accept Manunta’s facile political schema, least of all the binary opposition between democracy and totalitarianism. Nor does it necessarily follow that the rationality of insurance made society incompatible with individual freedom, as Manunta explicitly suggested. Indeed, as Ewald has argued, social insurance—unlike forms of assistance that attempted to transform individuals through moralization and education—could in principle guarantee protection against risks at the same time that it left individuals their freedom (Ewald 1986:177).34 But at the same time, social insurance articulated a new regime of duties, what Ewald calls a schema of solidarity. The fiction on which social insurance rested represented a new kind of social contract. Rather than a contract among individuals, who agreed to transfer sovereignty to the society they formed, this contract was between society already constituted and its members. And rather than a set of rights, this contract was founded on reciprocal duties: society was engaged to preserve the life of its members, while the members were obligated to contribute to the well-being of the social organism. If, as Ewald suggests, “the citizen gains . . . a right to security, the society acquires at the same time the right to compel [the citizen] to be provident despite himself” (ibid.:326–27, 331). In other words, the individual had a duty to neutralize risks and for this reason was denied the right, as Manunta put it, to “cultivate improvidence and antisocial behavior” (Manunta 1939:7). It is important to note that the efforts to limit the imprevidenza of ordinary Italians35 in the context of social insurance had little 39

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to do with the attempts by the clergy, philanthropists, and lay volunteers to instill, through a process of moralization, the value of foresight among the poor. In contrast to the liberal utopia, the good society was not to be guaranteed by the morality of individuals, but by society defending itself against antisocial behavior. Previdenza did not lose all its moral value but was transformed from an individual virtue into a social duty. More important, this duty—according to a logic that would have been “unthinkable” for liberals—could be legally enforced (Ewald 1986:332). Although this regime of mutual duties was by no means “fascist,” the political rationality of the interwar period in many respects shared its logic. Our task is to see how a set of welfare practices, and of ways of thinking about the relations between the social whole and its individual parts, were played out in the context of a regime that suppressed rights and liberties according to a particular political calculus.

BODIES AT RISK Strictly speaking, the goal of social insurance was not the reparation of damage to individuals but the management of risk: society had to be defended against itself. This implied a shift of concern from the body of the injured worker to the body of the social organism. In 1927 a new “work charter” codified this shift: the Carta del Lavoro made explicit a new conception of work as a “social duty” (dovere sociale) (Declaration II). The individual did not have a “right to work,” enabling him or her to make demands on the state, argued Roberto Trevisiani, a jurist and the director of the journal Politica sociale. Rather, work was constructed as a “task [compito], which the State assigns to individuals in order to achieve its own goals” (Trevisiani 1929:115). According to this formulation, protection against work accidents and professional diseases derived neither from a right to assistance nor from a bargain made between employee and employer, but from a reciprocal obligation whose character was social. The state intervened in the arena of work accidents in order to defend and strengthen the social organism. The health of the 40

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bodies of laboring women and men was not seen as a good in itself but was rather constructed as a “social good” and subordinated to economic and demographic interests: From the principle . . . that work is a social duty, and that the development of production is an essential element of the life and progress of the Nation, derives the consequence that the bodily integrity, health, and physical resistance of the worker constitute a “good” that must be protected, not only and not principally for individual ends, but for the ends of the superior interest of the Nation. (Roberti 1929:393)36

In fact, strictly speaking, the individual worker as such was not protected at all: “Before the worker, the fascist State intends to safeguard work.” As a response to a social problem, the state acted to guarantee the health of the “working masses.” As Dario Guidi explained, this shift transformed the “very premises of private, patrimonial law” (Guidi 1929:92–93). To be sure, the Carta del Lavoro did not initiate this process of transformation. As we have seen, nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century assistance and insurance legislation had already modified the liberal political rationality, creating new obligations, redrawing the lines between the private and the public, and defining a new calculus of social risks and benefits. However, the insurance practices of the fascist period extended this calculus in particular directions, effacing the individual and his liberties in a complex web of collective risks and obligations. This is perhaps best exemplified by the 1935 reform of the law concerning compulsory insurance for work accidents. The reform affirmed explicitly the public nature of work accidents and related issues, bracketing a number of jurisprudential questions on the private nature of the relations between insurer, employer, and employee. More important, the reform extended the legal obligation of medical treatment from the insuring institute to the injured worker. Article 32 stated, “The injured worker cannot, without a justified reason, refuse to submit himself to medical and surgical treatment, including operations, which the insuring institute deems necessary.”37 For Camillo Tovo, who had campaigned for this “bilateral obligation” since 1922, this new duty was determined by “superior interests of the collectivity, which 41

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must surpass anything that may represent a coercion of the right of personhood.” As Tovo explained, such “coercions” were already numerous in Italian social legislation (1933:529). Thus, the new legislation was not designed to protect individual bodies against risks—instead, it threatened to expose these bodies to the risks associated with medical treatment, or alternatively to deprive workers of indemnification. This insurance did not obey a logic of reparation or penalization: as the president of the Fascist Institute of Social Insurance put it, the “vanguard” legislation did not provide “compensation [risarcimento] for damages” (Biagi 1935:278). Its goals were instead to limit damage to the worker as a social entity.

PRACTICES OF PREVENTION: THE RISE OF SOCIAL MEDICINE Although insurance practices obeyed a logic of prevention rather than reparation, insurance alone did not act to reduce risk, only to manage it.38 The reduction of the risks of accidents, disease, and insecurity, and their associated social and economic costs, required complementary forms of social intervention— penetrations and ongoing modifications of everyday life.39 This task of intervention fell largely to the physician-hygienist and to the social worker. In the case of work accidents, the National Agency for the Prevention of Work Accidents was charged with the reduction of risk through worker and employer education. However, it was the doctor—and specifically, the “factory doctor” (medico di fabbrica)—who was responsible for examining new job applicants, assessing their proneness to accidents, monitoring their health, and managing statistical investigations of the causes of accidents (Tovo 1933:531–35).40 But the logic of insurance and prevention extended beyond the problem of work accidents to medical and hygienic practices in general. As one author suggested, medicine was to be increasingly transformed from a repressive to a preventive practice, from a “science of disease” to a “science of health” (Gabbi 1931:449). The primary target of medical intervention would no longer be the individual, but social classes, or indeed the biolog42

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ical population as a whole. Arcangelo Ilvento, a social hygienist and later national medical inspector, wrote of a “radical difference,” noting that while “curative” medicine was a science of individuals, “preventive” medicine was a “science of masses” (1922:3). In a 1931 address to fascist doctors, Mussolini described this latter orientation as “antiliberal,”41 but for another commentator it was, strictly speaking, “antimedical.” Physician Alessandro Guaccero complained of the armies of his colleagues who wasted time treating sick individuals whose decline was inevitable. The “modern” doctor was to be distinguished by his emphasis on a global prophylaxis (Guaccero 1931). Supporting this new conceptualization was a “recognition” of the social nature of disease and the existence of “illnesses that derive not from the individual, but from the environmental conditions in which he is obliged to live” (Levi 1922:8). This shift in etiology redefined disease not only as “supra-individual” but also as normal: disease was not a “caprice or random event,” but a “natural occurrence” governed by well-defined laws. As Ilvento explained, precisely this regularity made it possible to “trace back from effects to causes” and to prevent the first by eliminating the second. To achieve these goals, medicine “had to abandon the individual and pharmaceutical approach; it entered the school, the factory; it brought its contribution to the choice of career, to the qualification of the soldier; it penetrated the family, to conserve its health; it became social” (Ilvento 1932:944–45). This reorientation represented, in both the figurative and literal senses, a new economy of medicine. As Ettore Levi explained in the inaugural issue of Difesa sociale, “The State, Agencies, and Individuals pay harshly—in the ever-growing costs of asylums, hospitals, sanatoria, prisons, reformatories—for the failure to act to prevent tuberculosis, malaria, venereal diseases, alcoholism, childhood and infant illness, and trachoma” (1922:9). For Ilvento, preventive interventions focused on pregnant women had a particular urgency; by his calculations, only 30 percent of births resulted in healthy, productive citizens: “out of ten births, two [children] are dead before age ten, a third is dead before age twenty, and two are so disabled as to be unable to work; thus, those able to work for themselves and for others who cannot are reduced by half, and of these another two carry 43

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the causes of a future physical, mental, or moral disability— such that they end up in the hospital, the asylum, or prison—or of premature death” (1932:938). The new preventive medicine, whose techniques included education and hygiene, as well as detailed medico-social investigations, was dubbed by some “political medicine” (medicina politica) (Gabbi 1931:445).42 The goals of these medical practices included the defense of newborns, the physical and hygienic education of youth, and the prevention of social disease. But as Umberto Gabbi explained, these goals were not merely defensive or negative, but also positive: “it [preventive medicine] not only includes measures, provisions, and forms of assistance in defense of public health but also aims to fortify the stock [stirpe] . . . and to defend, protect, and fortify natality” (ibid.:453).43 This dual strategy of defense and fortification of the Italian “stock” was, as we will see, central to the pronatalist campaign of the 1930s and was from the mid-1920s until the mid-1970s the specific task of the National Agency for Maternity and Infancy (Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia; see Chapter IV). These and other efforts to defend the social body further developed a new kind of social contract, which redefined the relation between the individual and society. Medical and economic assistance were, in theory if not in practice, provided to individuals not because of a moral obligation, as under liberal regimes, or because individuals were considered to have a right to live free of disease or economic hardship. Instead, they were provided because it was perceived to be in the best interest of the nation that a statistically significant number of individuals be healthy, productive, and fertile. Of course, much of the assistance actually provided to diseased, injured, and distressed families during the fascist regime perpetuated to a significant extent the practices of charity that had characterized the interventions of the liberal state, the Catholic Church, and private philanthropic institutions in the late nineteenth century. The regime proved unable or unwilling to replace, as many democratic regimes in Europe had done, traditional sources of aid, particularly those associated with the church.44 Despite these continuities and “failures,” however, there were important shifts in the loci, personnel, and practices of social intervention that made possible a new policing of the 44

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home and the bodies it contained (See Chapter V). At the same time, the individual’s responsibility for his or her own welfare was transformed into a social duty: foresight as a moral virtue gave way to behaviors consistent with risk management. The individual had a duty not only to insure himself or herself against work accidents, unemployment, and tuberculosis but also to neutralize the medical and demographic risks he or she represented.

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The Power of Numbers

O

N 26 MAY 1927, Mussolini, speaking before the Chamber of Deputies, delivered what has come to be known as the Ascension Day address. The address was divided into three parts: an assessment of the physical health of the population, an examination of the administrative order of the nation, and a discussion of political directives for the state. As we will see, the interweaving of these three themes was by no means accidental: for Mussolini (and for an array of social experts), the physical wellbeing of the social body was linked both to a sound provincial and municipal administration, making possible a “rational” distribution of the population, and to public security measures, which he described as “social hygiene” and “national prophylaxis”: “We remove [dangerous] individuals just as a doctor removes a contagious person from circulation” (1927a:378).1 Indeed, what is striking about the speech is that the safeguarding of the fertility, health, and welfare of the biological population is taken for granted as a principal end of government. This was, Mussolini suggested, in sharp contrast to the liberal regimes of prewar Italy, which had advanced the “suicidal theory” that “the state must not be concerned with the physical health of the people” (ibid.:361). According to Mussolini, the fertility and health of the population could no longer be the concern solely of physicians or even sociologists and demographers but had to enter into the calculations of “men of government,” whose function he conceived in social-medical terms. It was time for men like Mussolini to ask: “Is the Italian race . . . in a period of splendor, or are there symptoms of decline? If development has slowed, what are the prospects for the future?” (ibid.:362). Statistics, it seemed, provided the answers, and Mussolini apologized at the beginning of his address for the number of statistics he would recite. While denying that he would be “governed by numbers,” he emphasized the importance of statistical studies for modern government: “Numbers do not govern peoples, but especially in modern so46

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cieties, which are so large and so complex, numbers are a necessary element for whoever wishes seriously to govern a nation” (ibid.:361).2 In Mussolini’s view the condition of the population in 1927, as revealed by the statistics collected by public health authorities, was gloomy if not yet alarming. Social diseases were on the increase: Italy had “won the battle” against pellagra but continued to be threatened by tuberculosis, malignant tumors, mental illness, suicide, and alcoholism. The last had been responsible for 1,315 deaths in 1925, up from 664 in 1922, and the trend had not been reversed by the closing of some 25,000 bars (osterie).3 It was therefore necessary, Mussolini argued, “seriously to watch over the destiny of the race; we must take care of [curare] the race, beginning with maternity and infancy” (ibid.:363–64). Indeed, for Mussolini, the most important problem facing Italy was not, strictly speaking, a medical one but a demographic one: “We are few.” Numbers, Mussolini argued, were the key to the strength of any nation, and of Italy in particular: “A first, if not fundamental, premise of the political, economic, and moral strength of nations is their demographic strength” (ibid.:364). Italy’s forty million inhabitants were surrounded by ninety million Germans and two hundred million Slavs to the north and east, forty million French and the ninety million inhabitants of its colonies to the west, and forty-six million English plus the four hundred fifty million in its colonies. In order for Italy to “count for something,” Mussolini announced, its population needed to grow to sixty million by mid-century (ibid.). If a large and growing population was the key to international and imperial success, a declining birthrate was a symptom of disease and decline. Empires and nations that ceased to grow felt “the gnawing of their decay” (ibid.:363): the Roman Empire and contemporary France were, for Mussolini, the best examples. In Italy, too, growth was waning: from 1886 the Italian crude birthrate had declined from 39 to 26.9 per thousand. Particularly troubling for Mussolini were the major urban areas: in Milan births had exceeded deaths by only 22 in 1926, while in Turin deaths had exceeded births by 538. The cause, suggested Mussolini, was industrial urbanization—a destructive urbanization that “sterilized” the people. Declines threatened not only 47

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Italy’s economic well-being, but also its imperial ambitions. As Mussolini conceived it, if Italy did not create an empire, it risked becoming a colony (ibid.:367). Linking together a concern with the size and health of the population and a critique of cities, Mussolini called for a series of measures to reduce mortality, to increase fertility, and to limit migration to urban areas. These, then, would be the foundations of the fascist regime’s “demographic campaign.” A number of historians have pointed out that the urgent tones of this campaign are not supported by attentive readings of the demographic realities of interwar Italy. Anna Treves argues that policies encouraging high natality “were founded to a large extent on a conceptual and cognitive misunderstanding: precisely, on a distorting and deforming reading of the contemporary demographic reality” (Treves 1983:236). On one hand, the birthrate in Italy, despite strong regional imbalances, was substantially higher than rates in other parts of Europe (ibid.:230). Between 1921 and 1935, the average birthrate in Italy was 26.7 per thousand, compared to 16.3 in Sweden, 18.0 in France, and 19.0 in Germany (Festy 1979:52). On the other hand, Treves suggests, interwar demographers overestimated the amplitude of declines in fertility: the widely used indexes of reproduction tended to accentuate these declines. Analysis of matrimonial cohorts instead reveals that the fall in births was “not a structural, but a conjunctural and transitory phenomenon,” linked to the distribution of marriages during the First World War. The rate, Treves argues, was “obviously entirely anomalous with respect to ordinary rhythms, and due in large part to the phenomenon of postponement of births, typical—particularly during periods of economic difficulty—of the comportment of largely Malthusian populations” (1983:235). Other historians have gone further. Piero Meldini (1975) is among a number of Italian scholars who have read the demographic campaign as irrational and reactionary, and a function of Mussolini’s political opportunism.4 For Meldini, “only the artificial inflation of the problem for propagandistic ends (that is, to guarantee the consensus of broad social strata) explains the alarmist, indeed terrorist tones of the ‘demographic battle’” (ibid.:90). And for Enzo Santarelli, the campaign needs to be seen in the context of “irrational theories, of refusal of modern 48

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society, of fear for the future of white, European civilization, of panic at the possibility of a link between socialist revolutions and revolutions of people of color” (Santarelli 1967, I:440). Attention to the imperialist and indeed racist assumptions that organized the campaign is, I will argue below, essential to making intelligible its particular logic. But if Italian demographic programs cannot be read as mere effects of, or responses to, an “objective” demographic crisis, neither can they be adequately explained as irrational. I propose instead to read them as solutions to a culturally constructed problem: a specifically modern construction of the demographic and medical needs of the biological population that called into question the relations between the individual, the social, and the political. This concern with managing reproduction was, in fact, part of a general European movement, although peculiarly Italian in its assumptions and manifestations. And though the measures enacted in Italy were marked by illogic and contradiction, they exhibited a new political rationality and participated in a new art of government. In the name of the welfare of the social body, it had become necessary to know and administer the population and the reproductive practices of women and men.

POPULATION AS SOCIAL PROBLEM: THE WORLD POPULATION CONFERENCE The Ascension Day address is a conventional starting point for stories told about fascist demographic politics, but Mussolini gave voice to a way of thinking that had its roots in nineteenthcentury constructions of reproduction as a scientific and socialtechnical object. Earlier the scientific management of reproduction had, in a sense, been unthinkable: reproduction had been defined as a “natural” phenomenon, one that could become neither an object of a predictive science nor one of rational managerial techniques. After the nineteenth century, reproduction came to be seen as “social,” in a variety of senses that testify to the flexibility of the category. To say it was social meant that it was both regular (and not atomistic) and the result of a reproductive tactics, and hence something that might be managed or governed. 49

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From this point of view, the narration of our story might just as easily begin elsewhere: the First International Conference on Eugenics held in London in 1912; the writings of Giuseppe Mortara, who warned Italians of the “nightmare of depopulation” (Mortara 1912); or those of Corrado Gini, who outlined the life cycles of nations (Gini 1912); or the World Population Conference, held in Geneva in 1927, months after Mussolini’s address. Perhaps more than any other scholarly undertaking, the World Population Conference signaled the pervasiveness of shared assumptions about the relations between science (especially social science) and arts of government, and the stabilization of the biological population as a scientific and governmental object. At first glance, a conference dominated by a eugenical discourse the Italian fascist regime would reject, and chaired by the American birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, seems an unlikely point of reference. Yet the conference made evident the assumptions that the “population problem” was international, was to be solved by science, and would require more and better statistics. At the same time, the conference also brought out the divergence of Italian social experts from many of their colleagues, a divergence that would become particularly marked by the 1931 International Congress for Studies of Population (Gini 1933). The 1927 conference, organized by Sanger and a group of American biologists, brought together natural and social scientists, social planners and technicians, “men of government,” and feminists, to articulate the possible contributions of the sciences to the government of populations.5 As Sanger put it in her introduction to the acts of the conference, it was “only natural” to turn to the scientists to discover the solution to problems of population (Sanger 1927:13). For Sanger, the strength of the conference lay in its convening of biologists and social experts, but for many of the conference participants the discussions confirmed the marginal relevance of biology to matters of population management.6 The conference was loosely organized around the central question of “optimum” population size and density but by no means achieved a consensus on this or other questions. Cultural and political differences, as well as disciplinary boundary disputes, were played out as disagreements about the desirability of unchecked growth of national populations for militaristic 50

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ends, about the advisability of eugenic measures and birth control, and about the significance of the “differential fertility” of social groups for the health of future generations. However, underlying all the disagreements was a shared set of assumptions: about the regularity of phenomena of birth, death, migration, marriage, and their susceptibility to quantitative study; about the need for further data and censuses; about the ability of the sciences to study “freely and with scientific impartiality the relations between population and human welfare” (Rappard 1927:353); and about the role of the natural and social sciences in the formulation of modern governmental policies. The political rationality of liberalism was not without its defenders: some biologists challenged the notion that population size could ever be effectively managed.7 However, as one commentator suggested, there was a shared assumption among the political leaders and social scientists that the greatest dangers faced by modern nations were not other states, but the internal pathologies identified by demographers, eugenicists, and sociologists—pathologies that demanded prompt intervention.8 The conference also marked the emergence, however tentatively, of an “Italian” position on population matters. Both the anthropologist Alfredo Niceforo and Gini tried to make plain the particularity of the Italian situation, where fertility remained high relative to other European states but was falling nevertheless. For Niceforo, the modern era was characterized by “everincreasing desires” for material goods that worked to reduce the number of births: “This is a dangerous path and may lead to the abyss, for progressive reduction of the birth rate leads to progressive diminution of the group” (Niceforo 1927:66). However, Niceforo was quick to reassure his audience that this was only a “general point of view” and was “not yet the case with Italy, which is not threatened”(ibid.). Gini, too, emphasized the uniqueness of the Italian situation, and of the measures being put in place to manage its population. For Gini, all questions of population were contingent: “optimum” population size, for example, depended on history, geography, and the social life of a nation (1927b:119). Gini also noted that in matters of population policy there could be a divergence between the optimums for the individual and for the state, which is “inclined to attribute greater importance to 51

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future results than is ever accorded them by individuals” (ibid.). A striking example of this was the reduction of the birthrate, which might result in advantages for the individual, at the same time that it threatened the future of the state (ibid.).9 Gini and his Italian colleagues distanced themselves from many at the conference by arguing against the “prevalent impression of the unavoidable need of an outlet in the form of emigration” (Livi 1927:310–11). As statistician Livio Livi noted, this was consistent with the fascist government’s policy, which considered “disorganic emigration to foreign countries as an unnecessary and undesirable phenomenon” (ibid.:311).10 As Marcello Boldrini pointed out, “Before the war, emigration was considered a phenomenon that was not susceptible to any kind of influence, while today it is considered a phenomenon that must be regulated and controlled” (Boldrini 1927:280). Indeed, by 1927 Italy had already acted to limit what a later commentator would term a “progressive bloodletting of the nation” (Federzoni 1937:8). Previously, emigration had been encouraged and facilitated by an emigration fund supported by the state, by special passports available to emigrants within twenty-four hours, and by discount railway fares. Now it was made very difficult, by a requirement of new documents for legal emigration and by a new policing of clandestine movements. Frontier guards were authorized to fire on anyone attempting to cross the border at unauthorized points (Glass 1940:221–24). At the same time the government attempted to prevent the denationalization of Italians working abroad and offered free passage to pregnant women so that their children might be born in Italy.11 If the language of Gini and his colleagues seemed to accord well with the pronouncements of the fascist regime, Gini’s conclusions about the causes of falling birthrates were more equivocal. Gini argued that decreases in “reproductivity,” most notable in the wealthier classes, were due less to conscious choices—including the decision to use contraceptives—or environmental influences than to an inevitable erosion of “the genetic instinct,” a transformation of the “biological substratum” that reduced over time the “reproductive power” of populations. The egoistic and rational calculations that would preoccupy fascist critics were, in his view, real enough but had a biological rather than sociocultural origin. Gini used an analogy 52

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with the body: “That the forces which tend to lower the population consist in a gradual loss of reproductive power will not seem strange to those who reflect that the gradual loss of reproductive power is a general characteristic of somatic cells” (1927c:166). The naturally declining fertility of the upper classes, Gini argued, was not cause for concern, as the Anglo-American eugenicists suggested; it was rather the sign of an inevitable process of growth, decay, and displacement. Gini argued that the “numerical reduction of the upper classes and of the nations of oldest civilization . . . afford[s] a provident natural mechanism by which certain racial and social elements, after contributing to national and world progress, gradually disappear from the scene of history” (ibid.:167). While this logic explained the “giving way” of “primitive” populations to imperial powers “endowed with a higher rate of natural increase” (ibid.:164), it also argued against eugenical efforts to stimulate the reproduction of wealthy Europeans: “An attempt to revive the reproductivity of the upper classes . . . would be a program as deleterious for the progress of civilization and humanity as that of prolonging the life of the aged, thereby preventing the generations which are growing up from taking their place” (ibid.:167; cf. Gini 1912:156). As we will see, although fascists would attack the city and bourgeois culture for their sterilizing effects, they would never make problematic the high fertility of rural and working classes.

THE WILL TO KNOW THE POPULATION Corrado Gini was a logical choice to head Italy’s Central Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), created in 1926.12 Perhaps more than any other institution, ISTAT manifested a new will to know the population, in order more rationally to administer it. According to Mussolini, the creation of the Institute marked the end of a “period of crisis” in the history of Italian statistics (1926a:295). Indeed, until that date, demographers had complained that the collection of demographic information had been hampered by municipal incompetence and the deceptions of individuals and families. In the 1921 census, for example, local governments, 53

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especially in the south and the islands, inflated population figures to minimize the extent of emigration and to conceal a portion of the losses suffered during the First World War. This was done, argues Massimo Livi-Bacci, in order “not to lose administrative, financial, and political prerogatives by falling into a lower class dimension” (Livi-Bacci 1977:291).13 Individual families also distorted figures: there was a tendency to postpone the registration of live births, particularly of boys, from December to January of the following year. This delayed military service for boys for one year and made girls appear one solar year younger. This tactic, constituted as a kind of “fraud,” was especially pronounced in the south, where it affected from 40 to 50 percent of December male births (Livi-Bacci 1977:294; Livi 1926:129). Ironically, this fraud and similar “ways of making do” (de Certeau 1984:29) were in some respects an outgrowth of the rise in importance of censuses, and of the juridical value accorded the number of inhabitants in a given area (the legal population). As Ugo Giusti, a former census director, observed in 1935: [The] frequent practical use of census results [was] one of the factors, although not the only one, to disturb the objectivity of the results; in fact, alongside the frequent antipathy and the fears of the population toward the operations of the census, the defects produced by the ignorance or bad faith of individuals, [and] the carelessness or inadequacy of some local authorities, there was sometimes conscious deception on the part of the last in order to obtain results that would favor personal ambitions or pretended collective interests. (Giusti 1935:64–65)

This fraud had been made possible, demographers argued, by the disarray of statistics collection. Mussolini himself complained that the previous, decentralized system had lacked continuity and order, resulting in waste, duplications, and contradictory results. The creation of ISTAT would, he announced, put an end to this situation. In fact, the Institute was to occupy a special place in the network of newly created or modified agencies of government. Mussolini told the first High Council of ISTAT, “Of the many institutional creations of the fascist regime, that of the Central Institute of Statistics is among the most important.” The Insti54

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tute was to be “an instrument for the action of Government, in the present and in the future” (1926a:295). In addition to its supervisory functions, ISTAT was to organize the censuses of the population, which from 1930 on were to be conducted every five rather than every ten years.14 And as one commentator explained, the census was a fundamental tool of government: When one considers that the action of the State finds its origin and goals in the population which is its base—which represents, that is, its means and its end—it seems evident that the census of the population meets a need of the State. . . . In the modern state, this need is no longer contingent, but rather continual, and also more vast and profound, correlated with the ever greater breadth and depth assumed by State intervention in social life. In fact, to direct its actions, the State cannot limit its gaze to the present population, but must watch over what it will be tomorrow, with regard to future conditions, in order to control its movement: to accelerate it, to contain it, to modify it. If this work is characteristic of the modern State, it is so to an even greater extent in the fascist State. (S. M. 1931)

Statistics, then, were explicitly and intimately tied to the practice of government and were extended into those new domains of human activity that were now to be administered. As Mussolini put it, “I do not exaggerate when I say that at this moment statistics are the order of the day throughout the world, which is explained by the enormous complexity of modern societies and by the thirst for investigations and control that torments men” (1926a). The will to know the population in the present and the future was also manifested in the proliferation of research, conferences, and journals—all of which indicated a tremendous overlap (among doctors, hygienists, demographers, urbanists, architects) in the concern to know the population statistically. Nowhere was this convergence more apparent than on the “demographic problem.” Medical and demographic journals, as well as new publications like Difesa sociale, Politica sociale, Maternità ed infanzia, and the Archivio fascista di medicina politica, were forums for the discussion of marriage and birthrates, and of disease, housing, and other factors as they affected reproductive behavior. And in 1931 the Italians hosted an International 55

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Congress for Studies of Population, a gathering of scholars that dwarfed the earlier World Conference and whose acts filled nine volumes. Although at times the scientific attention to reproductive matters could appear absurd,15 the conference testified to the stabilization of a whole field of knowledge and power, made possible by the construction of social bodies as particular kinds of scientific objects.

EMPIRE, DEGENERATION, AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES OF REPRODUCTION Attempts to develop a statistical understanding of the population were linked to projects of administration, the goal of which was to “govern” the biology of the body of society. The ends of this administration were defined by medical, demographic, and political discourses that identified the health of the Italian social body with its size and rate of reproduction: decline and degeneration were indicative of a looming crisis. In Italy the equation of numbers and strength, “il numero è potenza,” extends well back before the 1920s; some fascist commentators, ever anxious to construct noble genealogies, pointed to imperial Rome. Certainly, in the sixteenth century, Machiavelli had linked the greatness of cities to the number of their inhabitants, and two centuries later mercantilist discourses had identified population as a factor of national wealth.16 Moreover, Anna Treves suggests that in Italian folklore and popular culture the relation between numbers and force has deep historical roots (1983:230). However, the size of the population was not identified as a target for systematic regulatory interventions in Europe until the late eighteenth century (Hacking 1982:289).17 And increasingly, with the birth of the social, the size and rate of reproduction of European populations were linked not to the power and glory of sovereigns nor to the patrimony of kingdoms, but instead to the health and welfare of the populations themselves. In late-nineteenth-century France, for example, Durkheim identified the nation’s falling birthrates (together with increases in its suicide rates) as indexes of a social pathology.18 And in pre-war Italy, demographer Giorgio Mortara (1912) warned of the social and medical dangers represented by 56

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the “nightmare of depopulation.” Mortara associated demographic decline—which, he suggested, was less pronounced in Italy than in other European countries—with the penetration of socialist propaganda: The picture in gloomy colors of the disadvantages of a large family, and the exaltation of the benefits derived from an absence or small number of children, act powerfully on the uncultured crowd, which is capable of profound affection and sublime sacrifices but is unprepared to understand the most modest duties and is easy prey to base and material cupidity, driven, as it is, by a vague awareness of socialist theories, to excessive or premature claims of rights. (1912:15)

But it was especially after the First World War that nationalists posed the question with a new urgency. In Italy the war had claimed 300,000 lives, and a flu epidemic in the summer of 1918 another 600,000 (Mariani 1976:11).19 At the same time, although the population was nowhere actually decreasing, the rates of increase continued to fall. However, the problem for social technicians was not only to replace the losses of war but to improve the health conditions of the population. As the program for Italy’s first conference on “social eugenics” noted: The experience of the war and the needs of reconstruction have put in a new light the importance for a State of the physical and psychic qualities of its citizens and have therefore called the attention of men of government and scientists to studies and measures directed to improve in a permanent way the health conditions, labor efficiency, and the gifts of intelligence and will of the population. (Città di Milano 1924:212)

This sociopolitical construction of the “population problem” was not, of course, limited to Italy. It was posed, for example, in France and Germany by nationalists like Charles Maurras and Oswald Spengler, as well as by social experts. Emblematic of this international obsession with waning growth and imperiled health was Richard Korherr’s The Decline of Births: The Death of Peoples, a popularization of the ideas of Spengler published in Germany in 1927 and translated into Italian at Mussolini’s request in 1928 (Korherr 1928).20 In a preface to Korherr’s book, Spengler echoed themes he had developed in The Decline of the 57

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West: “The health of a living body is expressed by its fertility. Prolificness is a political force. This principle holds as much for a family of peasants as for a great people” (Spengler 1928:28– 29). For Korherr, like Spengler, the fall in birthrates was an aspect of a more general “regression of culture,” a product of the extinction of religious sentiment, the sterilizing effects of the cosmopolis,21 and the rise of feminism (Korherr 1928:93, 95). Korherr complained of the “emancipated woman” that she wanted to be “mistress of her body and her destiny.” And he cited a comment by Spengler, “Instead of babies, [she has] spiritual conflicts” (ibid.:102). No longer “natural,” reproduction had become rationalized and increasingly inorganic: Not because children would be impossible . . . but because intelligence developed to the extreme can no longer find reasons why children should be born, they are not born. . . . The great crisis occurs as soon as, in the everyday life of a population that has arrived at a high grade of civilization, there are “reasons” for the presence of children. Nature does not know reasons. The richness of births among primitive populations is a natural phenomenon: no one reflects on its occurrence, and still less on the utility or damage that derives from it. Where, in general, reasons for questions concerning life arise in the conscience, life itself has already become something problematical. Then begins a judicious limitation of the number of births, which at first is justified by material need, but soon is no longer justified. (ibid.:99–100)

Mussolini took it upon himself to specify the implications for the Italian situation of Korherr’s book and to dispel the “false” and “pseudo-scientific” theses of the followers of Malthus. In his preface to the Italian edition, he provided an exaggerated reading of Malthusian predictions22 and again argued that Italy was not immune from the dangerous linkage of falling birthrates and degeneration: “Those who have a kind of optimistic habit of mind observe . . . that the course of the disease [of declining birthrates] in Italy seems benign. This, too, is a commonplace and to eliminate it one need only examine the numbers” (Mussolini 1928a:17). The fact that the Italian population continued to grow might have appeared “comforting” with respect to 58

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other European nations, but it masked a “frightening demographic death throe,” especially in the cities. The relatively high national birthrate, Mussolini suggested, was due exclusively to the offspring of rural people: “All of town and urban Italy shows a deficit. . . . The cradles are empty and the cemeteries are growing” (ibid.:19). For Mussolini, the potential for further and more widespread numerical declines, and the progressive “aging”23 of the nation threatened not only Italy’s internal health and well-being24 but also its foreign relations and imperial ambitions. On the one hand, he linked numbers of troops to the military power of the state (1934b:190) and to the prerogative of imperial conquest: “Fertile peoples have a right to an Empire, those with the pride and the will to propagate their race on the face of the earth, the virile peoples, in the most literal sense of the word” (1936:30).25 On the other hand, he suggested aging nations, imagined as bodies whose virility was no longer assured, were threatened by “younger” and more prolific peoples who “press[ed] at the abandoned borders”: “[T]he entire white race, the race of the Occident, may be submerged by the other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own. Are black and yellow peoples therefore at the doors? Yes, they are at the door, and not only because of their fertility but also because of the consciousness they have of their race and its future in the world” (1928a:10).26 In the 1920s the concept of race deployed by Mussolini and most social experts had little to do with the biology of inheritance. Indeed, many Italian social experts, anxious (at least until 1938) to differentiate themselves from the racial and eugenical policies of northern Europe, rejected the idea of biological race in favor of that of the stock or historical population: “[W]e can speak of stock [stirpe] in the historical sense, rather than race in the biological sense” (Ilvento 1932:928).27 De Grazia has argued that Italy was a nation in which “admixtures” were not feared but were instead imagined to invigorate the stock (1992:53). Mussolini, in a 1932 interview, explicitly rejected the notion of a “pure” race and observed that “it is often precisely from happy mixtures that a nation derives strength and beauty” (Ludwig 1932:73)28 Even commentators who would later worry about 59

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“protecting the race” by forbidding sexual relations with the indigenous peoples of Italian colonies took pains to distinguish the demographic problem from a racial problem: The truth is that the problem of the race, however similar, is not identical with the demographic [problem]. When the legislator used the expression “stock,” he referred to the population that resides on the territory of the State, and he focused his attentive protection on its numerical strength. The expression “race” instead refers to the characteristics of the population as a homogeneous group, hereditarily distinguished by somatic and spiritual qualities. The protection of one (stock) is focused on demographic increase; the protection of the other (race) is focused on its purity, so as to avoid contacts that would contaminate it. In one case it is a question of quantity, in the other of quality. (Visco 1941:132– 33)29

Rather than purification, the goals of fascist demographic politics were social defense and multiplication; rather than selective breeding and sterilization, its means were improved hygiene, diet, and education.30

THE SHIFT TO PREVENTION: EUGENICS AND EUTHENICS The distinction between stirpe and razza was in some sense mirrored by a distinction made by Italian social experts between the “positive” interventions of a pronatalist social hygiene, and the “negative” interventions of eugenics. As we have seen, eugenical discourses were not absent in interwar Italy, and despite an emphasis on “quantity,” it would be misleading to assume that social experts (or any other Italians) were indifferent to the “quality” of offspring. However, the eugenics movement in Italy took a particular shape, molded by the church’s opposition to “zootechnics applied to human species” (Husslein 1942:148), and also by the specific demographic, medical, and urban strategies pursued by the regime. Many social experts would come to group together, as threats to the stock, practices as apparently diverse as birth control and Nazi eugenics. In the early 1920s many experts were openly sympathetic with the desire of some couples to control the spacing of births.31 60

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The neurobiologist Ugo Cerletti, writing in the fascist journal Gerarchia in 1924, advocated “birth control” as “a special rule of conduct to be observed in matrimonial life.” The goal was to be able to have physically and mentally healthy children at the most opportune moment, and to raise and educate them properly. This would provide both the family and society with “intelligent and active individuals.” The limitation and spacing of births by abstinence could, according to classic Malthusian logic, be beneficial both to individuals and to the collectivity. Especially among the lower classes, it would “reduce poverty and all of its ills” (Cerletti 1924:192–93).32 At the same time, however, Cerletti rejected the “neo-Malthusian” practices of contraception and abortion as “egoistic,” and selective eugenics as a threat to “the social utility of diseases” (ibid.:196). This position was also supported by Corrado Gini: while neo-Malthusian practices might increase the prosperity of individuals, “[f]rom the point of view of the race, and given the current conditions of the biological sciences, it seems extremely doubtful that it will ever be possible to substitute preventive practices for the repressive work of natural selection” (Gini 1922:171; cf. Arias 1924). However, this initial opposition between Malthusian practices, on the one hand, and neo-Malthusian practices and eugenics, on the other, was short-lived. It gave way, especially after Mussolini’s pronouncements in 1927, to an opposition between negative population policies and positive population policies, or between eugenics proper and social hygiene.33 A goal of the latter interventions was population increase, quantity and not just quality; self-control was no longer an appropriate means (Fabbri 1932a:719). This concern with population increase led to alternative readings of genetic statistics that emphasized the “weaknesses” of hereditary laws. Thus, Vincenzo Mario Palmieri, a Catholic professor of legal medicine, referred to a survey in Vermont, which purported to show that 63 percent of the children born to 157 families in which one or both of the parents were “abnormal” were themselves abnormal, in order to argue against negative eugenics: [W]e take up . . . the defense of the other 37 percent of normal individuals born from those couples, and we reaffirm that in its present state, eugenic sterilization represents an empirical attempt, 61

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comparable to that of the servants in the Gospel parable, who, in order to prevent the weeds sown at night by the “enemy” from sprouting, risked uprooting both them and the good grain. (Palmieri 1929)34

Even after Italy passed racial legislation in 1938, affirming the “Aryan” identity of Italians and restricting the rights of Jews, many social scientists continued to assail negative eugenics. Emblematic of this refusal was the debate in 1939 surrounding the premarital certificate and the “medical booklet” or “passport.” The idea of the premarital medical certificate, which would list contagious and degenerative diseases, had been debated since it was first proposed in 1919 by Ferdinando De Napoli. The Parliamentary Medical Fascio applauded the proposal in 1922 and suggested the certificate be required by every municipality. As Corrado Marciani commented, summarizing the Fascio’s order of the day, “Alongside the mayor and the priest, they envisaged the intervention of the doctor, who would give his approval to an enduring and sacred bond” (Marciani 1939:731). However, as Marciani noted, the papal encyclical Casti connubii and the Vatican decree of 24 March 1931 condemned the premarital certificate along with sterilization and selective breeding: the certificate “is part of that negative eugenics we have combatted as antihuman and, therefore, anti-Christian” (ibid.:732). More important for social scientists, however, negative eugenics operated to improve the quality of the population by limiting its rate of growth. It was therefore to be distinguished from hygiene and “positive eugenics,” or what was sometimes called “euthenics”:35 “Euthenics” or hygiene . . . is concerned with the manifest qualities of the organism. Euthenics is also called “positive eugenics,” which tends to improve the race through the individual, who is in turn improved by a perfect social environment. Positive eugenics is differentiated substantially from negative eugenics, which tends to improve the race by impeding the continuation of hereditary defects across generations, and by eliminating the weak, the defective, the sick, the degenerate, etc. It relies on repressive methods, such as sterilization and the obligatory prematrimonial certificate. (Poggi 1939:891–92)36 62

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The alternative to the premarital certificate for advocates of euthenics was the medical passport. The passport was to “accompany the individual from birth to death” and to contain an accurate and up-to-date clinical history. Not only would the physician be able to follow and control the health of single individuals, but the state would be able to use the passport, “just as it uses criminal records,” to eliminate people from certain jobs. In addition, the passport would “alert the physician and the State to the prevention and cure of hereditary or transmissible diseases,” would help the individual avoid “all those physical and moral sufferings that have entered his family,” and could be of use “in schools as well as barracks, in factories as well as offices, in hospitals as well as recreation rooms” (Marciani 1939:732; cf. Nardi 1940). In sum, the health of the population would be assured by a scientific management of the population that was both individualizing and totalizing. As we will see, the shift to positive eugenics was but one example of an increased emphasis in strategies of social intervention on prevention and the environment. Both demographic increase and medical health were seen to be linked to hygienic surroundings, and a series of measures were put in place not only to defend the stirpe against medical and demographic dangers, but also to promote “euthenic” behaviors.

TOWARD A POLITICS OF FERTILE BODIES Measures to defend the Italian stock were dependent on gendered scientific constructions linking the body of society and the bodies of women and men. Even before the First World War, Alfredo Rocco had warned that the different life expectancies of women and men meant any “aging” of the population threatened to disrupt the “quantitative equilibrium between the two sexes” (1914b:63). For Rocco, the voluntary limitation of births, that “plague of ultra-civilized populations,” resulted in a literal feminization of the body of society.37 As we have seen, social experts after the war also expressed a concern that the virility and youth of the nation were endangered by declining fertility. 63

CHAPTER III

At the same time, the nation was seen to be put at risk by the reproductive capacities of female bodies. A study presented to the 1931 International Congress for Studies of Population by the endocrinologist Nicola Pende aimed to make this danger visible and quantifiable. Though he acknowledged that up to half of all “infertility” was due to problems with men’s reproductive organs, Pende’s attention focused on the bodily structures of women.38 Using anthropometry to determine the features that would indicate the “greatest adaptation to maternity” (Pende 1933b:77), Pende found that the women who bore the most children also exhibited a “maternal” body type, characterized by narrow shoulders and a wide pelvis. Those who bore few children or were unmarried exhibited a “non-maternal” type, in which the shoulders were wider than the hips. Not only were these women not well suited to be mothers, they were also not fully female but rather “viriloid”(viriloidi) and characterized by an ovarian hormonal deficiency (ibid.:81). Though Pende found the origins of non-maternal natures in the endocrine system, others pointed to feminism and fashion, particularly as these affected urban women. A number of doctors complained that urban women avoided pregnancy in order to maintain their physical appearance, and that the fashion for low body weight and small breasts in turn made them poorly prepared for motherhood. A propaganda campaign in women’s magazines and medical journals therefore emphasized the aesthetic appeal and good health of larger and pregnant women. (Gaetano Salvemini, an exiled critic of the regime, parodied the campaign, calling it the “battle for the fat,” and looked ahead to the day when the regime might execute slender women for treason.)39 In sum, at the same time that the female body was closely identified with reproduction, the body’s reliability was called into question and made an object of concern. For Pende and others, the dependence of the body of society on the reproductive practices and health of its constituent parts required both a heightened medical surveillance and new subordinations of bodies and rights to collective imperatives. The task was to develop social technologies to defend the body of society against the disease of infertility, and to manage the reproduction of bodies in the social. These would range from financial incen64

THE POWER OF NUMBERS

tives to reproduce—measures more or less continuous with the political rationality and welfare practices of liberalism—to measures of social defense that subordinated the procreative tactics and physical bodies of individual women and men to the needs of the collectivity, to technologies operating at the level of the city and the home that sought to reduce dysgenic and sterile conditions and to restore bodies to “natural” levels of fertility. To some extent these measures engaged the bodies and practices of both women and men, redefining both paternity and maternity as social duties, and male and female bodies as loci of preventive and repressive interventions. But the virility of the social body, like that of the individual male, was seen to depend crucially on women.

65

✼

CHAPTER IV

✼

Governing Reproduction

I

N ORDER TO “defend” the Italian stock against further declines in rates of fertility and to ensure a vigorous expansion of the nation and its projected colonies, the fascist government proposed a series of social-technical interventions designed to transform the marital tactics and procreative practices of the Italian people.1 Commentators frequently grouped these interventions into two categories: “negative” or repressive measures were intended to inhibit the “Malthusian” practices of bachelorhood and delayed marriage and to punish the “neo-Malthusian” practices of abortion and contraception; “positive” measures were meant to encourage marriage, childbirth, and large families (See Zingali 1933). Many of these measures had their counterparts in other European nations (Glass 1940); throughout the West, reproduction had ceased to be a “fact of Nature” and had become instead a social-technical object, a potentially manageable social practice. However, as we have seen, the government of social bodies obeyed a particular logic in interwar Italy. Reproduction was reconfigured as a national duty, and new spaces were carved out for the preventive interventions of the state. While social scientific constructions of society as an organic body worked to “naturalize” contingent historical formations and particular articulations of rights and duties, they also made the body of society and its constituent parts objects of an ongoing surveillance and management, necessary to ensure a health and fertility that Nature alone could not guarantee. The Italian family and the bodies it contained, both imagined in “cellular” terms, would emerge as special foci of knowledges and technologies that aimed at a new social prophylaxis.

SPACES OF THE SOCIAL: THE FAMILY, NATURE, AND LAW The space for this activity of social experts and the state was opened up by an evolving jurisprudence that re-problematized 66

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

the “location” of the family, in relation to both Nature and the domains of “private” and “public” law. For many interwar jurists, the family could no longer be considered a natural institution, prior to society and outside the purview of the state. It was instead to be imagined as a social institution, open to (or perhaps even requiring) state intervention and therefore transcending the domain of private law.2 In fact, legal and scientific discourses would define the family not only as a legitimate object of surveillance and correction but also as an instrument for the defense of the Italian stock; in the context of the demographic campaign, the family would operate as a social technology. The 1865 Italian Civil Code, whose structure repeated that of the Napoleonic Code of 1804, had already marked a transition in the jurisprudence of the family. The code had continued the French liberal classification scheme: the principal institutions of the family were regulated in the “Book of Persons,” while inheritance and the marriage contract were included in the third book among the “Modes of Acquiring Property.” However, the author of the code, Justice Minister Giuseppe Pisanelli, had identified the family as lying somewhere between civil law, which “regards the individual,” and statute law, which “regards the political community” (Pisanelli 1863:247). Although Pisanelli would eventually abandon a proposal for the creation of a new body of “family law,” entirely separate from the Civil Code,3 the debate about the legal status of the family would continue to be phrased largely in these terms. Catholics and liberals argued that the family was a natural institution and therefore substantially beyond the jurisdiction of the state, an “island at whose shores the sea of law can only lap” (Jemolo 1948:57). This point of view was expressed, for example, in the Codice sociale, a charter of social Catholicism prepared by the International Union of Social Studies in Malines, France (Unione internazionale di studi sociali 1927). This code defined the family as an “institution arisen directly from nature” (§11). The family head had “duties and rights anterior and superior to every human law” and which “follow from the end assigned by nature to the familial community” (§13). Thus, although the family was entitled to “protection” (§17), it could not properly be a target of state intervention. A rather different conception of the family underlay the arguments of nationalist jurists such as Rocco and Antonio Cicu, the 67

CHAPTER IV

author of an important treatise on family law. For Cicu, the family was a “social formation” that functioned in the national interest. Thus, unlike the individual, the family could not be said to enjoy la signoria della volontà, the autonomy and “unencumbered power” to look after one’s own interests: While there is full liberty to enter into marriage and to adopt, the legitimation and recognition of natural children does not depend entirely on the will of the parents; there is absolutely no freedom to conform familial relations to one’s own interests, to diminish or increase the rights and obligations between parents and children, between husband and wife, between tutor and pupil, to guarantee better than the law allows the fulfillment of these obligations, or to eliminate legal guarantees; finally, . . . there is no freedom to decide whether to exercise these rights or not, or whether to renounce them. (ibid.:1913:126–27)

Instead, for Cicu, family law was on the boundary of private law and public law and was characterized by the idea of dovere (duty) rather than potere (in the double sense of authority and freedom to act). Familial rights and duties were not, he argued, set out to defend the autonomy of the single members but to defend social interests that included the education of minors, the conservation of their patrimony, and the care and assistance of the “unfit.” Cicu found in family relations a “commonly recognized characteristic of the relations of public law—that is, rights that are also duties” (ibid.:131–32). For Cicu, the parallel between public law and family law was linked to a convergence of the responsibilities of the family and those of the emerging welfare state. Just as the modern state was charged with maintaining the health and well-being of its population, the family was responsible for the care and education of its members. Indeed, Cicu argued that the family was not only a social entity but also a governmental entity: “The family carries out a State function. And it is this juridical end that justifies the vigilance and intervention of the powers of the State” (ibid.:132).4 This construction of the social and the governmental roles of the family implied a partial disqualification of certain discourses that naturalized the family, including the discourses of kinship and biological relatedness. For example, nationalists cam68

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

paigned in the interwar period to refashion legislation regarding “adoption,” a practice that the 1865 Civil Code had allowed over Pisanelli’s objections but had defined (loosely following Roman tradition) as a relationship established between two consenting males (Articles 202–19).5 As Giuseppe Chiarelli wrote in 1935, adoption had been opposed and restricted because the liberal state had limited its own role to conforming the family to “nature.” By contrast, the fascist conception of the family as “an institution of private law, but with social functions that the State supports, protects and coordinates,” meant adoption could not be considered “a simple fictitious means of imitating nature, or a pure juridical lie.” Adoption was to be reimagined as “a means for realizing a form of family organization on the basis of a real affective tie, which favors the solvency of the general social organization and the achievement of the social ends of the State” (Chiarelli 1935:3). However, a tension among Catholic, liberal, and nationalist constructions of the family persisted during the interwar period and is perhaps best illuminated by the debates surrounding marriage law in Italy, and especially by the legislation associated with the Lateran Accords of 1929. The law recognizing the “civil effects” of marriages celebrated by the church represented a compromise among legal doctrines and among political forces in interwar Italy. Thus, while it marked a partial defeat of the “statist” conceptions of the nationalists, it also marked a partial triumph of the social conception of the family as a proper object of state tutelage and legal regulation. The 1804 French Civil Code, marked by anticlericalism, had not recognized church marriages as civilly valid and had also contained provisions for divorce. However, the pre-unitary Italian states (with the exception of Lombardy, which came under the jurisdiction of Austrian law) had each modified the Napoleonic provisions in the matter of family law.6 The disarray of Italian matrimonial law in 1863 was for Pisanelli a sign that “the Italians do not yet have a country in common” (Pisanelli 1863:248). The 1865 Civil Code thus represented an attempt to unify family law, while at the same time rejecting canon law and insisting on a separation of jurisdictions. The code included several innovations relative to earlier legislation, including the removal of the dowry obligation. But most important, it required 69

CHAPTER IV

a civil ceremony in order for marriage to be legal, and it no longer recognized the “civil effects” of marriages performed by the church. In effect, the code distinguished the contract of marriage from the sacrament of marriage, placing the first under the jurisdiction of the state. If these same provisions in the 1804 Napoleonic Code had been a negative reaction—a refusal of the authority of the church over the will of individuals to contract marriage—in late-nineteenth-century Italy, they grew out of a positive desire for state intervention in the matter of marriage. As Pisanelli noted in his address to the Senate, marriage was not simply a contract but “an important social institution, which falls under the prescriptions of the State” (ibid.). This shift meant that legal marriage could no longer be regulated by canon law alone but had to be regulated by civil law. There were, to be sure, important continuities: the new code forbade divorce and identified the ends of marriage as procreation and the education of children. However, the code also brought significant changes: it raised the minimum ages of marriage from 14 to 18 for males and from 12 to 15 for females (Article 55) and required parental consent for those under 25 and 21, respectively (Article 63).7 At the same time, it removed some canonical obstacles to marriage, including religious vows, differing faiths, “spiritual kinship,” and legal kinship within certain limits. Finally, the code required that couples, in order legally to be married, present themselves at city hall and be read the sections of the Civil Code specifying the reciprocal duties of husband and wife (Articles 130–32). However, much as post-unification changes in property law failed to transform the inheritance practices of many Italians, so too changes in marriage law at first affected only a portion of the population. After 1 January 1866, when the new law took effect, marriages celebrated by religious rites alone continued to be frequent: there were some 120,000 from 1866 to 1871 (Ungari 1974:172).8 Paolo Ungari explains this early continuity, and the consequent statistical decline in the number of “legitimate” marriages (cf. Barbagli 1984:410–26), by the “confessional bias of the population of some regions and the political hostility of broad strata of the clergy to the new order of things” (Ungari 1974:188).9 But even after the clerical resistance softened, in part 70

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

because the “illegitimate” and unregistered marriages could be too easily broken (Desjardins 1932:40), many couples preferred for tactical reasons to avoid civil marriage. As Ungari notes, some wished “to avoid onerous double formalities, as well as the expenses for the necessary documents; to rescue children from registration, and therefore from military conscription; to evade the limits and prohibitions of marriage set for servicemen; [or] to avoid the loss of pension for remarried widows” (Ungari 1974:189). In other words the unintended effect of civil marriage—whose motivation was a more direct state control over the family and inheritance—was that many marriages escaped the detection of civil authorities, including census takers. Proposals to remedy this situation, by requiring that civil marriage precede the religious rite and by making priests criminally liable for infractions (as in the Napoleonic Code), were rejected as violations of the separation of the powers of the state and the church. This ambiguous and (for demographers) problematic state of affairs continued until the marriage law of 1929, which again recognized the “civil effects” of religious marriage. However, far from overturning the previous situation, the Lateran Accords and the marriage law represented a compromise between the nationalist and Catholic-liberal conceptions of marriage and the family. Article 34 of the treaty between the Holy See and Italy announced simply that “the Italian State, wishing to restore to marriage, which is the basis of the family, the dignity consistent with the Catholic traditions of its people, recognizes the civil effects of the sacrament of marriage regulated by canon law” (reprinted in Migliori 1959:41). Alfredo Rocco, who played an important role in the negotiation of the treaty but was silently opposed to its general orientation (Ungari 1974:220), argued that this recognition in no way implied the disqualification of civil marriage or a limit on the sovereignty of the state: “The State recognizes the civil effects of religious marriage but does not refrain from constituting and regulating civil marriage or conserving its juridical efficacy, once celebrated, even in relation to another marriage celebrated religiously” (Rocco 1929:1074–75). Instead, for Rocco, the state allowed religious marriage, “delegating” authority to the church, for its own reasons (Ungari 1974:222). On the one hand, 71

CHAPTER IV

unification of the rite avoided “disputes and duplications that damage the order of the State and civic morality” and permitted better censuses of the family. On the other hand, in Rocco’s view, religion performed a strategic social function worthy of some state support: According to the Concordat, marriage maintains its importance as a social and political institution, since the legal family, the primary cell of the Nation, continues to be regulated by the laws of the State. But the State cannot forget that religions recognize a sacred character to this essential act of individual and social life, which for the Catholic Church elevates it to the rank of sacrament. The State has no motive, nor any interest, to oppose anything that might in any way elevate this institution in the consciousness of the people or reinforce its spiritual value. (cited in Jacuzio 1932:536)10

The state’s ongoing interest in marriage as a social institution was reflected in matrimonial practices themselves. Thus, for example, the law detailing revisions in the Civil Code relative to marriage required that banns be published at city hall as well as the church, that the priest forward a copy of the marriage certificate to civil authorities within five days, and—at Rocco’s insistence—that the priest explain the civil effects of marriage to the newlywed couple and read aloud the sections of the Civil Code concerning spousal rights and duties. (As Ungari notes, Rocco campaigned unsuccessfully to have these sections of the code read during the ceremony, from the altar and not in the sacristy (Ungari 1974:221)).11 Where civil and canon law differed, the treaty held the former to be determinant. As Rocco explained, “canonical marriage will be celebrated only in those cases in which it would also be possible to celebrate civil marriage” (1929:1084). This meant the state would continue to determine the legal minimum age at marriage—this was, however, lowered to 16 for boys and 14 for girls—and restrict the marriage of the “mentally infirm.” Rocco argued that “the existence, in a single juridical system, of a double standard of capacity cannot be tolerated. Consequently, the religious marriage contracted by a legally disabled person cannot be registered, even if the person is judged capable according to canon law” (ibid.). 72

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

These new regulations created a certain amount of uncertainty among couples as to the legality of their own marriages. To reduce this uncertainty and to “protect the good faith of the bride and groom,” the municipal registry office found it necessary to issue certificates after publication of the banns, guaranteeing to individual couples that their marriages would be legal under civil law.12 Nevertheless, as Ungari notes, some confusion persisted: In 1866 and after, timid people poured into the rectories and bishoprics, asking if a marriage contracted in city hall was truly valid, and for many years they continued . . . to opt for a religious celebration only. In 1929 they instead climbed the stairs of the Prefectures, to be reassured about the civil validity of concordat marriages. (Ungari 1974:153–54)

Although the new laws did not radically transform marriage practices, they did confirm marriage and the family as within the purview of the state. These would eventually be regulated not only by civil law but also by the new Penal Code. Title XI punished bigamy, adultery, deception resulting in marriage, and violations of the obligations of familial assistance as “Crimes against the Family” (Articles 556–74). This Title was necessary, Rocco argued, in order to “strengthen the physical existence and moral unity of the familial organism.” Punitive sanctions defended against “attacks on the institution of marriage, the fulcrum of every well-constituted society, or on the organism of the family” (cited in Battista 1931:292). At the same time, the family was constituted juridically as a locus of new responsibilities and duties. The 1942 Civil Code continued to include the family within the realm of private law. But proposals for a Carta del Diritto, a kind of fascist constitution based on the 1927 Labor Charter [Carta del Lavoro], defined the family as “the fundamental nucleus of the national society.” As such, the family had certain social duties, in the fulfillment of which it was to be “aided” by the state: “The state entrusts to the family the upbringing, education, and moral preparation of the young but supplements and amplifies the work of the family, in order to achieve completely the ethical goals of the nation” (Funaioli 1943:372).13 It was, in some sense, by defining the family as (naturally) deficient in matters ranging from education to 73

CHAPTER IV

leisure to reproduction that the state authorized its own presence (cf. Saraceno 1991:201). This orientation may not adequately be explained, as some have suggested, as a “return” to the preindustrial, patriarchal family.14 To be sure, the family continued to be patriarchal in its structure and functioning, but even the authority of the father, the patria potestas, was increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of the collectivity. This was, in fact, a cause of concern for some fascists, who continued to emphasize the power of the family head and the importance of private property against the state and “social imperatives.”15 On the other hand, social technicians such as Sileno Fabbri, the president of the Opera Nazionale di Maternità ed Infanzia, argued that some patriarchal prejudices in the law (and in the positions of the church) posed threats to the welfare of the population. This was so, he suggested, in the case of paternity investigations, which although an Italian common law tradition, were forbidden outside marriage by the 1865 Civil Code (Article 189).16 For Fabbri, the right to investigate paternity was “an act of social justice” with farreaching practical consequences: [I]t is an act of public and private morality, because it encourages men to be more prudent about casual affairs and is therefore also an incentive to public decency; it is an act of social defense because it eliminates the causes of three categories of crimes: infanticide, crimes derived from vendettas for seduction, [and] the sorrowful series of all the other [crimes] that find in illegitimate children the element predisposed to rebellion against society and its laws; it is also an act of defense of the race, because, by reducing illegitimate births, one reduces the category of children among whom mortality is the highest; it is an act of general economy, because by reducing the number of the illegitimate, society will not have to pay to raise the children of persons unknown. (Fabbri 1930:658)17

As Fabbri’s arguments make clear, the Italian family was not only constituted as an end or locus of government in interwar Italy; it was also constituted as a kind of social technology. Michel Foucault has argued that, with the rise of statistics, which showed it was impossible to reduce the phenomena of population to the level of the family, this patriarchal structure 74

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

lost its status as a model of and for government and instead became an instrument of government. The family came “to appear as an element internal to population, . . . as a segment. But nevertheless a privileged segment, because whenever information is required concerning the population: sexual behavior, demography, consumption, etc., this has to be obtained through the family” (Foucault 1979:17). In interwar Italy the family would emerge as both a privileged locus and agent of social intervention, a point of intersection for a variety of strategies that at times worked at cross-purposes but with the ostensible goals of securing the welfare and fertility of the stock.18 In particular, the family was called on to play a positive demographic function, to guarantee the health and expansion of the population. As Fabbri wrote, the family was “the most suitable environmental condition for pursuing the best demographic effects” (1932a:721). This construction of the family worked to further destabilize the boundaries of the private and public. Many social experts, adopting the masculinist language of the natural sciences, would speak of the state “penetrating” the private domain of the family (see Dessau 1933). But I want to suggest that medical, juridical, and social scientific practices made the family part of the domain of government and administration by locating it elsewhere. The “social” was constituted by discourses and interventions that crosscut domestic and public spaces and that specified rights and duties outside the confines of private and public law. Here, the familiar practices of both women and men took on new meanings. Although Chiara Saraceno describes the interwar Italian family as an “institution of normality” (1981a:191), it might be more accurate to call it an institution of normalization. As we will see, it would be charged with the reduction of risks and of deviations from medico-hygienic norms, and with the development of the married couple’s reproductive potential.

CONSTRUCTING REPRODUCTION AS SOCIAL DUTY The discourses of nationalist jurists and social experts agreed that both paternity and maternity were duties owed toward the nation (Saraceno 1991), and constructed the bodies of both men 75

CHAPTER IV

and women as objects of legal and technical intervention. However, one of the earliest demographic measures enacted by the regime—a 1927 tax on bachelorhood and, by extension, on the practice of postponing marriage—was the only one explicitly to identify men’s reproductive practices as problematic. Bachelors were penalized financially because they failed to contribute to the strength of the nation. As social hygienist Arcangelo Ilvento put it, paternity was akin to military service, and bachelors were “deserters of paternity” (Ilvento 1927).19 However, though the tax targeted men, who were presumed to start families (de Grazia 1992:69; Saraceno 1991:205), it was also grounded in anxieties about the wasted resources of young female bodies. Like other European countries, early-twentieth-century Italy was characterized by late age at marriage and by a high percentage of persons who never married:20 TABLE 1 Marriage Patterns AVERAGE AGE AT MARRIAGE

Males Year 1916–20 1921–25 1926–30

Females

Single

Widowers

Single

Widows

28.9 27.5 27.4

45.5 44.6 44.6

23.4 24.1 23.9

41.4 40.4 41.8

PERCENTAGE NEVER MARRIED

Males

Females

Year

20–24

50–54

20–24

50–54

1911 1921 1931 1936

86.4 85.9 88.4 90.0

10.0 10.1 9.1 9.0

60.5 67.8 66.8 69.3

10.6 11.2 11.9 12.4

These practices and their effects on demographic increase had been frequently discussed by demographers but were made objects of particular concern after the First World War, which reduced the supply of marriageable men. As we have seen, nationalists and social experts had worried even earlier that Italian 76

GOVERNING REPRODUCTION

women, encouraged by feminism, might “withhold vital reproductive services from the nation” (de Grazia 1992:25; cf. Rocco 1914). Now it appeared that a shortage of men would, as one Senator put it, cause “an infinite quantity of girls to remain attractive devices, useless for the ends of procreation.”21 Physicians and eugenicists argued that postponement of marriage not only limited the number of children a couple could eventually have, but also affected the quality of the offspring. Gini, in a paper delivered in 1912 to the First International Eugenics Conference, had announced that “all the data examined . . . agree in showing that the younger the mother at delivery, the better are found to be the characteristics of the offspring” (Gini 1912:146). Gini suggested that lowering women’s age at marriage was the “most practicable eugenic technology,” because it was consistent not only with the nation’s interests but also with “the girls’ desires and the aesthetic sentiments of the men” (ibid.:159). These themes were echoed by Mussolini in a 1934 editorial on “Young Marriages” in Il Popolo d’Italia. Mussolini cited a variety of national interests in the encouragement of early unions: 1. At age 20, marriage conserves all its physical and sentimental freshness, and the birth of a child is an event that integrates and cements the union. 2. When a man decides to marry at age 30, 80 percent of the time it is only for practical or financial . . . reasons, and thus, ignoring every argument, he is determined to avoid at all costs the arrival of a child, which causes . . . a violent financial disruption of the family budget. 3. Even when there is procreation, the children born of unions that are no longer young cannot have the same physical, moral, and intellectual health of other [children], and in 20 percent of the cases, they contribute diseased, deficient, and asexual persons to the national economy. (1934c)

In order to discourage late marriage and bachelorhood (and their degenerative effects), the regime instituted a progressive tax on unmarried men between the ages of 25 and 65, “for the sole fact of their status,” which took effect on 1 January 1927.22 The tax was doubled two years later and increased again by 50 percent in 1934. But though the tax was not economically insig77

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nificant, it had little observable effect. It neither lowered the average age at marriage nor increased the marriage rate, which instead fell from 7.6 in 1927 to 6.7 in 1931 (ISTAT 1943:59).23 And from 1931 to 1936, the percentage of bachelors in the age group 25–64 increased from 19.6 to 21.9, in part because of the depression (ibid.:58). Saraceno argues that “the long-term cost for the individual but also for the family (often in need of a son’s wage) of a marriage could not be balanced out by the burden of the [bachelor] tax” (1991:205; cf. de Grazia 1992:70). In fact, social experts and commentators were divided about the tax’s real functions. It was, in Mussolini’s words, a means of giving a “demographic spur to the nation,” one that might be complemented someday by a tax on “infertile marriages” (1927a:364).24 An ISTAT report on demographic increase argued that the tax met “the demands of tributary justice” by fairly distributing the burdens of government expenses among families and individuals (ISTAT 1934:50). And Gaetano Zingali, in a paper delivered to the International Conference for Studies of Population, suggested that the tax “did not so much have practical and financial goals, as a moral goal of censure and condemnation” (1933:589). Many women appear to have welcomed the tax, not only because it penalized men but also because the money collected was directed to the maternal and child healthcare agency (ONMI) (de Grazia 1992:70).25 The tax on bachelors represented one of the few points of divergence of fascist reproductive politics from the teachings and interventions of the Vatican. Although priests, together with servicemen, disabled veterans, and the mentally ill, were exempted from the tax, celibacy was nevertheless defined as a kind of “treason.” The church instead wished to distinguish “desertion of paternity” from the choice to control the desires of the flesh through celibacy. This was the position of the International Union of Social Studies, for whom the population problem was above all a “moral question” rather than a social question: “The command of Genesis, crescite et multiplicamini, does not impose on each man the duty of transmitting life; for a certain number of persons, destined to exercise functions incompatible with the burden of a family, celibacy proves to be a condition superior to conjugal status” (Unione internazionale di studi sociali 1927:77). Judith Blake (1965) has argued that the 78

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church’s exaltation of celibacy may have reinforced the European marriage pattern of postponing marriage.26 For fascist social technicians like Sileno Fabbri, the self-control advocated by the church could, if generalized, be socially dangerous. Here he seems to echo Korherr, connecting abstinence with egoism: Just as civilization signals the beginning of demographic regression, so, too, the calculation of each person for the government of his own existence (while representing a virtue to the extent that it is an optimal means of self-control of one’s actions), carried onto the terrain of love, constitutes a condemnation to sterility. Those [who practice calculation] are the natural candidates for neomalthusianism, narcotics, and similar degenerative forms. (Fabbri 1932a:719)

Fabbri argued that marriage and procreation were, in fact, social duties (doveri sociali) engaging both women and men; some jurists would suggest that these duties be made legal obligations.27

THE POLICING OF CONTRACEPTION A similar logic made efforts to impede conception and fetal development an attack on the integrity of the social body. If the tax on bachelors represented a flattening of gender differences, efforts to police contraception and abortion articulated a genderspecific politics in which promotion of fertility was explicitly linked to control of women’s bodies and their reproductive potentials. The politics of abortion in particular not only articulated reproduction as a social duty but also subordinated women’s bodies to the needs of the state. The campaign against “neo-Malthusian” practices—that is, against contraception and abortion rather than abstinence or birth postponement—began in earnest with the creation in April 1926 of a ministerial commission charged, as one commentator put it, with informing the government of “the administrative and social police measures able to insure the order of the family against the various perils of empirical and pseudo-scientific neo-Malthusianism” (Zingali 1933:592). Several of the commission’s proposals were incorporated into the 1926 Testo unico delle 79

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leggi di pubblica sicurezza, which made it a crime to publish or distribute information on neo-Malthusian techniques; into the 1927 law on public health, which required physicians to report all suspected abortions;28 and into Rocco’s 1930 Penal Code, which defined contraception and abortion as “crimes against the integrity of the stock.” This legislation marked a shift in the politics and jurisprudence of reproduction, making public and a target of state intervention what had recently been constructed as private and a matter of individual morality and the action of the Catholic Church, and articulating a new politics of the population and the human body.29 In a study of the jurisprudence concerning reproduction, lawyer Antonio Visco identified coitus interruptus, anal intercourse, and the use of chemical and mechanical devices, including condoms and occlusive pessaries, as popular forms of preventing conception in Italy (Visco 1941:98). According to Visco, the most commonly used technique was withdrawal, which, a physician had observed, had entered into common use even in the most humble bridal chambers . . . uncontrollable, antihuman, antiphysiological, it defrauds nature by exalting sexual egoism; it defrauds the State because it subtracts thousands and thousands of citizens from the Nation; it goes against the laws of God because it suppresses a natural and intended manifestation. (Semizzi cited in Visco 1941:98)

In the eyes of many jurists and doctors, contraception (like late marriage) represented a double threat to the Italian stock. Not only did it deprive the nation of citizens, they argued; it also damaged the mental health and reproductive organs of women, and hence the future reproductive potential of the collectivity (Marconcini 1945:206–7). Here, once again, experts mapped the social and the physiological onto one another, using the medium of the female body. The effects on mental health of women’s refusal of maternity were said to include neurasthenia, anxiety, vertigo, and forms of madness (Visco 1941:97–98). To prevent these practices, the Testo unico delle leggi di pubblica sicurezza forbade the sale, distribution, and publication of information on the prevention or interruption of pregnancy;30 a Royal Legislative Decree dated 7 August 1925 outlawed the sale 80

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of medicines with contraceptive properties; and Article 553 of the Penal Code prohibited “public incitements” to use contraception. However, the most popular technique of contraception, withdrawal, was acknowledged to be beyond the scope of effective regulation, while condoms, against the wishes of the church, continued to be available for reasons of public health.31 Yet, although condoms remained legal, they were expensive; and oral testimony suggests that their purchase was socially stigmatized and informally policed during the fascist regime. Luisa Passerini notes that in Turin it was often necessary to buy condoms in another part of the city, so that neighbors would not be aware that one was practicing contraception (Passerini 1984:194–95). And de Grazia points out that condoms were often associated with extramarital affairs and prostitution (1992:57). The effects of the new legislation are therefore difficult to judge. Gaetano Salvemini argued, only somewhat perversely, that in a nation lacking a widespread birth-control movement, the bans on the advertisement of contraceptives helped to diffuse practices that had previously been unknown and “taught many innocent souls that one could enjoy oneself without paying the price” (Salvemini 1933:65). More plausibly, Luisa Passerini suggests that the bans accentuated the “poverty and uncertainty of the contraceptive techniques available to the women of the working classes” and may actually have increased the frequency with which women resorted to abortion (Passerini 1984:192). Passerini doubts that the most popular forms of birth control were enough to account for the reductions of fertility in interwar Italy: the fact that these methods all required the cooperation of men, combined with the ineffectiveness of other techniques and the bans on information, led many women to rely on abortion (ibid.:195).32

ABORTION, LIFE, AND SOCIAL DEFENSE The new logic of regulation of reproductive behavior as an aspect of social defense is perhaps best exemplified by the discourses and legislation concerning abortion. Abortion had long been against the law. The liberal Penal Code of 1889, drafted by 81

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justice minister Giuseppe Zanardelli, punished procured abortion as a “crime against the person [the fetus]” with incarceration from one to four years.33 Penalties were also prescribed for second parties and made more severe when the abortion was performed without the consent of the woman, especially by her husband. However, when the abortion was done to save the honor of a man, his wife, or his female relative, the penalties could be substantially reduced. The inclusion of abortion as a crime against the person was rooted in a liberal notion of the rights of individuals. As jurist Michele Longo noted in his 1911 commentary on the Zanardelli code: From the moment that the human being begins to live in the maternal belly, it has a right to expect that the society of which it is about to become an integral part will take an interest in it and protect it against anyone who wishes to attack its existence. . . . The right to life is inherent to us by natural origin. The social group does nothing but ensure it. . . . The juridical object of the crime of abortion is the right to life of the fetus. (Longo 1911:396– 97)34

Given that the crime of abortion consisted in the intent to suppress the life of the fetus, it was possible to commit the crime only when there was no doubt as to the existence of this life.35 Yet, as Longo remarked, for the first two or three months of pregnancy, the uncertainties surrounding the viability of a fetus raised serious doubts about the objective, juridical nature of the violated law: “Thus, rather than speak of abortion in the criminal sense of the word, we should speak of dispersion of the fetus . . . and not proceed on questions of imputability” (ibid.:399).36 Similar ambiguities marked popular and religious constructions of fetal life. As the demographer Giorgio Mortara reported, on the basis of conversations with obstetricians, many couples did not use contraceptives “because of religious scruples” but “did not hesitate to obtain abortions, believing this to be a trifling offense”: This opinion is confirmed, sometimes in good faith, by the priest and the confessor, who interpret very broadly certain provisions of canon law, which punished with only light penalties abortion 82

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within forty days of conception, because it was believed (following the doctrine of Aristotle and Pliny) that only after this period did the embryo receive its soul. (Mortara 1908:146–47)37

In sum, prefascist legislation was grounded in the notion that abortion was an attack on an individual life and the rights of the fetus; in juridical, religious, and medical determinations of when life begins; and in largely subjective questions about the motivations of aborting women. The 1930 Penal Code broke with the code of 1889 by creating a new category of crimes in Title X: “Crimes against the Integrity and Health of the Stock.” In his report to the King, Alfredo Rocco situated this new category between “Crimes against Public Morality and Decency” (Title IX) and “Crimes against the Family” (Title XI), all of which “offended the interests of society” (Rocco 1930:53).38 Yet it was the grouping of a set of apparently unrelated practices under the new title that signaled a juridical transition. The new category included the crimes of voluntary sterilization, instigation to practice contraception, willful transmission of venereal disease, and criminal abortion, now punishable by imprisonment of from two to five years.39 Rocco wrote that existing categories in the code were inadequate to the needs of the social body and the state. The use of birth control, he argued, could not properly be included among “Crimes against Public Morality and Decency”: Instead, it seemed to me that the principal raison d’être of the indictment of [neo-Malthusian] practices was to be found in their offense against the interest that the nation has, as an ethnic unit, to defend the continuity and integrity of the stock. No one can really doubt that every act meant to suppress or sterilize the founts of procreation is an attack against the very life of the race, in the series of present and future generations that compose it, and therefore an offense against the very existence of society ethnically considered—that is, against the existence of the nation. (1930:53)

According to a similar logic, transmission of social disease was moved from the category of “Crimes against the Life and Safety of the Individual” and redefined as a main factor of the degeneration of the race.40 And abortion, because it attacked “maternity 83

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as a perennial fount of the life of individuals and the species,” was identified as a threat to both the nation and the state. There were some important continuities in the treatment of abortion. The new code again recognized the defense of “honor” as a mitigating circumstance, and Rocco acknowledged that abortion also threatened other interests that had been protected by the earlier penal code. These included the interest of the unborn child, “which is always a spes vitae if not yet a life,” the interest of the life and safety of the mother, and the interests of family, social morality, and decency. “But it is certain,” Rocco wrote, “that the offense against the interest of the nation to ensure the continuity of the stock must be considered predominant” (Rocco 1930:53).41 And if the rights of the fetus were subordinate to those of society, so, too, were the rights of women, including those who had been victims of rape.42 As one commentator explained: The crime [of abortion] cannot be excused when committed to eliminate the product of a conception due to carnal violence. . . . As soon as it is conceived, [the child] is protected by law, both in the individual interest, and in the social interest, to ensure the continuity of the stock. The hypothesis of carnal violence . . . is therefore irrelevant. (Drago 1939:666)

With abortion defined as a crime against the social body and its reproductive potential, the question of when the life of the fetus began became largely irrelevant.43 The effective repression and prevention of abortion required knowledge, not only of the frequency of abortive practices but also of the fact of pregnancy. And this, in turn, required overcoming the resistance of physicians who constructed abortion differently. Given the acknowledged failures of doctors to report suspected abortions, jurists in the late 1930s called for the “mandatory declaration” of pregnancies. The idea had been proposed before (by Pinard in France, and by Alfieri at the 1919 Congress of Social Obstetrics), but in 1936 and 1937 it was addressed with a new urgency at two meetings of the Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and at a special congress at the Exhibition on Summer Camps and Infant Welfare. One proponent, Giuseppe Santoro, suggested the law should require that women report their pregnancies after three or four 84

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months. Failure to do so would result in fines, which could then be donated to assistance programs. Mandatory declaration would, he argued, have a number of positive effects. First, it would permit a “permanent census” of pregnant women and provide precious statistical information for the social and medical defense of maternity. Second, it would allow the state better to measure the size of generations to come, and thus contribute to the demographic campaign. Third, and perhaps most important, it would facilitate the policing of criminal abortions: “[W]hen an abortion or miscarriage occurs, the preceding declaration of pregnancy will make [claims of] miscarriage more believable. . . . [V]ice versa, the failure to report the pregnancy will constitute an important clue concerning abortion” (Santoro 1938). Indeed, it was the goal to repress abortion that argued for declaration no later than the third month. Pinard and Alfieri had suggested the fifth month, in order to be certain of pregnancy, and Santoro found this acceptable to meet administrative, prophylactic, and assistance needs in the case of married women. But it would be too late “for the ends of a vast prophylaxis of pathological and criminal abortion,” especially in the case of unmarried girls and separated spouses (ibid.:23). However, the collection of information for this permanent census, to be supervised by the public health officials of each province, raised a number of strategic and legal problems, not least of which was the question of doctor-patient confidentiality. This was especially acute in the case of unmarried women, who might be reluctant to declare themselves pregnant for fear of “moral repercussions.” Santoro wrote: Only by surrounding these declarations with the precaution of professional secrecy will we encourage women to be sincere, and avoid grave family tragedies. At the same time, criminal abortions will diminish. It would be enough to prevent the collected declarations from going beyond the awareness of the physician and becoming a cold, bureaucratic, office dossier. This is, unfortunately, what happens with the obligatory reports of abortions, which should remain secret. (ibid.:23)

The question of professional secrecy was, however, taken up with more intransigence and from a rather different point of view by the magistrate Piero Pagani. For Pagani, the ease with 85

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which all traces of abortion could be hidden meant that the number of known and punished abortions was “an infinitesimal part of the real number” (Pagani 1938:14). Although estimates for the total number of aborti (abortions and miscarriages) ranged from 5 to 40 percent of all conceptions (Alberti 1934; Marconcini 1945:209–12), the total number of “known” abortions and miscarriages in 1932 was, for example, only 65,679 (Passerini 1984:215).44 Moreover, a very small proportion of these were classified as suspect, and only a handful were successfully prosecuted.45 The problem, argued Pagani, was to distinguish miscarriages from criminal acts, and this required a “systematic search for causes” (1938:15): “[I]n order to engage and wage the battle advantageously on this terrain, it is necessary to know very well the enemy against which one is fighting: its forces, its possibilities, its arts of concealment and defeatism. Once all of this is discerned, it will be possible to weaken [the enemy] with adequately prepared means” (ibid.:14–15). Pagani proposed two measures: the institution of mandatory declaration of pregnancy—“a juridical institution that is blocked with the pretext of damage to the right of the woman not to make publicly known a fact that might bring dishonor”—and reform of the laws requiring doctors to report abortions (ibid.:18). Unlike Santoro, Pagani was not bothered by the potential harm to individuals and their reputations: “[W]hen a private right and a right of the association are in contrast, the first must give way” (ibid.:17). The 1934 Testo unico delle leggi sanitarie obligated physicians to report within two days to the provincial medical officer any miscarriage or abortion in which they participated or of which they became aware.46 The appropriate form required that the doctor not only describe the circumstances of any miscarriage but indicate the cause. The report would remain secret, but suspected abortions would be investigated by the General Health Administration at the Interior Ministry. If properly enforced, Pagani argued, the law would create an “official observatory,” able to specify the etiology of every single miscarriage and abortion and able to draw conclusions about the population as a whole, on the basis of topographic, social, and environmental variables (ibid.:19). However, Pagani found the body of legislation concerning abortion to be seriously flawed. On the one hand, the obligation 86

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to report abortions was not extended to midwives, which represented a “grave lacuna” in the collection of accurate information. Pagani suggested that women were more likely to discuss matters related to sex with other women, and that the patterns of sociability of midwives, especially in the countryside, put them in the best position to collect information on abortion (ibid.:20). On the other hand, Pagani saw any provision for secrecy to be in contradiction to the social and public nature of the problem of abortion, especially when it protected individuals from prosecution. In his view, while the first paragraph of Article 365 of the Penal Code required medical professionals to refer all suspected crimes to the authorities, the second paragraph completely “castrated” the first, removing the sanction when the report (referto) would expose the patient to criminal prosecution. In this way, Pagani argued, doctors and midwives were “ope-legis exempted from observance of the precept of the law”(ibid.:22).47 The referto had long been debated by legislators and criminologists, less in terms of the rights of patients versus the needs of the state than in terms of the professional versus civic duties of the physician. In formulating the 1889 Penal Code, Zanardelli had rejected the proposal to weaken the protections of professional secrecy, because an absolute obligation of referral would have created a conflict between law and relations of personal and professional trust (ibid.:23). A similar proposal was also rejected by Rocco and the Parliamentary Commission, but for different reasons. One jurist argued that the referto should be obligatory only in cases of abortion on non-consenting women; were it otherwise, “the person who needed a doctor would, in order to avoid prosecution, prefer not to seek his help, thereby often exposing herself to grave danger” (cited ibid.).48 But for Pagani such considerations, which made possible a “legalized code of silence [omertà],” indicated that “the theory of the fascist, authoritarian, and totalitarian State had not yet rid itself completely of the residue of the theory of demo-liberalism . . . and individualism.” Since, for Pagani, doctors and midwives performed “a service of public necessity,” any consideration for the individual—whether the doctor or the patient—had to give way (ibid.:27, 24–25). To back up this “pedestrian application” of fascist legal logic, Pagani cited the example of fascist insurance legislation, which 87

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as we saw in Chapter II had radically redefined the social nature of private acts. Pagani suggested that the provisions on abortion and the work-accident insurance law of 17 August 1935, requiring that injured workers submit to the medical interventions deemed necessary by insurers, undermined “the demoliberal and individualistic canon that the citizen is the only and sovereign bearer of the right to dispose of his own physical person” (ibid.:27). Thus, for Pagani, a new articulation of the relations between the individual and the social organism also developed a new politics of the human body. The limits set on the individual’s right to dispose of his or her own body were, in fact, made explicit by Article 532 of the Penal Code, which made voluntary sterilization a crime. In this instance, the state asserted an interest not in the potential life of the product of conception but in the reproductive potential of the body itself. As Antonio Visco explained, “the juridical good of generative potential, to which a most important interest of the Nation is linked, is not disposable” (1941:101).49 Although most of the operations classified as “voluntary sterilization” were performed on women, men could, at least in principle, also be prosecuted under the law. An example was a man who donated a testicle for an organ transplant. Because the operation had “certainly caused . . . a weakening of the sexual function” of the donor, Antonio Visco argued to the court, both he and the doctors should have been punished (ibid.:103). In this case the Supreme Court found on appeal that a man’s physical integrity could indeed be a disposable good. But though neither doctors nor lawyers could always be depended on to defend the stock, a new juridical rationality had called permanently into question the relation between the bodies of society and the individual.

THE PROMOTION OF FERTILITY In addition to negative measures intended to reduce the frequency of bachelorhood and to suppress neo-Malthusian practices, the regime adopted a variety of “positive” measures. These included financial stimuli, as well as interventions in popular culture, designed to act as incentives to marriage and procreation. However, a number of social experts and political 88

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leaders would complain that financial rewards were not only ineffectual but also insufficiently modern. Wary of any appeals to economic self-interest and of interventions that seemed therapeutic rather than preventive, these social technicians would call for measures that displaced rights with duties and that made the bodies of women and men subordinate to the demands of the body of society. One set of measures eliminated obstacles to marriage by giving representatives of the King the ability to exempt couples from requirements of the Civil Code concerning kinship, by lowering the dowry requirements for officers of the armed forces and by reducing the minimum age at which soldiers could be married.50 A second set forbade the exclusion of married women from certain jobs51 and gave preference in hiring and the assignment of public housing to married men and women.52 Finally, a third series of measures, especially at the local level, provided financial incentives to marry, including marriage bonuses,53 loans,54 and rail discounts for honeymoons.55 The regime’s attempts to promote high birthrates were concentrated on financial aid to families with several children. The first law provided tax exemptions for employees of the state and parastate agencies with seven or more dependent children, and for other families with ten or more dependent children (or a total of twelve with six or more dependent); though many families qualified, few took advantage of the exemptions.56 The law further called for initiatives at the local level to aid large families (ISTAT 1934:32–36). A number of municipalities reduced the number of children required to qualify for exemptions from municipal taxes. Turin, for example, extended benefits to families with five dependent children under the age of 18. Other, more limited measures included reductions in the cost of transportation, utilities, and garbage collection. Parastate agencies gave subsidies and preference in hiring and housing to large families, the Institute of Public Housing in Milan reduced rents, and labor unions cut back dues and provided assistance in filing for tax exemptions (ibid.:35–36). Finally, national and local entities introduced a variety of “birth bonuses.” A decree by Mussolini had provided bonuses to civil servants and members of the armed forces at the birth of 89

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a child beginning May 1935.57 Similar bonuses were provided, along with other subsidies, by the Prefectures, the Provincial Administrations, and the Provincial Councils of Corporations. Seventy percent of these bonuses (and 50 percent of the total aid) went to non-state employees, while the subsidies were directed almost exclusively toward the second groups. Still greater financial assistance was provided by the municipalities, especially the large cities of the north.58 The municipalities also subsidized rents, distributed tram tickets, and offered discounts on utilities to “prolific couples” (ISTAT 1943:81). A limited number of demographic prizes were provided by ONMI, and more substantial sums by other parastate agencies and the fascist confederations (ISTAT 1943:115–34). Other incentives to procreate included demographic “contests,” begun in 1929 in the regions of the Abruzzi, Campania, and Sicily; breast-feeding bonuses; and pregnancy allowances (ISTAT 1934:49). It is important to point out that the publications of the regime often identified as elements of the demographic campaign social technologies that had been deployed to different ends in other nations or that obeyed a different logic (Glass 1940: 247). This was the case, for example, with the family allowances instituted in 1934.59 As de Grazia has argued (1992:86–87), these allowances are best understood not as demographic interventions but as economic measures linked to reductions in men’s wages. Many of the other measures described above worked to reward paternity in times of economic scarcity and represented in some cases a shift away from the support of maternity toward the support of large families (See Saraceno 1991:203).

TOWARD A NEW POLITICS OF PREVENTION Bonuses and other financial incentives to marry or procreate— as well as the measures against bachelors—were, in fact, attacked by some social scientists and technicians as not addressing the real demographic dangers facing Italy, and by fascist politicians as resembling too closely the welfare measures enacted by liberal-democratic states. For Korherr, writing about earlier German interventions, prizes (as well as repressive mea90

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sures) were useless to combat a problem that required preventive interventions: “Just as a doctor who combats the exterior forms of a disease, instead of going to its deep causes, will not help the patient to recover, the physician of the social body will never liberate it from the state of disease and reawaken the desire for children, with only superficial means, as democracy attempts to do” (Korherr 1928:167–68).60 Alberto De’ Stefani, a political economist and member of the Fascist Grand Council, complained that fascist legislation on marriage and filiation was “abundantly liberal.” Although himself a liberal in economic matters, De’ Stefani warned the Council of the same logic being applied to reproduction. The citizen is today authorized to remain celibate or with few children, by paying the price of his sin in installments to the State. If celibacy and voluntary sterility are, as people say, a crime against the State, this crime, under the current legislation, can be continued by paying a fixed-price ransom. Thus, we cannot speak seriously of penalties. It would be necessary to discipline juridically the political obligation of marriage and procreation.61

The solution to the demographic problem, argued De’ Stefani, was not fiscal. Instead, bachelors and childless parents were to be denied the legal rights enjoyed by those who guaranteed the reproduction of the population. De’ Stefani proposed that the Fascist Party card, “a condition of full participation in civil life,” be joined by a “Family card.” Whoever did not possess both would suffer economic consequences. Gina Giannini, a former socialist lawyer and expert in matters of assistance (de Grazia 1992:91), proposed replacing measures that rewarded the birth of children with a legal recognition of the importance of motherhood. But she, too, imagined maternity as a duty and called for a “Maternity Charter” to accompany the Carta del Lavoro: “Just as the Labor Charter affirms that work is a social duty and is protected by the State only as such, so, too, the Maternity Charter will proclaim that maternity is a national duty, and as such—and only as such—it is protected by the State, because the fortunes of the Nation depend on its level of development” (Giannini 1932:651). Finally, for Ferdinando Loffredo, one of the most intransigent Italian writers on the family, financial benefits furnished “an 91

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encouraging figure to the ‘cerebral calculation of egoism’ on the convenience of having children” (Loffredo 1938:115; also see Zingone 1936). Like other critics of liberal rationalities of assistance, he inverted the logic of Malthus: assistance was wrong not because it led people to have too many children who would then be dependent on the state, but because it addressed individual needs and entered into egoistic calculations. Indeed, some social hygienists argued that public charity, by reducing economic inequalities and fostering the “calculating mentality and excessive expectations that come with material well-being” (de Grazia 1992:54–55), might threaten the prolificness of the poorer classes, a source of the nation’s demographic strength. Jurists, social physicians, hygienists, and social workers would therefore call for a different economy of government, for preventive and prophylactic measures aimed at the diseased body of society. For many, this strategy was epitomized by the National Agency for Maternity and Infancy (ONMI). Created in 1925, in an effort to curb Italy’s high rate of infant mortality, ONMI was charged with coordinating assistance to and protection of mothers and infants, on the basis of modern scientific knowledge.62 As Sileno Fabbri, Royal Commissioner and then President of the Agency from 1931 to 1937, observed, the law drew on “norms inspired by the most important principles approved by the congresses on hygiene, pediatrics, obstetrics, and the education of wayward and delinquent minors” (Fabbri 1955–57:227).63 These principles, consistent with the shifts in rationalities of intervention we encountered in Chapter II, included an emphasis on preventive medicine and normalizing social work, rather than on medical treatment and charity. For Fabbri, aid to mothers and infants in prefascist Italy had been characterized by an insufficiency of rational, governmental intervention: An almost total absenteeism of the State; welfare action distributed inorganically among Provinces, Municipalities, Congregazioni di Carità, charity Institutions; absolute liberty of private initiative; lack of links and coordination between public and private initiatives; lack of a true social service organized on the basis of rational criteria and staffed by specialized personnel. (Fabbri 1932b:431) 92

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By contrast, he argued, the fascist regime had “correctly perceived” that assistance to infants was a political, demographic, hygienic, economic, and moral problem requiring scientific study and state intervention. The goal was the formation of “generations [that are] physically and morally strong and healthy” (ibid.). As one author put it, raising children was rather like agriculture: care of maternity and infancy was like the work of the “horticulturalist, who cares for the seed, sorting and strengthening it” (Pontano 1932:166). ONMI was similarly intended to have primarily educative and prophylactic functions, rather than a therapeutic function. At times Fabbri could be insistent: “[ONMI] must not treat [curare]” (Fabbri 1932c:548). The challenge, as Fabbri articulated it, was to intervene before the mother or infant suffered moral or physical harm (Fabbri 1934). Too often, noted another author, “the masses . . . take care of their health only when the disease is so far advanced as to be, unfortunately, rarely curable” (Provincia di Milano 1926:185). It was therefore necessary, for example, to educate mothers in proper hygiene and diet, to intervene before birth to change the home environment, and in the case of the young delinquents who came under the care of ONMI, to defend children against “elements corrosive of the normal state” of the individual, including poverty, alcoholism, and venereal disease (ONMI 1936; Fabbri 1935:121). But prevention and defense were not enough. Especially after 1927 ONMI was called on to play a positive demographic function—that is, to increase rates of marriage and birth, as well as reduce infant mortality (Fabbri 1932d). As Fabbri put it, ONMI was “par excellence the organ of the Regime best suited to favor demographic increase” (Fabbri 1932e:1,000).64 This task, too, was seen to require a move away from charity, toward social work and previdenza.65 The distribution of prizes and alms was discontinuous, temporary, and “empirical” and addressed symptoms rather than causes. More important from the demographic point of view, argued one social worker, charity entered into egoistic calculations and served to “cultivate and maintain poverty” (Dessau 1932:742; also see Loffredo 1938:115). Rather than creating new incentives to procreate, charity tended to create new needs no state could meet, thereby installing a “creeping malcontent” among the working classes (di Robilant 1932:401). Fabbri argued that charity was, for this reason, more costly than 93

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social work: “Whereas by facilitating the first, the needs and needy increase, by facilitating the second the needs are rigorously selected, controlled, contained” (1932e:1,001). These economies were not, however, easily realized. In 1932 Fabbri noted that the system of local institutions (Patronati) then in place had “failed completely.” These had continued to provide subsidies in both money and goods, which as Fabbri explained was the function of the congregazione di carità—not of an institution of social prevention.66 He therefore proposed creating “Centers of Aid for Maternity and Infancy,” whose function would be “hygienic and moral prophylaxis.”67 But again in 1936 Fabbri complained of a “general incomprehension of the nature, spirit, aims, and method of the Agency.” This failure of understanding grew out of two errors: in the first place, [the mistake] of considering [the Agency] an eleemosynary institution; in the second place, [the mistake] of believing it has a curative rather than predominantly prophylactic function. And thus the first error has led to the handing out of subsidies as ends in themselves, rather than constituting means for achieving the social ends of the Agency; the second error has led to veritable therapeutic services, and to the creation of treatment institutions rather than consulting clinics whose goal is predominantly prophylactic, with a corresponding confusion of ideas, dangerous interferences, and costs not pertinent to the Agency. (ONMI 1936:38)

Fabbri’s repeated calls that ONMI not concern itself with the already sick were rooted not only in an institutional division of labor, but also in a new governmental calculus, which was rarely realized. In principle if not in practice, the bodies of women and infants, even when sick, could not command the attention of the state. The right to bodily integrity that liberalism had associated with the individual would be displaced by a duty (owed toward the collectivity) to maintain a healthy and fertile body. This logic of prevention would also be extended to entire segments of the population, and particularly to the inhabitants of cities, and would inform a transformation of social work practices. 94

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The Sterile City

I

N ITALY, as we have seen, the problem of the sterile city entered official political discourse in 1927. In his Ascension Day address, Mussolini identified the Italian city as a demographic problem (Mussolini 1927a:378). Particularly the urban industrial centers of the north, he argued, were largely responsible for an “alarming” national decline in rates of marriage and fertility. Of course, in Italy as elsewhere, the city and the population had each been problematic before: epistemologically, practically, and politically. The city had been an ambivalent object of architectural, medical, and ethical reflection and intervention since Roman antiquity. And the size and rate of growth of urban and rural populations had, for example, operated in mercantilist discourse as symbols of Italy’s wealth and military prowess. But beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially in the tumultuous years following the First World War, when European societies sought to rebuild or indeed reinvent themselves, the Italian city and the urban population were made problematic in new ways. In nineteenth-century social scientific circles, the industrial city was imagined in medical terms: as a cancer, as a leprous body, or as an organism whose growth was pathological, whose component parts were diseased, and whose populations were both dangerous and endangered (Choay 1969:9–10). There emerged a series of new problematizations of the city, centered on the welfare and reproductive practices of its biological population. In Italy of the 1920s, social scientists continued to view the city with a “clinical” eye, but through a particular lens. They made the city problematic in relation to the defense and strengthening of the Italian stock: they interrogated the demographic functions of the city and proposed particular strategies and remedies to check its “dysgenic” and “sterilizing” effects. In Italian scholarly journals and university curricula, and at international conferences devoted to such topics as rural-urban migration, housing, and eugenics, the new experts of the social 95

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pictured the city as an infertile and ambiguously gendered social body. They developed a new nosology of urban ills (both medical and demographic) that had to be studied scientifically in order to be managed or “treated” according to modern principles of government. And they proposed medico-social therapies targeting urban spaces, the home, and the reproductive body—forms of intervention that were intended to supplant the “discontinuous” and moralizing interventions of the liberal state and the Catholic Church (Horn 1988). Of course, the Italian city had been, and would continue to be, considered problematic also in terms of its politics, economics, and spatial arrangements. This was especially so after the war, when changes in production, the growth of mechanical industries, and the expansion of urban job markets increased pressure on the housing market (Consonni and Tonon 1977). Migrations from the countryside not only caused increased urban unemployment but also contributed to the crowding of working-class housing, the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis, and the multiplication of possible sites of resistance to government. However, in the context of the militarized campaign to increase Italian rates of marriage and fertility, the city also emerged as a locus and cause—indeed the principal locus and cause—of sterility, degeneration, and decay. The construction of the city as sterile was further linked to the (partial) disqualification of other discourses that celebrated the modernity and power of the industrial city (notably socialism, futurism, and the Stracittà literary movement), and to a construction of “the rural” and “the classical” as the loci of Italian identity (Simeone 1978; cf. Herzfeld 1982). In place of the industrial city, fascism celebrated (although not without ambiguity) the classical urbs (Kostof 1973). Rome figured as a symbol of both empire and virility, and romanità, even as it was called on to mediate between the classical and the modern (Bondanella 1987), stood as an alternative to the “sterilizing values” of the industrial cities of the north. However, in Milan the construction of the city as “sterile” was at times accompanied by celebrations of the city’s size, economic power, cultural sophistication, vitality, and even beauty. Indeed, a variety of unstable images of the city, forms of knowledge, and strategies (for social intervention and social life) competed with one another in Milan—not only 96

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at the level of the city itself but also at the level of the urban population, the home, the reproductive body, and male and female identities. In the end the attempts to know and govern urban reproductive behavior produced few of the effects desired by the fascist regime. However, the proliferation of discourses and practices did make urban populations and the home objects of a permanent (if historically variable) investigation and management. And ironically, by denaturalizing rural-urban migration and (failed) reproduction in cities—constructing these as both pathological and “social” and making them objects of science and technical intervention—social scientists worked further to transform reproduction into a site of social struggle and to inaugurate a new politics of private spaces and the body.

AETIOLOGIES OF INFERTILITY: THE NATURAL AND THE SOCIAL In an article entitled “Urban Attraction and Sterility,” Cesare Coruzzi, a physician specializing in social medicine, linked medical, social scientific, and moral discourses to construct a diagnosis of the industrial city (1933). He identified the organic causes of urban infertility as venereal disease, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and industrial accidents. These causes, linked especially to the poor hygienic conditions of city housing and to factory work, acted to reduce the reproductive potential of both men and women. However, for social physicians such as Coruzzi, the diseases affecting women again assumed a particular importance. The dangers to potential mothers were thought to vary according to social class and occupation. Bourgeois housewives, argued Coruzzi, suffered from anemia and a shortage of ultraviolet light in their “unnaturally” darkened apartments, while working women were characterized by low body weight and poor resistance to disease, especially to tuberculosis (1933:67). More important, urban working women were identified as having high rates of miscarriage, premature birth, and “pathological” birth (33.5 percent), and their offspring were said to have higher rates of disease and mortality than did children born in 97

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the countryside. Coruzzi further argued that the stresses of urban life—noise, hyper-excitation, and “continual venereal excesses”—made women more vulnerable to various forms of neurosis. He pointed not only to hysteria and frigidity but also to the “neurosis of neo-Malthusianism,” a formulation that transformed the tactics women used for controlling births—delayed marriage, contraception, and abortion—into a new form of psychopathology (ibid.:68). At the same time, Coruzzi borrowed an equation from the moralistic discourse of the nineteenth century, linking the city to egoism, excessive rationality, artificiality, and what he termed the “death of the soul”—each of which contributed to an erosion of “natural” paternal and maternal instincts. The city was a center of attraction, wrote Coruzzi, because it represented the possibility of a “more comfortable and pleasurable life” that both transcended and subverted Nature. City dwellers, driven by the desire for rapid social advancement and unlimited pleasure, were anxious to postpone or avoid altogether the inconveniences of conjugal life and the expenses of children. And when marriage did occur, it was based on the “cold calculation of an alliance,” the conjugal duty being satisfied by the birth of a single child (ibid.). The city further made problematic the control of female sexuality. In Coruzzi’s view women in cities were lured from the home and domestic duties by jobs that promised financial independence. Many were drawn to the industrial factory, a moral universe made dangerous by the presence of “female crowds,” who were “given to indecent discourse, to reciprocal sexual and sensual incitement, to craftiness” (ibid.). The employment of women, particularly in industry, was in fact a point of intersection for medical discourses, nationalist ideologies, and Catholic teachings that defined industrial work as inappropriate for women. Endocrinologist Nicola Pende spoke for many physicians when he characterized the “demographic problem” as subordinate to the “female problem.” Pende constructed maternity and (other) physical labor as “biologically incompatible” and called for legislation barring pregnant and breast-feeding women from work outside the home (Pende 1929:520–24). In both medical and social scientific discourse, the city was seen to denaturalize and defeminize women, just as it emascu98

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lated men, even at the level of the physical body. However, it is important to note the complexity and ambiguity of the gender symbolism that was connected with the city and used to distinguish it from rural Italy. In much of the writing on the history of urbanism, the city was linked with culture, reason, civilization, and progress, which stood in opposition to a feminized and nonurban Nature. Futurists, whose ideas shaped early fascism and provided an aesthetics of existence for its proponents, exalted the virility of machines, the size and impersonality of the metropolis, and the speed and violence that characterized urban life. At the same time, nationalists saw the city as threatening the virility and virtù of the (predominantly rural) Italian population by reducing its overall fertility. Finally, as we have seen, doctors and social scientists identified the city as working to subvert or invert the “natural” gender distinctions and hierarchies that prevailed in the countryside.1 In other respects as well, the city was objectified as the medical, moral, and existential antithesis of the countryside. The latter was said to be marked not only by an absence of urban hygienic and demographic dangers but also by an absence of egoistic desire, rational calculation, artificiality, and indeed any form of procreative tactics. Scientists contrasted the supposed “natural” rates of reproduction in rural areas with the unnatural rates in the cities—“unnatural” in the double sense of pathologically low and socially determined or constructed, the result of more or less conscious tactics. A distinction between “natural” and “social” was repeated in the vocabulary of Italian demography and sociology, which labeled (and continues to label) population increase due to procreation as “natural” and increase due to immigration from the countryside as “social.”2 Gradually, however, even natural increase would be denaturalized and constructed simultaneously as a social practice and social-technical object. In each case the city itself played an important role in this objectification and denaturalization. If migration had its roots in the countryside, its principal cause was seen to be the attractive force of cities (urbanesimo). And the conscious social control of procreation was identified as peculiarly urban: a complex of behaviors and attitudes that were learned by rural populations as they entered the city. As one political economist put it, the Italian city was a “school of sterility” (Lojacono 1933:13). 99

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NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE URBANISMS The remedies social experts proposed to check national fertility declines were linked to this medical and social-scientific construction of the city. The strategies of social scientists, doctors, and planners in fascist Italy can be described, in part, as responses to the twin demographic dangers represented by uncontrolled migration from rural areas to cities, on the one hand, and urban medico-social pathologies, on the other. The first danger called for a “negative urbanism,” a policing of migration designed to protect naturally fertile but vulnerable rural populations; the second called for a “positive urbanism” of planning, architectural interventions, and social-work measures, designed to transform the conditions and reproductive behaviors of infertile city dwellers. The anti-urbanization measures of the late 1920s were part of a broader program of “ruralization” and land reclamation, a program that was itself the expression of a complex set of national political and economic strategies.3 It should also be emphasized that measures to check urbanization were motivated both by long-term demographic, hygienic, and moral concerns and by short-term crises in housing and employment in the cities of the north. Restrictions on housing, hiring, and internal travel were developed not only to defend the fertility of the national population but also ostensibly to break the vicious cycle of the housing shortage and its associated political instability.4 Ironically, housing was most scarce and unemployment most acute where the population “failed” to reproduce itself by “natural” means. Instead, immigration from the countryside and smaller towns accounted for most of the population increase of urban areas, an increase Mussolini and others termed “artificial” and “pathological.” In the first half of 1928 alone, 68,621 people had moved to the eight largest Italian cities. Although these rates of migration were neither new nor objectively high, migration accounted for almost all of the population increase in these cities. And this was, Mussolini suggested, a sign of “decay,” which he proposed to check by encouraging the depopulation of urban centers and by opposing the abandoning of the countryside (1928b:258). 100

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At the same time that the government began to impose restrictions on migration to stem the “unnatural” growth of the city, doctors and urbanists elaborated a closely linked, “positive” urbanism: a series of interventions that sought to eliminate the pathologies of the city. In the words of Guido Salvini, a professor of medicine and the head of antitubercular services for Milan, the science of urbanism was “an antidote to urbanization”: it aimed not only “to curb urban elephantiasis, but also to correct . . . the already constituted urban body” (Salvini 1930:489). For Salvini, urbanism consisted of “medical” strategies directed at the city itself, a series of “measures meant to correct everything unhealthy contained in the city” (1931:195). Salvini and others advocated a surgical approach to the city, whose techniques included the “gutting” (sventramento) of entire neighborhoods, the decentralization of housing, and a kind of “ruralization” of everyday life. These techniques were rooted in nineteenth-century city planning (Choay 1969) and were seen to require a parallel development of urban studies: the diagnosis and cure of urban disease made necessary the cooperation of the social physician and the sociologist. The physician was called to do more than cast a metaphorical “clinical eye” on the city: the medical officer, wrote social hygienist Arcangelo Ilvento, was in a position to enter and inspect every home (Ilvento 1925:iv). But increasingly, as in other domains, investigators shifted attention from the medical strictly speaking to the sociological—the organism to be treated was the city itself—and from the individual to the social (Pende 1921). The clinical eye was supplemented by the gaze of the statistician, able to observe regularities, distributions, the “normality” of the pathological. This shift from the medical to the sociological, from the individual body to the social body, also corresponded to a shift from repression to prevention. Urbanists and hygienists argued that it was not enough to combat the existing ills of the city by treating sick or infertile individuals: future medical and demographic dangers had to prevented. Finally, as we will see, social scientists and urbanists objectified the city not only as a target of practices of knowledge and of negative and positive interventions, but also as a technique for transforming reproductive behaviors. According to a logic of environmental determinism, the ordered, hygienic, ruralized city—and at the 101

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micro-level, the home—could be a tool in the care of the stirpe, having a positive demographic function. It is important to note, however, that while a problematization of the city and the urban population according to a particular logic linked the discourses and interventions of medical specialists, sociologists, urbanists, hygienists, and demographers, these by no means constituted a single, univocal, or even coherent strategy. Rather, urban social-technical interventions—like interventions at the level of the population—were often contradictory, logically inconsistent, and productive of unintended effects. Moreover, the city and its population were in no way passive, neutral targets. They were instead dynamic and evolving. In the city the strategies of the fascist party, industrialists, labor unions, church organizations, merchants, landlords, housewives, and police intersected and competed with one another. All of this combined to shape the playing out of the practices of investigation and government that arose from the identification of the city as a demographic problem. This can be seen clearly in the case of Milan.

COMPETING IMAGES OF THE METROPOLIS As we have seen, the critique of cities was directed primarily against the industrial centers of northern Italy, points of political resistance to fascism as well as demographic “crisis.” The position of Milan, however, was unique: denounced on the one hand as sterile and diseased, it was at the same time hailed as the symbolic “birthplace” of the fascist movement and acknowledged to be an important European center, contributing to the economic well-being of the nation. Indeed, demographic imperatives tended to run counter to other political and economic strategies centered on the “moral capital” of Italy. Among the urban centers of central and northern Italy, Milan presented a rather moderate demographic profile. In 1927, for example, the year of the Ascension Day address, Turin, Florence, and Bologna recorded more deaths than live births, a situation the Central Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and local newspapers quickly called to the attention of Italian readers (ISTAT 1929:38). In Milan, by contrast, mortality was lowest for 102

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all cities with populations greater than 100,000, and births exceeded deaths by 2,064 (or 2.26 per 1,000 inhabitants).5 The frequency of marriage, meanwhile, was higher than the national average: 7.56 per 1,000 compared to 7.46. Nevertheless, the birthrate in Milan, as elsewhere in Italy, was declining more rapidly than was mortality: the crude birthrate fell from 17.41 per 1,000 in 1921 to 14.46 in 1927, while the crude rate for mortality declined from 14.21 to 12.20. Indeed, an alternative measure of fertility, which takes account of the aging of the population, reveals a 50.4 percent decline from 1901 to 1931.6 Moreover, fertility in Milan was consistently lower than in urban centers in the south, as well as rural towns in the north (ISTAT 1929:38). Despite a low rate of “natural” increase, as this was described, Milan continued to grow—and dramatically—during the fascist regime. In fact, from the beginning of the century to 1927, its population almost doubled. This increase was in due in part to the annexation of several neighboring municipalities (ISTAT 1930:529) but above all to immigration from rural areas in the north and from other regions of Italy.7 In 1927 alone, immigrants exceeded emigrants by 35.41 per 1,000 and accounted for 94 percent of the city’s growth.8 This was not a new pattern: migration had, for example, “compensated” for the low rates of fertility and the extraordinarily high rates of infant abandonment in nineteenth-century Milan (Hunecke 1978). And until 1927 this population influx was welcomed by Milan’s political and economic leaders, who displayed a favorable attitude toward the continued expansion of the city. Indeed, for several years the Milan-based fascist daily newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, edited by Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo, had been engaged in a campaign for a “greater Milan.” One editorial went so far as to exalt urbanization and to critique “ruralist” discourse: “It is necessary to correct many legends concerning urbanization and populous cities, and concerning the georgic beauty of the countryside. . . . The idyllic country, the creator of vigorous loins and the nursery of the long-lived, is a work of poets: in any case, it cannot be in accord with the development of industry” (Bertarelli 1925). All of this changed, at least on the surface, following Mussolini’s Ascension Day address. In June 1927, Il Popolo d’Italia 103

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announced that “a grand Milan” was incompatible with the “voices of wisdom and reason [that] urge and advise a return to the countryside.” The paper, adopting the language of medical and social science, identified urban centers as “breedinggrounds of all the moral—but not only moral—infections of the people” (Cajani 1927). However, in Milan the demographic imperatives announced by Mussolini would in practice often be compromised by the strategies of urban developers, industrialists, and fascist labor unions (as well as migrating individuals and families), all of whom maintained rather different images of the city in general, and of Milan in particular.

THE POLICING OF MIGRATION These competing images and strategies were made explicit from 1928, when a law gave prefects the power to issue ordinances “to limit the excessive increase of the resident population of the city,” after first consulting with the Provincial Economic Council, a body made up of leaders in industry and agriculture. In Milan the Council responded to the prefect’s request for proposals by assuming a defensive position: “It would be an error,” argued the Council, “to see the city as an organization to oppose or undo.”9 The Council’s report to the prefect noted that the city was an indispensable condition for civiltà (roughly, “the civilized”), and for agricultural as well as industrial progress. Indeed, the Council suggested the city had historically exercised a positive demographic function: “We must not forget that the high natality of the countryside has been maintained precisely because of the great and continual absorption of labor requested by the city, with its great factories, its trade, and its tourist industry.”10 The Council reluctantly agreed to suggest a number of measures to limit further migrations to Milan (at least by the poor and the unskilled). These ranged from decentralization of medical and welfare services, to improved transportation between Milan and surrounding communities (to discourage permanent relocation), to improved hygiene, irrigation, and housing in the countryside.11 However, demographic statistics and government records testify to an almost total lack of effective enforce104

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ment. Although it is true that the Milan police chief and the prefect made occasional use of their powers to expel nonresidents, this was done most often for reasons of public security and not for “demographic defense.”12 Rather than protect the countryside against depopulation, then, these expulsions tended to defend the cities against persons perceived to be politically and socially dangerous, a point that was not lost on critics of the regime (Stato Operaio 1928:746). The rise and fall of these and later measures against ruralurban migration (many of which remained on the books during the postwar reconstruction) had less to do with a gap between ideology and practice than with a number of competing—and at times diametrically opposed—discourses, practices, and strategies. As we have seen, the politics of migration was informed not only by demographic concerns but also by a variety of local economic and political considerations, including the growing industrial unemployment and scarcity of housing in cities such as Milan. Against these concerns and considerations worked the interests of Milanese industrialists, who feared restrictions on the available pool of labor (Treves 1976:92). Indeed, some industrialist critics of restrictions on migration appropriated the medical metaphors of social science, attempting to distinguish the negative, “pathological” urbanization combated by the regime from a positive, “physiological” urbanization in accord with the development of industry. More important, the attempts to restrict rural-urban migration ran counter to the cultural practices of peasants and agricultural laborers, who had for decades relied on migration to urban areas in Italy or abroad as a strategy for coping with unemployment, falling prices, and ecological crisis. The movement to cities was, in fact, made more urgent by Italian and American restrictions on migration to the United States, by the international depression, and by programs of land reclamation and reforestation that disrupted patterns of agriculture, goatherding, and transhumance (ibid.:110–33). The implications of these events were familiar to social scientists and were often the focus of scholarly conferences;13 they were also apparent to critics of the regime, who contrasted fascism’s exaltation of the rural with the real conditions of poverty that prevailed in the countryside (Stato Operaio 1928). 105

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Indeed, the appeals of the regime to abstract rural values, and the calls for the “ruralization” of everyday life, were at odds with the values of a great many Italians—that is, with their own constructions of the urban and the rural. Donald Pitkin (1963) has noted that the attitude that equates being urbanized with being civilized is one of long standing in southern Europe (cf. Caro Baroja 1963). To be sure, agriculture was a dominant component of the interwar Italian economy. However, as Pitkin reminds us, “the importance of agriculture in the economy, due in part to the lack of economic alternatives, does not necessarily make for a rurally oriented culture” (1963:128). In cities such as Milan, more closely connected to the cultural traditions of northern Europe, there was some nostalgia for rural ways expressed in romantic literature. However, many of the agricultural regions of central and southern Italy were characterized by a distaste for the “rural,” an emphasis on civiltà, and a glorification of town and city life (cf. Silverman 1975:1–11). Even this may be too simple. For example, studies of migration in Greece suggest that the meanings of the urban and the rural for women and men may be multiple, flexible, and indeed contradictory (Costa 1988; Dimen 1986; Dubisch 1977). There is no reason to suspect that a shepherd in the Abruzzi, for whom transhumance was no longer possible, and a day laborer in Emilia-Romagna, fleeing fascist violence, and a young woman in the province of Milan, seeking a measure of financial independence, would all construct the rural and the urban in the same ways. Just as their practices resisted the interventions of the state, their cultural constructions contested the binary oppositions and continua developed by social scientists. The fact that deeply rooted structural causes and contradictory strategies combined to produce an extraordinary amount of internal migration in the interwar period (Treves 1976) does not mean that the problematization of rural-urban migration was without consequences. Social scientists constructed urban and rural populations as objects of a permanent monitoring and management and made recently urbanized families targets of a wide range of specific investigations and interventions, including those of urban anthropologists (cf. Douglass 1983). Finally, as we will see more clearly in the sections on housing and social 106

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work, the constructions of social scientists helped to redraw the lines not only between the natural and the social but also between the normal and the pathological, and the private and the public. And they helped to define a new regime of rights and duties for Italian women and men.

URBANISM, HEALTH, AND FERTILITY Although measures to reduce the flow of migrants to Milan and other urban areas proved contradictory and ineffective, the attempts made by urban planners and social experts to restructure cities, housing, and patterns of urban life had more decisive (if often unintended) effects. In Milan urban interventions in the 1920s and 1930s transformed both the physiognomy of the city and its residential distributions.14 Eighty percent of the area in the city center was rebuilt: hundreds of low, densely grouped apartment buildings near the Duomo were replaced by tall, grey-marble office buildings, new plazas, and wide streets lined by galleries of shops. Elsewhere, entire neighborhoods, which had once (as the tourist guides put it) provided “color” to the downtown area, were razed or made unrecognizable. The Fossa Interna, a system of old canals stretching across the city from Piazza San Marco to Porta Genova, was paved over. In all, some 35,850 rooms in the city center were destroyed between 1921 and 1931 (Consonni and Tonon 1977:200). These changes were accompanied, as in other large European cities, by a redistribution of the urban population. The least prosperous of the Milanese—largely artisans, vendors, and wage laborers—were effectively displaced from the center of the city by those who could afford the higher rents of new apartments. The percentage of the active population in the city center represented by the working classes declined from 30.2 in 1901 to 14.25 in 1931 (ibid.). Finally, a series of localized medical and demographic interventions, including new forms of social work aimed at transforming reproductive behavior, redrew the boundaries among private, public, and “social” spaces in Milan. Even though governmental interventions did little to increase the fertility of the city’s inhabitants (and may even have acted to reduce fertility), 107

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the urban home and the reproductive bodies it contained were made and have remained objects of social scientific knowledge and normalizing practices. In the context of the demographic campaign, two urbanist strategies in Milan emerged as particularly important: the “recovery”(risanamento) of neighborhoods identified as medically, demographically, and socially “dangerous” and the construction of new types of working-class housing. These were designed, at least in part, to defend the stock by reducing urban morbidity and mortality and by “improving” the reproductive behavior of Milanese women and men. In fact, the medical and social scientific discourses that were centered on the home not only identified its demographic dangers but also specified its potentially positive functions. The uncrowded, “ruralized” apartment could be a “eugenic dwelling” (casa eugenetica) and contribute to a “human reclamation” (bonifica umana) (Piccoli 1938). Projects of risanamento in the 1920s and 1930s ostensibly aimed to restore to health (literally and metaphorically) areas of the city characterized by high population density and poor hygiene, as well as potential political instability. By the 1920s tuberculosis had replaced cholera as the “social disease par excellence” (Salvini 1931:179), and in urbanist discourse metaphors drawn from the circulation of fluids had given way to metaphors drawn from the circulation of air and sunlight. Tuberculosis was seen to be quintessentially urban, associated with high population densities and dark, overcrowded dwellings. In fact, for Salvini, the urban problem and tuberculosis were not only causally related, but also parallel phenomena: urbanization constituted “the pathological hypertrophy of an organ of the social organism” (ibid.). “Given the parallels between the two phenomena,” he continued, “one sees how the urbanist and social physician are true allies, in that both tend to abandon the unfruitful path of repression in order to set off on the road of prevention.” As Salvini noted, there had been a shift in the targets of intervention, a “depolarization from the sick person to the person presumed to be well.” To fight against “evident disease” was no longer sufficient; the need was for “integral prophylaxis” (ibid.). Italy had, in sum, moved from the “sanatorial era” to the “era of the pickaxe” (1929:337). 108

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The battle to be waged against the pathological city required, in Salvini’s view, new “knowledge of the enemy,” a detailed mapping of medical and demographic dangers (1930:494). Before the war a topographic study of Milan conducted by Pietro Ferrari had mapped deaths by tuberculosis, concluding that, although tuberculosis was a “terrible leveler,” mortality was highest in the densest, most overcrowded neighborhoods. For Salvini, however, mortality statistics were inadequate for a politics of prevention: what was needed was detailed knowledge of tubercular morbidity—that is, “the current danger, not that in the past: because defense must be addressed not to the dead but to the living” (1931:181). In addition to “patient, methodical observation” conducted by the dispensaries, which would “uncover every case, survey it, follow it continually,” Salvini called for a medico-social survey of tuberculosis, which would chart its distribution as a function of economic and moral conditions (ibid.). Although in the past, he noted, such information would have held little interest, rising costs of repression and prevention and the extension of insurance law had made such surveys imperative. In 1930 alone some thirty thousand individuals were under the care of the municipal dispensaries. There was, in Salvini’s words, “a veritable ‘tubercular city’ [città tubercolare] inserted in the great body of the city” (ibid.:182). This “sorrowful city” was unknown to many of the inhabitants of Milan, even to those who carried the disease (1930:488). Contrary to popular assumptions, the tubercular city was inhabited largely by the petty and middle bourgeoisie, rather than the working classes, and by recent immigrants to Milan. Some of the latter were already sick when they immigrated: lacking means, they were drawn from the countryside to the city by the promise of medical assistance (1931:193). Others had never before been exposed to urban environments and were presumed to lack resistance to disease: they were “relatively virgin organisms” (ibid.:194). In fact, however, the città tubercolare was no real city at all but a statistical distribution in space. It was, above all, this distribution that had to be known. Detailed study of the “city” would yield a map of medical and social dangers—a map that could guide not only the hygienist but also the pickaxe. As early as 1921, social scientists and urban planners had identified a 109

CHAPTER V

“Milan that must disappear”: centers of “moral and physical infection” that had to be “surgically removed,” with their populations relocated (Città di Milano 1921). This kind of urban intervention was not, of course, entirely new. The “gutting” of urban neighborhoods had begun in Naples in the late nineteenth century, in the midst of a devastating cholera epidemic, and proposals for demolitions in Milan had been made before the First World War and by socialist administrations. However, the proposals made in the 1920s and 1930s addressed a substantially altered political situation and obeyed a logic not only of prevention of medical and social risks, but also of demographic increase. The de-urbanization of the working classes, their relocation in low-cost housing projects (case popolari) in closer proximity to rural areas, was meant to return the Milanese population to “natural” levels of fertility. From a medico-demographic perspective, the most frequently cited negative aspects of worker housing in the city center were the rates of mortality associated with crowding and poor hygiene. However, doctors and social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s argued that the “unhealthy dwelling” (casa malsana) also operated to reduce fertility: by threatening the reproductive health of women (Coruzzi 1933) and by “alienating” men from the home and their conjugal duties (Ilvento 1925:iv). There is ample evidence to suggest that conditions in the center of Milan were indeed often deplorable. When a fascist administration came to power in Milan in 1922, apartments in many sections of the city were overcrowded and poorly ventilated. This was not a recent condition: a detailed survey of housing in 1903 had revealed 2,284 families of eight or more persons living in one or two rooms (Mortara 1908:151–52). Nor, however, did the situation show signs of improvement in 1921: 70 percent of Milanese housing was officially classified as “crowded” (more than one person per room) (Chiumeo 1972: 155), and 21.16 percent as “overcrowded” (more than two persons per room) (Città di Milano 1922:137). And it is important to keep in mind that in the 1921 census, kitchens and foyers large enough to contain beds were included in the calculations of average density, while densely populated collective lodgings (boarding schools, hostels, shelters, and inns) and temporary housing (caravans, lean-tos, and shanties) were excluded. 110

THE STERILE CITY

It is clear, however, that the health and reproductive potential of urban populations were not the only considerations motivating demolitions and the relocation of the Milanese population: others included the alleviation of traffic congestion, the expansion of downtown office space, and real estate speculation. Sventramenti promised, in addition, to remove “dangerous” concentrations of antifascist laboring classes from the body of the city. To the extent that existing worker housing represented a series of interconnected political, medical, and demographic dangers, argued Arcangelo Ilvento (1925), it was necessary to reduce these risks and create safe, alternative spaces: spaces productive of governable social relations, docile citizens, and healthy, fertile bodies. At one level this involved dispersing the lower classes, breaking traditional social and spatial arrangements at the center of the city, and subjecting recent immigrants and the homeless to an ongoing surveillance. Practices of marginalization and disciplinary regulation that had characterized factory housing at the end of the nineteenth century were extended to the city as a whole. In 1921 families uprooted by demolitions were sent to a former detention center on via Parini, to the former hospital of San Vittorio, and later to a number of case-albergo, shelters for the homeless whose rules and schedules closely resembled those of prisons. At the same time, the tenement projects of XXVIII Ottobre and Regina Elena (later renamed Stadera and Mazzini)—the only housing many evicted and newly arrived families could afford—were designed as “clearing centers” for the observation and classification of tenants. The “best” families would be allowed to inhabit case popolari elsewhere in the city, while the rest would be “abandoned to their destiny” (Chiumeo 1972:164–66). At another level, housing was meant to regulate social relations and their multiple potential dangers. Earlier housing projects had, of course, been guided by concerns for the moral tenor of the working men and women. However, doctors and social workers in the interwar period, using a different calculus of risk, identified additional dangers: solidarities and points of resistance to government—even within the new housing units— that the regime could not tolerate. In 1923 the Commissioner of the Milanese housing agency (ICPM) lamented that meeting 111

CHAPTER V

rooms, which had been “granted with excessive largess by the Institute to associations for recreative and educational ends,” instead aided worker and tenant organization and were sometimes the site of subversive and antipatriotic meetings.15 Thus, in 1925 the fascist city administration dissolved the nine winedrinking clubs and tenant leagues centered in the case popolari. And in a move that combined policing with the promotion of fertility, the city erected in their place nine day-care centers and seven maternity centers.16 Finally, the individual apartment was problematized as a nodal point in the regulation of the welfare of urban populations, and a privileged site for the demographic campaign. Ironically, the home and the family it housed were made part of the domain of government and administration at the moment when the housing projects created the first real “private” spaces for many families. At the same time that the elimination (in some projects) of common toilets and water sources reduced face-toface interactions, and thus the role of gossip as a form of social control of reproduction, the space of the home was made a locus of surveillance by social workers.17 As we will see below, the home was not only marked as a target of investigation and intervention; it was also imagined as a tool or technique for the production of “eugenic” behaviors. This required, some argued, that the house not only be clean and spacious but also far removed from the negative demographic influence of urban areas. Urbanist Umberto Piccoli called for the “ruralization of the house” and suggested that families raised in simple, “ultrafunctional” rural environments would have high fertility, would be less inclined to urbanize themselves completely, and would maintain a healthy and fertile contact with Nature (1938:120). This pronatalist project of urban planning was largely unrealized. Ironically, the sventramenti called for by urbanists and hygienists, and carried out in Milan over the entire course of the fascist regime, together with continued immigration and a deregulation of rents, only aggravated the already problematic shortage of housing. It is true that, from 1921 to 1931, the average number of persons per room declined from 1.26 to 1.22 (Comune di Milano 1935:xxiii). But these figures conceal a shift in the locus of overcrowding, away from the center, the target of risanamento, and toward the periphery, the destination of the ex112

THE STERILE CITY

pelled populations. To the south of the city, overcrowding was indeed the norm: the average density was 2.12 persons per room (ibid.:xxi). At the same time, many of the new apartments in the center that had replaced traditional artisan and working-class housing remained unoccupied. As a number of demographers and architects observed, the housing policies of the Milanese civic administration (and the plans of architects for increasingly “functional” and “rational” apartments) ran directly counter to the demographic imperatives of the regime. The shelters and one-room apartments the city built tended in fact to punish existing large families when they did not directly threaten their health (Griffini 1936:4). In such conditions of overcrowding, argued Roman pediatrician Elena Fambri, it made no sense (medically, demographically, or eugenically) to encourage further high fertility. For Fambri, a social expert who was more attentive than many of her male colleagues to economic and social tactics of procreation, the inhabitants of case popolari could hardly be expected to be receptive to pronatalist discourse (Fambri 1938a, 1938b). In her view it was not surprising (nor perhaps lamentable) that such homes fostered an “antiprocreative mentality.” Indeed, as she reported, a survey of pregnant women at the Obstetrical Clinic of Milan revealed such a mentality among 223 of 300 women interviewed (1938b:963).18

FROM THE NATURAL TO THE NORMAL For many years the dream of morally innocent, physiological reproduction, in areas relatively free of the contaminating influence of cities, remained alive (Piccoli 1938). Increasingly, however, there was a shift from attempts to maintain the natural (by policing migration) or to recreate it (by ruralizing housing) to attempts to know and manage the newly constituted social spaces of the home. Here deviations from statistical and medical norms replaced deviations from Nature. For example, several authors argued that housing projects alone could not resolve the problems of social defense and the strengthening of the population. Urbanist Piero Bottoni suggested that in addition the home had to be inhabited correctly: “the full exploitation and enjoy113

CHAPTER V

ment of the rational casa popolare” required the education of the tenants (1936:145). Bottoni was among a number of social experts who proposed courses for housewives on furnishing, maintaining, and managing the home. These courses were to be directed especially at recent immigrants from rural areas, where “the system of habitation is not yet organized” (ibid.). Once again, little could be entrusted to Nature. Elena Fambri had suggested some years earlier that working-class tenants also needed to be “taught how to rest” (1922:148). For Guido Salvini, the practice of habitation required another kind of intervention: that of the ubiquitous social physician. From a social medical standpoint, he argued, the casa popolare and its inhabitants could not be left to themselves. It was instead necessary to exercise a continual “function of investigation, of safeguarding, of correction” (1936:188). For Salvini, the home and its inhabitants existed in a kind of equilibrium, but one that was permanently at risk, making necessary a “normalizing” intervention (funzione di normalizzatore) (ibid.:186). The duty of surveillance and normalization fell, in his view, to the social physician, that practitioner of preventive medicine able to detect “the slightest, almost unnoticed oscillation of well-being” (ibid.). This form of social work would in theory be the complement of the “control of health” (controllo della salute) effected by “urban renewal.” Indeed, the working-class home was made the site of visits, investigations, and interventions by a wide variety of experts, though few were physicians and many of them were women. Social workers, nurses, and members of fascist women’s organizations conducted fieldwork and completed detailed surveys intended to make pathologies visible and manageable, and offered advice on the “rationalization” of the household, on hygiene and diet, and on pregnancy and childrearing. Many of these activities, and the association of women with visits to the home, continued the lay and religious practices of the previous century. But by the 1930s the logic, techniques, and personnel of social investigation and intervention underwent important transformations. The defense of the stock was seen to require the professionalization of those who worked in the social, and the normalization of their gaze. 114

THE STERILE CITY

WORKING THE SOCIAL: WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGIES OF WELFARE During the interwar period, the execution of assistance programs undertaken by the state was to a considerable extent the responsibility of the fascist party’s women’s organizations, the fasci femminili.19 These took over many of the charity functions of previously existing women’s groups whose membership was largely aristocratic and middle class, and competed throughout the fascist regime with parallel organizations established by the Catholic Church. The evolution of the women’s fasci—from small, militant political groups, to philanthropic clubs, and then to social work organizations—reveals a great deal not only about the changing roles of women in fascism (de Grazia 1992:242–48), but also about the rationalities, practices, and limits of assistance and demographic defense in the interwar period. A central concern of the few women who identified themselves as fascists as early as 1919 had been women’s suffrage, but in Italy as in other places (Riley 1988) the insertion of women in the social was accompanied by their disqualification from the domain of politics. The statute proposed for the fasci femminili in Il Popolo d’Italia on 14 June 1922 reflected the influence in the fascist movement of men for whom the political exclusion of women was beyond discussion. The statute forbade the women’s groups from “taking initiatives of a political nature,” instead assigning them the co-ordination of initiatives of propaganda, charity, and social work.20 A number of bourgeois feminists would continue to see fascism and feminism as potential “sister forces” (De Felice 1981:79), and with the opportunistic support of Mussolini, they would campaign for and win the vote in local administrative elections in the second half of 1925.21 But this modest political participation was itself conditioned on women’s location in the spaces of the social. The Fascist Grand Council explained that “an administrative women’s suffrage committee, involving women in the life of the comune, could be of some utility in the sphere of welfare, philanthropic, and educational activity, in which the woman can express her particular gifts.”22 In the end this “achievement” would have no practical 115

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consequence, because elections for provincial and municipal councils were abolished in 1926. In 1925, as Valeria Benetti Brunelli put it, the fasci femminili were “redirected,” transformed from a political movement into a mass organization whose function was “not precisely political but social.” In exchange for a “withdrawal” from the formal political realm, women were offered “the field of assistance works” (Benetti Brunelli 1937:203). After all, said Maria Castellani, “by nature, the woman has an inclination to occupy herself with social work and the education of the young” (Castellani 1937:49).23 And yet, despite this appeal to natural inclinations, the fasci femminili defined a rather ambiguous role for its members: a class-based social activism that was neither “traditional” nor feminist. Maria Pezzè Pascolato, an educator and the head of the Venetian province’s women’s groups, complained in the pages of the journal Gerarchia of the “uncomfortable” position of the fascist “visitor” (visitatrice). For some, we were too advanced: women who talk about home economics but who go out of their own home to talk about it; who attend meetings and assemblies and who work shifts at outpatient clinics, health-camps, day nurseries, and popular libraries and who visit the homes of the poor, hospitals, educational and welfare institutions, industrial establishments, even prisons. . . . For others, we were backward: women who busy themselves with home economics, with raising children, chicken, and silkworms; who follow fashion but without ostentation or exaggeration; who do not wear foreign perfumes and are not at all Americanized; who do not talk about politics and do not bother with votes and suffrage, or even with psychoanalysis. (Pezzè Pascolato 1932:113–14)

However, as we have seen, at the same time that the spaces of female action were being constructed by party leaders in opposition to the masculine spaces of the “political,” the domain of the social was being constituted by juridical and social scientific discourses as a locus of specialized knowledge, urgent technical interventions, and expanding national duties. A redrawing of the line between the private and the public would give the traditionally “female” activities of assistance and social work a new set of meanings. 116

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THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL WORK The development of the social service practices of the fasci femminili corresponded to an expansion of the assistance activities of the party as a whole during Italy’s economic crisis. As early as the 1920s, local party headquarters (fasci) and, in larger cities, the neighborhood groups (gruppi rionali) had instituted charity committees charged with assisting the poor and unemployed in each section of the city. But not until the early 1930s was the party assigned an important organizational and leadership role in the sphere of assistance, consolidating control of summer camps—part of a broad campaign to manage the health and education of “future generations” (Koon 1985)—and directing aid to the unemployed.24 The deepening depression made other forms of assistance—including insurance for unemployment— inadequate to the needs of the population. At the same time, the women’s fasci were themselves undergoing a transformation from bourgeois clubs to mass organizations. Although only a handful of women attended the founding of the fascist movement in piazza San Sepolcro in 1919, and some 100 participated in the March on Rome in 1922, by 1926 there were 600 fasci with several thousand members. In the 1930s drives were mounted to enroll entire factory work forces, and special sections were created for women in agriculture.25 By 1937 the fasci included 1,334,751 girls and women (Castellani 1937:51). The activities in the domain of assistance were varied, linking the fasci femminili not only to the welfare offices of the party (EOA) but also to ONMI.26 They ranged from the creation of centers for mothers, including outpatient clinics, refectories for pregnant women, consulting rooms for nursing mothers, and day-care centers; to the sponsoring of children at summer camps; to a variety of forms of what was still called “philanthropy.” In Milan fascist women operated shelters for the poor which in February 1932 served 1,400 meals per day and housed 500 persons.27 The fasci also organized feste (at Christmas, Epiphany, and Easter), “lucky dips” (pesche per le assistenze), and winter assistance, which entailed distributing wool and sewing work to the unemployed, and finished garments to the poor. Finally, the fasci femminili served an educative function, organiz117

CHAPTER V

ing courses on interior decorating, home economics, family health, and preparation for life in the Italian colonies. At first, women in the fasci femminili were encouraged to visit workplaces in order to engage in political propaganda, and to visit the sick and poor in hospitals and shelters in order to provide “moral comfort.” In 1932 Pezzè Pascolato gave the following description of social work visits: The work is delicate and extremely tiring—in the working-class trattorie, in the kitchens, in the clothing workshops; and there is the distribution of coupons for popular messes, which the visitatrici take from house to house; and the filling in of index cards . . . and the detailed accounting. Fascist women who have a beautiful, comfortable, and wellheated home spend hours and hours every day in a squalid little room, without taking off their overcoats (they do not wear furs into the office, because “they are ashamed” in the presence of certain poor rags. . .). They listen to misfortunes and tribulations until late in the day . . . and return home dead tired . . . and sometimes find waiting for them a request for statistical data. (Pezzè Pascolato 1932:116–17)

This function of social work, which had much in common with the activities of Catholic and lay philanthropic organizations and which was consistent with the upper-middle-class basis of early female fascism, continued into the late 1930s. But an additional task was also added: that of inspections and referrals, which required that the activity of visitors to the home become more systematic. In 1933 Lena Trivulzio, the head of the Milanese provincial women’s groups, reported that the heads of the twenty-eight gruppi rionali had collaborated during the winter months with the party welfare offices, “carrying out on-the-spot investigations, verifications, and visits to the poor.”28 And by 1936 visitatrici were said to be present “in every neighborhood and in every home,” directing the needy to appropriate welfare agencies and providing material as well as moral aid.29

UNMASKING FRAUD AND DETECTING NEED There was a shift, then, not only in the method of assistance but also in the locus of assistance, which was less frequently the hos118

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pital or the office of the gruppo rionale than the home of the needy. This made it possible, on the one hand, to avoid the flooding of applicants in the offices of the EOA, often a source of political embarrassment for the regime.30 On the other hand, it enabled social workers to detect need, a task that refigured the art of social work in the 1930s. In the early nineteenth century, the principal problem for social workers had been to recognize “true indigence.” The dangers associated with assistance were fraud and the creation of dependence. Social workers developed techniques for investigating the home in order to distinguish those who thrived on handouts from those who were truly needy. In the 1930s this danger of fraud persisted,31 but a new one was identified: the concealment of need. Some families, because of “invincible pride,” as one writer put it, “do not dare make known their pitiful state and live in seclusion, deprived of sustenance: they almost escape society” (Galimberti 1924). But, argued social experts, society could not afford to have the impoverished family, the malnourished pregnant woman, or the tubercular child escape the gaze of the social worker or the care of welfare institutions. The family and the bodies of individuals were, after all, instruments for social ends. The recognition of the needy and the sick therefore required “perfecting the capillary organisms” of the party and appointing “for each sector, nucleus, and possibly for each street, a fascist visitatrice able to know personally the conditions of needy families. It would then be possible to advance against the truly needy, who sometimes keep themselves hidden.”32 Again in 1935 PNF Secretary Achille Starace charged visitatrici with carrying out assessments of need, “even without requests or urging on the part of those concerned.”33 This new investigative role for visitatrici also meant that wealthy lay volunteers had in theory to be replaced by trained social workers. As Sileno Fabbri put it, the social worker represented “the filter through which the whole mass to be assisted must pass” (Fabbri 1932e:1,006). And if women were no longer presumed to be “naturally” good mothers, neither could social work depend on the natural abilities of well-meaning women. Thus, the fascist party and para-state organizations established courses for visitatrici (as well as for Patronesses of ONMI, summer camp directors and assistants, and family nurses), and Starace advised federation secretaries to use only those women 119

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who had successfully completed these courses.34 The courses for visitatrici proposed in 1934 included studies on charitable institutions, state health organizations, the protection of maternity, the education of youth, and assistance to workers.35 In conjunction with its courses in 1937, the Federation of Padua published one of the most comprehensive manuals for party social workers, Wanda Scimone’s Nozioni per visitatrici fasciste (Federazione Provinciale dei Fasci Femminili 1937). By the end of the decade, it would be read by a few thousand young women (de Grazia 1992:263). In Padua the visitatrici affiliated with the EOA were each assigned two or more neighborhoods (contrade) and were provided lists of poor families “under their direct supervision.” The visitatrici were to make repeated inspections and to draw up written reports on the status, economic conditions, morality, and health of the family (Lovo 1937:12). Those women who worked in collaboration with ONMI were charged with similar tasks: inspecting the environmental conditions of pregnant women and recent mothers, making recommendations concerning hospitalization, and confirming information provided by mothers requesting assistance. In addition, they were to explain medical instructions and the benefits of breast-feeding, a balanced diet, and hygiene to new mothers (Righetti 1937:47, 49). Finally, visitatrici were to work alongside the public health officials in the campaign against tuberculosis. Here, too, the work of the modern social worker was to be distinguished from that of the “pure benefactress” by an attention to diagnosis and prophylaxis. The “Ten Commandments for the Fascist Visitatrice in the Battle against Tuberculosis” described no less than a micro-anthropology of the urban home: During the visit to the home, nothing must escape her vigilant eye. After the interrogation of the patient, which should be carried out with scrupulous care, she will turn attention to the whole of the house. She will notice how many rooms comprise it; whether it is sunny and airy; whether it is damp; the degree of cleanliness; whether the family lives alone in the residence; whether there are lodgers; whether there are children; how many beds exist in the house; whether the patient sleeps alone; whether the room has enough windows; whether [the patient] is covered adequately; what he and his family eat; whether he is a drinker; 120

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whether he spits and where he spits; whether he needs a spittoon; where he works; what were, according to the patient, the conditions of the workplace; what was his wage; whether the family is entered on the poverty rolls; whether it is eligible for insurance payments; whether it has received subsidies; from whom it received them and in what amount. (Fabbro 1937:57–58)

This task could not, the manual advised, be performed in a single visit but rather required periodic observations. In sum, the professionalization of visitatrici was to be marked by three moves: a move away from philanthropy and toward assistenza, a move from repression to prevention, and a move from moralization to normalization. This is not to say that there were sharp breaks—for example, there continued to be an emphasis on moral (as well as political) conversion until the end of the fascist regime.36 But there was nevertheless an important shift: the emphasis was less on the individual and his or her morality than on social prophylaxis. In fact, new arts of social work were being elaborated not only in Italy but throughout Europe in the interwar period. According to investigator Fanny Dessau, the modern social worker needed to submit “her action to a method, allowing herself to be guided by the natural and social sciences, which point out the origins of social ills and the means to cure them” (1932:737). Evangelical charity could then give way to “social diagnosis,” the name Dessau gave to the study of the causes of individual and collective ills as the basis of “curative action.” Many of these causes were to be found in the home. “Do we really know the family?” asked Dessau. “Do we know what composes it, [do we understand] the unfolding of the life of this organism that hides its intimate being from the gazes of outsiders [and is] a mystery to the very people who form its parts?” (ibid.:739). To know the family, Dessau argued, the monographs modeled after Le Play and Booth no longer sufficed. In addition to studying a few families “up close and in all their particulars,” it was necessary to investigate entire neighborhoods and to understand families “not only as isolated organisms, but, more important, in their reciprocal relations, voluntary and involuntary.” The method she advised was akin to participant observation: “only by living with the people, in the midst of people, sharing their life, can we understand, help, and uplift them” 121

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(ibid.:740). As Fabbri noted, this kind of observation called for particular qualities in the social worker: “a forcible, courageous, proud character that enables her to penetrate and live without anxieties, repugnance, or worries, in the most gloomy and shady popular neighborhoods” (1932e:1,009). Though Dessau made explicit appeals to science, she also worried aloud, in a presentation of her investigations of ten Roman families, that her work might be viewed as an unserious pastime or as “lacking in scientific value,” especially when compared to the mathematical elaborations of the statisticians (1933:38–39). There are indications that, for some experts, truly modern technologies of welfare and reproduction might have dispensed with all practices coded as female. As we have seen, Salvini and Ilvento called for doctors to perform investigations, while Ugo Manunta and others viewed social work as a transitory phenomenon, to be replaced by practices of previdenza sociale. For experts like Dessau, however, insurance technologies were “schematic and leveling” and needed to be corrected and supplemented by social service directed toward individuals. This required, she argued, knowledge not only of “abnormal people” but also of the everyday lives of the majority of the population (ibid.:41). In sum, her vision was of a social work that was both individualizing and totalizing. It would, on the one hand, offer assistance tailored precisely to the conditions recorded by the social worker and engage the assisted family in its own risanamento.37 On the other hand, it would develop a synthetic picture of the causes of the social phenomena of poverty, delinquency, disease, and infertility, which could serve as a map for a global prophylaxis. The individual and the social were thus to be linked in a process of normalization. As Sileno Fabbri wrote, social work was directed at the individual considered as a “social entity,” with the goal of “re-adapting him [or her] to collective life, from which, for various direct and indirect reasons, he [or she] has moved away” (1932e:1,000). Only diagnosis of the individual case, and an understanding of environmental conditions, would enable the social worker to return the family to normal and fertile life, a life that neither morality nor Nature could guarantee.

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✼

CHAPTER VI

✼

Beyond Public and Private

T

HIS BOOK has attempted to trace some of the lines of descent of present understandings of reproductive bodies (together with cities, homes, and families) as sites of technological intervention and political contestation. In an effort to make these understandings less familiar, I have highlighted the historical particularity of scientific efforts to know and manage populations. And I have suggested that these modern projects took specific forms in Italy, where nationalist juridical discourses and social sciences worked together to subordinate the bodies of women and men to the collective needs of the stock, and to assign new duties to the family. At one level, however, this story reads as a narrative of failure (to promote fertility, to prevent disease, to displace liberal and bureaucratic welfare practices), and we may well ask what it has to do with “our” present. In Italy, perhaps, the continuities are visible: for example, fascist legislation banning abortion and the distribution of information on contraception remained in effect until the 1970s. But I want to argue, more broadly, that social sciences and technologies reconstituted bodies in ways that continue to have material consequences for women and men throughout the West (and elsewhere), though again with important local differences. Social bodies, imagined as dangerous or endangered, continue to figure as objects of concern; the pregnant bodies of women are a particular focus of anxiety (Terry 1989). New technologies of reproduction have, indeed, made possible a heightened scrutiny and more far-reaching, normalizing interventions. And they have contributed to further erosions of the taken-for-granted status (if not the authority) of the natural.

(RE)READING RESISTANCE The technologies that engaged social bodies in interwar Italy appear rarely to have stimulated women or men to be prolific. Mussolini and the fascist press acknowledged this “failure” of the 123

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demographic campaign with some regularity;1 the statistics assembled by demographers spoke eloquently enough. Italy’s crude rates of “demographic increase” exhibited a steady decline:2 TABLE 2 Demographic Increase (Excess of births over deaths, per 1,000) Period

Italy

North

Center

South

Islands

1921–25 1926–30 1931–35 1936–40 1941–45

12.9 11.3 9.9 9.6 5.3

10.6 8.6 7.2 6.8 3.0

12.2 10.3 8.9 8.9 3.6

16.7 15.5 14.4 13.7 9.2

14.4 13.7 11.8 12.3 7.8

The embarrassment of the regime can only have been heightened when, as the Fascist Grand Council met in 1937 to propose new demographic measures, it was discovered that only 2 of the Council’s 26 members had more than 3 children, and more than half had 2 or fewer.3 Some critics and historians of the regime have characterized the failure of pronatalist interventions as the consequence of a “demographic strike” (sciopero demografico) waged predominantly by women in response to Mussolini’s Ascension Day address. Gaetano Salvemini, in an article that cast women’s relation to fascism in terms of “disobedience,” observed that “from March, 1928, on—i.e., exactly from the month in which the imperial commands issued in May 1927 should have borne fruit— the Italian birthrate dropped disastrously. . . . It was, in effect, a general strike” (Salvemini 1933:64–65). There is, of course, little evidence to suggest that women were moved to become pregnant by the public appeals for higher fertility.4 And Passerini notes that, in Turin at least, many women considered offensive the use of bonuses, incentives, and taxes to increase fertility. However, it is also important to recall that the reproductive behaviors decried by the regime—late marriage, a high percentage of bachelorhood, and low fertility in urban areas—had begun to be widespread well before the 1920s (See Hajnal 1960). Thus, as Chiara Saraceno notes, fertility declines cannot easily be attributed either to antifascism or to the economic conditions that prevailed between the wars (Saraceno 1981a:206). 124

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Stefania Bartoloni has been led to describe the failures of the demographic campaign in terms of a more general resistance to state intervention in reproductive matters: “Rather than an antifascist attitude,” argues Bartoloni, “the control of reproductive behavior represent[ed] a critique of the intrusion that fascism carried out more than other [regimes]” (Bartoloni 1984:127). Yet this analysis, opposing recurrent governmental interventions to a de-historicized desire of women to control their bodies, runs two risks. First, it may be inadequate to depict reproductive practices negatively, as a refusal of intervention rather than an assertion of a particular tactic. Pierre Bourdieu has instead suggested that marital and reproductive strategies be read as parts of complex patterns of social reproduction; as such, they cannot be divorced from other cultural practices and tactical decisions (Bourdieu 1976). This is not to suggest, as many social experts and moralists did in the 1920s, that the limitation of births was the result of a particular psychological or moral orientation, namely, egoism. Nor must it be read simply as an “economic” decision in the narrow sense of the word. Rather, as we saw in earlier chapters, the heterogenous social technologies that composed the “demographic campaign” encountered varied and local resistance. Efforts to enumerate the population, to penalize bachelorhood, to check the movements of migrants to urban areas, to police “neo-Malthusian” practices, and to encourage large families came up against the desires and multiple “ways of making do” of Italian women and men (de Certeau 1984; Galt 1974): southerners’ evasions of the census taker, middle-class concerns with the “quality” of offspring, young women’s aesthetics of the body, the housing practices of recent immigrants to the metropolis.5 Second, constructing social technologies as governmental “intrusions” risks naturalizing the “private” spaces of the family and reproduction and may obscure the creation of social spaces, which were simultaneously places of knowledge, intervention, and the articulation of duties. I have argued that specific practices designed to reduce mortality, promote marriage, and increase fertility worked to redefine reproduction as a social phenomenon, with specific and predictable social effects, and as a site of particular kinds of contestation. Thus, we might begin to examine women and men’s negotiations with this new set of scientific constructions, political rationalities, and governmental 125

CHAPTER VI

practices, including the normalizing practices of urbanism, architecture, social work, and medicine. I want to suggest, in short, that social technologies of reproduction, and the modern forms of knowledge and power on which they have depended, might be analyzed in terms of the modifications they brought to a field of tactical possibilities (Foucault 1982). It is in this context that we can ask, for example, to what extent social technologies of reproduction were successful at redefining the Italian family, not only as a target of interventions but also as a bearer of social duties. Married women, in particular, were made responsible for the health and welfare of their children—for the hygiene of the home, diet, and child-rearing. Paradoxically, the success of new models of the family in Italy—this new relationship among hygienic spaces, mother, child and society—may have operated to reduce fertility. Saraceno suggests that “the increased value put on child welfare by the offer of health care and maternity education may not have strengthened the desire for many pregnancies so much as enhancing the value . . . of the individual child, thereby justifying the limitation of their numbers” (1991:198). In fact, there is much to suggest that social scientific constructions (of health and welfare, of dangers and risks) could be reappropriated or even used to critique the state’s inadequate services, the erratic and piecemeal nature of its assistance, and its failures to be “modern.” De Grazia speaks of the emergence of an “oppositional familism” in Italy, an antistatist attitude that drew precisely on the new constructions of the family: “Once family interests became legitimate grounds for demanding government action, they also became grounds to retreat from government impositions” (1992:113).6 In other places as well, “welfare” and “health” have come to have multiple and contested meanings and have made possible practices at odds with the normalizing interventions of states.

DENATURED BODIES Perhaps the most lasting and ironic consequence of interwar efforts to know and manage procreation has been a thorough denaturalization of reproductive bodies. As late as the 1970s, 126

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Italy’s legal codes would continue to consider procreation as a natural fact, “to be defended against any technical or medical artifice” (Livi-Bacci 1977:349). But by the end of the fascist regime, it was really no longer possible (if indeed it ever had been) to speak of reproduction as innocent or natural, even when it took place in the countryside and resulted in large families. Women could not be counted on to be naturally fertile or to be naturally good mothers. Reproduction was instead marked as (and has remained) an object of social scientific knowledge, social-technical and biomedical intervention, and political debate. And if today many Italians and others—in and outside the West—take it for granted that reproduction can be “planned” or “managed,” this is in some measure the result of a modern, social-scientific construction of social bodies as objects of knowledge and government. This effect has only been heightened in recent years by the appearance of “new reproductive technologies” that further erode the idea that reproduction is natural. As Marilyn Strathern points out, though “nature” continues to have considerable rhetorical force, it can no longer be taken for granted: “Nature becomes a department of human enterprise, and we discover that it was never autonomous” (1992:55). Nature has not, of course, disappeared from scientific discourses surrounding “infertility,” but Strathern suggests there has been a “subtle shift from regarding naturalness as part of the workings of physiology to attributing it to parental desire” (ibid.:56). Finally, we may begin to wonder what has become of the dream—widely shared at the beginning of this century—that with the aid of science the social might be rationally managed. The local crises of the welfare state have contributed to a sense that the social might be not be as reliably known, or as amenable to technological interventions, as experts had once imagined. At the same time, new terrains are being constituted for science and government. Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that it is now at the level of the genome that we seek to correct and normalize. Keller traces the emergence since the 1950s of a new era in which the meanings (and potentials) of nature and nurture are reimagined, if not inverted: “Where the traditional view had been that ‘nature’ spelled destiny and ‘nurture’ freedom, now the roles appear to be reversed” (ibid.:288). We may question 127

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whether, in the European discourses that constructed social bodies, nature and nurture were ever as autonomous as this (American) genealogy suggests. But Keller argues convincingly that the ideological triumph of molecular biology, and the linked expansion of the concept of “genetic disease,” has carved out new spaces for knowledge and power. These still-emergent problematizations of bodies—of their boundaries, potentials, and dangers—call forth their own governmental practices, from practices of reading and decoding, to visualizing and screening technologies, to what Keller identifies as a eugenics at the level of the individual (ibid.:289). They also call forth cultural critiques that are just beginning to be written.

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CHAPTER I 1. Much of the impetus for questioning the cultural assumptions and power relations that underlie debates about reproduction comes from feminist studies of science and medicine, and most recently from a productive intersection of feminist and anthropological work. Emily Martin has, for example, analyzed the metaphors (taken largely from the sphere of production) that organize women’s experience of menstruation, childbirth, and menopause (Martin 1987); Rayna Rapp has begun an ethnography of amniocentesis and genetic counseling that explores the problematic notion of choice (Rapp 1988); and Carol Delaney has attempted to unpack the complex meanings of paternity (Delaney 1986). 2. Problematization is admittedly an awkward term, but it points to the active construction of scientific and governmental problems. It will become clear below that a problematization is not something “unreal”—thus, for example, there was indeed disease, overcrowding, and lowered fertility in the cities of interwar Italy. Nor, however, is the elevation of certain aspects of a complex situation to the status of problems—and particular kinds of problems requiring particular kinds of solutions—simply an “effect” or “reflection” of the real. One cannot always predict the form a problematization will take nor specify its effects. See Foucault (1984). 3. For related projects see Urla (1993), Herzfeld (1987, 1992), Rabinow (1989), and Faubion (1993). 4. As Rabinow has argued, “An ethnographic approach to society as the product of historical practices combining truth and power consists of identifying society as a cultural object, specifying those authorized to make truth claims about it and those practices and symbols which localized, regulated, and represented that new reality spatially” (Rabinow 1989:11). 5. On the historical and cultural peculiarity of the notion of “construction,” see also Strathern (1992:39). 6. For example, Haraway argues that in science studies the language of “construction” has meant that Nature is not allowed to be an active participant in the stories we tell (Haraway 1992:298). 7. The roots of a concern with population, reproduction, and the social domain, even in Italy, can be traced back to the nineteenth cen129

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

tury, and in a recent series of essays I have begun to outline the history of anthropologies of the body and the social body (Horn forthcoming). 8. For a general discussion of Italian anthropology during the fascist period, see Puccini and Squillacciotti (1979). 9. Several authors have called attention to fascism’s reliance on medical and surgical metaphors (see, for example, Rigotti 1987); there has been no comparable attention to fascism’s uses of social scientific discourse. 10. By “rationality” I do not mean to suggest that particular interventions were more or less rational than others, or that they were part of a general trend of “rationalization,” but that they obeyed and developed a particular logic. A rationality is therefore a cultural and historical construction. See Foucault (1981:226). 11. Much has been made, for example, of the party affiliations of prominent Italian anthropologists, and of intellectual accommodations made or not made to fascism (Puccini and Squillacciotti 1979; Simeone 1978). However, these discussions tend not to consider the more complex and durable relations between social scientific knowledge and modern arts of governing populations. See, for a contrasting example, Proctor’s discussion of racial science in Nazi Germany (1988). 12. See, for example, de Grazia’s productive comparison of the demographic policies of Italy and Sweden (de Grazia 1992:4–5). CHAPTER II 1. See, for example, the comments of Augusto Turati: “The conviction of the need for the intervention of the State in social matters . . . constitutes without a doubt the crucial difference between the fascist conception and the liberal and socialist conceptions of the modern State” (Turati 1929:61). 2. At the same time, models of the cosmos and the body politic were used to map the order and illnesses of the human organism (Singer 1957:64–65). 3. Donna Haraway is among a number of culture critics who are wary of the promise of organicism. She suggests that a “longing for a natural body, for purity outside the disruptions of the ‘artificial,’ ” may be “more dangerous for feminists than obviously abstract forms of masculinist transcendence, which do not hide their danger to ordinary, finite communities by claims of being fully embodied and natural” (1988:86). 4. As one historian put it, in the nineteenth century organismic ideas took on a “more concrete and positive form” (Coker 1967[1910]:41). 130

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5. Gini was a professor of statistics at the Universities of Cagliari, Padua, and Rome, and a member of the Fascist Constitutional Reform Commission of 1925. 6. For Gini, sociology included all the “social disciplines” that did not yet have autonomy within the university (1927a:5). 7. Compare Herzfeld’s discussion of nineteenth-century genealogies of nations, constructed by Gobineau and others, in which some races were coded as active and male, and others as passive and female (1992:30). 8. See, for example, Durkheim’s discussion of the “social physiology” of Saint-Simon, which had been modeled in part on the biomedical research of Xavier Bichat (Durkheim 1971[1928]:118–36). 9. For the history of this medical symbolism prior to the twentieth century, see Nye (1982). 10. Mussolini, for example, likened Italian society to a cancer-ridden body, and himself to a uncompromising surgeon. Mussolini’s use of medical metaphor dates from his involvement with socialism before the war. See Cortelazzo (1977), Simonini (1978), and Ellwanger (1941:122–34). Compare Durkheim’s equation of the modern statesman with the doctor (1982[1901]:104). 11. In fact, during the fascist period, the metaphorical relationship between the individual and social bodies worked in both ways—as in the squadristi ritual of administering castor oil, a powerful purging agent, to opponents of fascism. As Luisa Passerini notes: The ritual of castor oil availed itself of the correspondence between the social body and the physical body. If the human body lends itself particularly well to symbolizing the social system, such that its control can be taken to be an expression of social control, this occurs because each of the symbolic codes pertaining to the two bodies renders the other more meaningful. By making use of a forbidden organic function, fascist violence revived, in its own way, an ancient ritual procedure: provoking disorder in order to constitute a new order, and reinforcing this by bringing together, even materially, the social body and the individual body. (Passerini 1984:117)

Also see Douglas (1973:93–112). 12. Political biology was defined by Nicola Pende as “the science that, founded on the . . . study of men as cells of the great social organism, must . . . guide men of government” (Pende 1933a:7). 13. As Figlio has noted for the case of “organization,” a unity of intention with respect to the notion of “life” could be accompanied by a relative discord with respect to social interests, etc (1976:32). 131

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14. As Lukes notes (1973:338), Durkheim was also (mis)read by some as a forerunner of twentieth-century nationalism, even fascism. 15. For a discussion of the life and thought of Rocco, see Gentile (1982) and especially Ungari (1963). 16. This logic was used by Rocco and others to support capital punishment. For Raffaele Garofalo, a founder of the positivist school of criminal anthropology, society had the right “to cut away malignant tumors from its own organism” (Garofalo 1926:546). 17. Italian criminal anthropology variously described itself as the “Italian School,” the “Anthropological School,” the “Positive School,” the “Modern School,” the “Scientific School,” and the “New School” (Lombroso-Ferrero 1972[1911]:vi). Its members shared no particular disciplinary training, but rather a manner of problematizing criminality and deviance. 18. While the focus on the head was in some ways “commonsensical” and continuous with popular practices of reading faces, Sekula suggests it also worked to “legitimate on organic grounds the dominion of intellectual over manual labor” (1986:12). The anthropology of criminal women also privileged the genitals as loci of deviance. 19. On the links between anthropometry and photography, see Sekula (1986:19–23); on anthropometry’s relation to racist evolutionary thought, see Gould (1978:73–122). 20. On the uses of anthropometry to manage populations in other domains, see Blanckaert (1988). 21. The degeneration of the race was due, in Lombroso’s view, to the action of alcoholic beverages and “inheritance.” Its effects included sterility, madness, and crime, and it manifested itself in anomalies of the ear, the skull, and the genitals (Lombroso et al. 1886:6). 22. As Bruno Latour notes, Pasteur’s microbiology “metamorphosed” the very composition of the “social context” and endowed Pasteur with “one of the most striking fresh sources of power ever”: “Who can imagine being the representative of a crowd of invisible, dangerous forces able to strike anywhere and to make a shambles of the present state of society, forces of which he is by definition the only credible interpreter and which only he can control?” (1983:158) On Alexandre Lacassagne’s use of Pasteur to construct a critique of the Italian school of criminology, see Sekula (1986:37). 23. Article 1, Royal Decree 1743, 14 September 1919. 24. The project for Book I was published in four languages: Italian, English, French, and German. For a further discussion of the relations between criminal anthropology and the revision of the penal code, see Pasquino (1980). 132

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25. For a discussion of the militia, see Aquarone (1965:65–68, 246ff.). Also see the circulars from the Minister of the Interior Luigi Federzoni concerning fascist “illegalisms” (ibid.:382–85). 26. Royal Decree 1848, 6 November 1926. 27. As Aquarone notes, some of these measures dated from the nineteenth century. House arrest (domicilio coatto) was introduced by a law dated 15 August 1863, for the suppression of brigandage (1965:99). 28. As Johan van Justi wrote in 1768: “The science of policing consists . . . in regulating everything that relates to the present condition of society, in strengthening and improving it, in seeing that all things contribute to the welfare of the members that compose it. The aim of policing is to make everything that composes the state serve to strengthen and increase its power, and likewise serve the public welfare” (cited in Donzelot 1979:7). 29. See, for example, Manunta (1939), Pignatori (1936), and Siliato (1939). 30. Cherubini notes that carità was usually used to refer to assistance carried out by religious organizations, while filantropia was applied to lay interventions (1977:11). 31. See also Castel (1976). Giovanna Procacci defines pauperismo as “poverty risen to the rank of social danger . . . a collective and essentially urban phenomenon” (Procacci 1978:71). 32. Previdenza refers both to the values of thrift and foresight, and to a set of practices designed to anticipate future needs, including savings, mutual aid, and insurance. In his entry for the Enciclopedia italiana, Romeo Vuoli defined previdenza sociale as “a complex of initiatives which the state undertakes directly or indirectly to eliminate in individuals the need to turn to charity” (1935:240). 33. Also see Siliato, who contrasted fascist social insurance with nineteenth-century mutual-aid societies, described as “means of class struggle,” and with the intermittent interventions of philanthropic institutions (Siliato 1939:20–21). 34. Indeed, some fascists worried that social insurance left individuals too much freedom. Ferdinando Loffredo argued that insurance, by providing the guarantees of support that the family had traditionally provided, discouraged the formation of new families. Loffredo therefore praised the reform of social insurance in 1939, which made the family rather than the individual the object of insurance, defining risk as “any event that may strike and harm the family nucleus” (1939:159). 35. Mussolini complained that there was considerable cultural resistance to previdenza, particularly in certain parts of Italy. Speaking in 1926 to agents of the National Insurance Institute, which administered 133

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

life insurance, he noted, “You are also fighting another great battle against debilitating, miraculistic mental habits that turn [people] away from previdenza toward that absurd mirage summed up by the saying ‘the saints will provide’ ” (1926b:86). Ironically, many of the welfare programs administered by the regime were financed in part by income from lotteries. 36. For Roberti, these interests were not only economic but also demographic. Also see Colamarino (1932:35). 37. Law 1765, 17 August 1935. 38. As Roberti observed, “Insurance . . . does not strike the ‘phenomenon’ of the accident, which is dispersion of productive force in its origins and consequences” (1929:397). Also see Ewald (1986:343). 39. Although for some, social assistance was a “transitory activity,” for others it represented “the necessary complement” of previdenza sociale. Compare Manunta (1939:8) and Pignatori (1936:99–100). 40. For more on work medicine and the factory doctor, see Dodi Osnaghi (1981). 41. “In this case, too, we are antiliberal and prefer to prevent rather than intervene afterward to correct” (Mussolini 1931:59). 42. According to Gabbi, the expression dates back to 1910, when Guido Baccelli distinguished it from clinical medicine. 43. Also see Baglioni (1937). For Baglioni, the physical and moral “strengthening” of the race in turn tended to increase the defensive powers of the organism, “the most important and efficacious aids (because they are natural) to prevent the rise of diseases and to overcome them when they arise” (1937:232). 44. Although the administration of assistance was to become one of the most important tasks of the party, PNF organizations existed alongside relief programs of the Provinces, the municipalities, the congregazioni di carità, the opere pie, and a bewildering number of other philanthropic organizations. In the case of municipal and provincial assistance programs, the state and the party simply declined to take over the responsibilities of local governments. In the case of opere pie and religious programs, the state and party were actively opposed by the church, which had for some time seen Catholic social initiatives threatened by increased state intervention. CHAPTER III 1. For a discussion of the address, see Santarelli (1967, I:439–45) and Meldini (1975:11–19). For a contemporary and comprehensive discussion of Italian demographic programs, see Glass (1940:219ff.). 2. Also see Mussolini (1927b). Knowledge of the population, in134

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cluding its biology, was seen to be necessary not only for the government of Italy but also for the government of the Italian colonies. As one author put it: [T]he problem of colonial conquest is not, except in its very first phases and in particular regions, an exclusively or predominantly political or military problem but is instead first of all a scientific problem, above all a biological problem. . . . This means it is necessary, on the one hand, to know the environment completely . . . and, on the other hand, to know completely the people of color—that is, the somatic and psychic characteristics, the customs and the biological needs of the local populations. (Zavattari 1929:213)

3. Law 937, 3 June 1926, increased the ratio of inhabitants to public bars from 500:1 to 1,000:1 and limited hours for the sale of alcoholic beverages. See Zingali (1933:596). The closing of osterie of course had other motivations, as Mussolini noted sarcastically: “Since we [fascists] probably will not have the opportunity to solicit votes from bar-owners and their clients, as happened during the democratic-liberal Middle Ages, we can afford ourselves the luxury of closing these dispensaries of cheap, ruinous happiness” (1927a:363). 4. Although an important moment in the history of discourses and practices of population management in Italy, the Ascension Day speech was by no means Mussolini’s first comment on the demographic situation. On 28 January 1924, in a speech to the fascist party, Mussolini had described the Italians as an “industrious and prolific people, which has provided and will provide many soldiers to the army, sailors to the navy, workers to the factories, and peasants to the fields” (1924a:47). But, as he would announce several months later, the demographic growth of Italy was not without problems. It was, in fact, the principal cause of the “underdevelopment” of Southern Italy: a part of Italy characterized by the slums of Naples, by municipalities lacking roads and water and cemeteries, and by the poverty and lack of housing in Sicily and Calabria. But Mussolini had not proposed to check that impoverishing population growth: “I will never engage in Malthusian or neo-Malthusian propaganda. . . . I do not believe in the scientific seriousness of these doctrines. The sole fact that decline threatens other nations means we must be satisfied by our vigorous development” (1924b:295). Mussolini was, however, a late convert to anti-Malthusian positions. In 1913, responding to a question from the Turin journal Educazione sessuale, he had declared himself in favor of “procreative prudence,” 135

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and together with Leda Rafanelli, a libertarian writer and early girlfriend, had professed himself a “Malthusian.” See Meldini (1975:85). Indeed, according to Paolo Monelli, the young Mussolini had planned to write a play around Malthusian themes, to “demonstrate that bringing many children into the world is an error that damages the entire society, because it restricts the parents to a strenuous fight for life” (Monelli 1968:69). 5. The participants included the biologists Julian Huxley and Raymond Pearl; social physician Léon Bernard; demographers Lucien March, Corrado Gini, and Livio Livi; eugenicists Cora Hodson, Charles Davenport, and J.B.S. Haldane; racial hygienists Eugene Fischer and Max Hirsch; anthropologist G. H. Pitt-Rivers; economist Maynard Keynes; and author H. G. Wells. In addition to Europeans and North Americans, there were representatives from China, Japan, Siam [now Thailand], India, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile. 6. In his closing remarks, W. E. Rappard mocked the contributions of the biologists: “I wondered if our countries represented for them little islands isolated from the rest of the world where only corn was cultivated” (Rappard 1927:354). 7. In a comment on the opening-day address by Raymond Pearl on the growth of yeast and Drosophila populations, J. W. Glover concurred that social and economic events had little ultimate effect on population growth: “The small fluctuations seem important because we view them from the magnified position of the infinitesimal present; in the march of centuries these variations fade away and are absorbed in the trend determined by the immutable forces of nature as expressed in natality, mortality, and world boundaries” (Glover 1927:43). 8. As Rudolph Holsti put it, “[T]he conference may insist that, from a scientific point of view, the worst enemies of the great statesmen are not the nations living on the other side of political frontiers, but are all the anti- and a-social forces keeping even the highest of nations internally weak and socially sick” (Holsti 1927:360). 9. Compare the comments of French demographer Lucien March, who argued that in matters of reproduction, individual foresight (that liberal value) might be contrary to the interest of the whole. For March, family allowances enabled “the community” to correct “that dangerous tendency which is created by individual foresight” (March 1927:146–47). 10. In August 1927 Mussolini complained to the prefects of this drain of “vitality”: “For every emigrant who leaves Italy forever, in exchange for the little money that arrives from abroad, the country loses economically all that it has spent to feed him, to educate him, to 136

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train him to produce. Militarily, [it loses] a soldier, demographically a young and strong individual, who will fertilize foreign lands and provide children to foreign countries” (1927c:350). 11. In practice, however, these measures were largely redundant: restrictions placed on immigration by the United States, beginning with the Quota Act in 1921, had already greatly checked the movement of the Italian emigrant population overseas. Although migration within Europe, and especially of northern Italians to France, actually increased during the 1920s, this could not compensate for the reduction of movement to the United States (Treves 1976:111). 12. Law 1162, 9 July 1926. ISTAT was in many ways a compromise between decentralization and the highly centralized statistical offices of other European countries. For a discussion of the history of censuses in Italy, see Fortunati (1935). Also see the comments in Hacking (1982). 13. The population of Sicily, according to the “corrected” figures of the 1931 census, had been inflated by 11.2 percent. Livi-Bacci notes that “many comuni are reluctant, even now, to admit that many emigrants have departed for good and try to keep them in their records” (1977:297). 14. Royal Legislative Decree 1503, 6 November 1930. Censuses of the population in years ending in a 1 were to be accompanied by censuses of agriculture, livestock, and agricultural professions. Those in years ending in 6 were to be accompanied by censuses of industry and commerce, of industrial professions, and of industrial production. The 1931 census was the only complete census of the population conducted during the fascist period. The first quinquennial census of 1936 was “streamlined” and centered on “the most important characteristics of the status of the population” (ISTAT 1938, vol. 3, part 1:1). The 1941 census was canceled because of the war. Anna Treves suggests that the 1936 census intentionally avoided a number of embarrassing statistics, including those on the place of birth: This was . . . a rather suspicious “omission,” which was accompanied by the delicate questions on religion and unemployment, on education, and on the fertility of women. The risk of seeing national statistics themselves ratify the failure of the policy carried out until that point probably appeared real, and [the government] preferred not to run [that risk], blocking every investigation and every appeal to statistics. (Treves 1976:24–25)

Matteo Matteotti made a similar argument for the statistics associated with working conditions under the regime: “[The fascists] wanted to avoid offering dangerous documentation” (1944:112). 137

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15. At the International Congress one professor of statistics undertook to examine the relationship between appearance and dress, on the one hand, and reproductive behavior, on the other. Physical appearance and elegance were ranked on a scale of 0 to 3, while the characteristics of the toilette could be “slovenly, simple, negligible, thorough, showy.” The author concluded that the beauty and elegance of the woman was directly correlated with the probability of marriage but inversely correlated with fertility (Grillenzoni 1933). 16. See, for example, the comments of the eighteenth-century Milanese Pietro Verri: “The population is one of the factors of national wealth; it constitutes the real, physical force of the State; the number of inhabitants is the only measure of its might.” Cited in Visco (1941:17). 17. The problematization of the relationship between population size and well-being also included Malthus and his followers, although they gave an opposed evaluation to the relationship. 18. Robert Nye suggests that a medical model of cultural decline penetrated the political milieu of France in part because of “the very appropriateness of such a model for a nation whose vital statistics revealed several alarming trends. Chief among these were disquieting demographic figures” (Nye 1982:21). By 1900 the Chamber had established a permanent committee on depopulation. Also see Ronsin, who argues that pro-natalist policies in France were in part a response to the defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870 and were motivated by a desire for revenge (1980:126–27). 19. In addition, malaria and tuberculosis were widespread: there were more than 350,000 cases of malaria in 1917 alone (Mariani 1976:11). 20. Korherr, a demographer and a Roman Catholic, was later appointed by Heinrich Himmler as “Inspector for Statistics attached to the Reichsführer-SS and Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germanism.” 21. For a discussion of the city and its effect on the decline of the population, see Spengler (1928[1919]). Also see Schorske (1963). 22. It has been demonstrated that, starting from the population present on the face of the earth in Malthus’s time, and applying the law of Malthus backward through the centuries, one would arrive at this astonishing, as well as grotesque, conclusion: that at the time of the Roman Empire the earth had no inhabitants! The thesis that quality can substitute for quantity is false. . . . False and imbecilic is the thesis that a smaller population means greater well-being: the standard of living of the 42 million Italians today is far superior to the standard of living of the 27 million of 1871 or the 18 [million] of 1816. (Mussolini 1928a:15)

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23. See Mussolini (1931:60). A real demographic consequence of falling birthrates, the aging of the population was also the symbolic antithesis of the recurrent fascist themes of virility and youth. 24. The economic welfare of the population was seen to be threatened by declines in consumption: “It is by now obvious that one of the causes, or rather the fundamental cause of the crisis that has afflicted the world, is the violent rupture of the equilibrium between production and consumption. . . . The consumers have been lacking and continue to be lacking. Why? Because they have not been born and are not being born” (Mussolini 1934a:52). This emphasis on the limits of consumption rather than the limits of production reversed the logic of Malthus and recalled the stances of nationalists such as Alfredo Rocco. For Rocco, population decline spelled economic disaster: “Reduction [of the population size] does not produce well-being, it produces poverty; because the lack of workers, the high price of labor, causes, in a brief period of time, desertion of the fields, a return to extensive cultivation, to the latifondo, and then—the final act of a great tragedy—the abandoning of cultivation, the desert” (Rocco 1914a:80). 25. This rhetoric lent support to opponents of the regime who characterized the demographic campaign as a battle for “cannon fodder.” Interview, Giuliana Gadola Beltrami, 9 May 1985. 26. For Mussolini, the “ultra-fertility” of blacks in the United States served as a warning signal: “There is a large neighborhood of New York, Harlem, populated exclusively by Negroes. A serious revolt of Negroes that erupted in this neighborhood last July was, after a night of bloody conflicts, barely controlled by the police, who found themselves faced by dense masses of Negroes” (1928a:10–11). 27. Until the 1930s the term stirpe (stock) was normally used to refer to the Italian people, while razza was normally used in a zoological sense, as in a razza of horses (Sera 1935). With increasing frequency, however, the two words were used interchangeably. Once racial legislation was in place, an order to the press, dated 6 August 1938, sought to remedy this confusion by forbidding the use of stirpe. For a discussion of usage toward the end of the regime, see Cortelazzo (1984). The etymology and fluid meanings of “race” are carefully analyzed in Goldberg (1993:61–89). 28. Later, however, Mussolini called himself a “racist” in a conversation with the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, Giorgio Pini, and corrected Pini’s use of the word stirpe in his biography of Mussolini: “Stirpe is a generic, literary expression, whereas razza interprets better my thinking, which refers to the blood and the flesh of the individual, in addition to the spirit” (Pini 1950:90, 180). 139

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Renzo De Felice argues, however, that Mussolini never embraced a racism on the German model. A certain “myth of the race” is discernible in his thought and writings from the first years after the “March on Rome”; this never had, however, anything in common with Nazi racism. Until the conquest of Ethiopia, the goals and limits of Mussolini’s “racism” never went beyond the realization of a medical, demographic, and eugenic politics. More broadly, [they never went] beyond the aspiration of substituting an “imperial” consciousness of Rome for the “bourgeois” consciousness of “little Italy”—[they did not go] beyond, in sum, the vitalization and the physical and moral strengthening of the Italians. (De Felice 1977:288–89)

29. For Visco, the best Italian examples of “protection of the race” were the laws forbidding ongoing sexual relations with the indigenous peoples of the colonies. See Law 822, 13 May 1940. 30. As Francesco Nalli wrote, “The demographic politics of Fascism . . . is a pedagogic politics—otherwise, it would be pure and narrow biological politics; humanculture [ominicultura], not education; eugenics, not ascetics; racism, not Fascism” (Nalli 1934:7). For another writer the rejection of German, negative eugenics was linked to a rejection of natural selection: The little that we know with certainty about “heredity” . . . is enough to demonstrate that natural survival is not selective, that artificial selection is not progressive. The “struggle for life” kills and does not select; it works for destruction, not construction. . . . The politics of the Regime [as opposed to Germany] is focused on another order of facts, which are facts of life, wholly within the framework of social phenomena, and which therefore can be dominated with sure principles: environmental factors. (de Florentiis 1935:193–94, 196)

31. For a discussion of prefascist positions, and of the advisability of spreading neo-Malthusian propaganda among the Italian working classes, see de Pietri-Tonelli (1911). 32. This was, moreover, the position of the church, which condoned abstinence as the only acceptable means of limiting the number of children and avoiding poverty (Husslein 1942:143). 33. Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman, writing on France and Germany, suggest two different genealogies for hygiénisme, which was “reformist” and tied to plannisme, and eugénisme, which was anti140

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reformist and rooted in social Darwinism. Throughout Europe many neo-Malthusians, including Margaret Sanger, linked explicitly birth control and eugenics (Murard and Zylberman 1977). The “hygienist” position was, of course, implicit in Cerletti’s (1924) emphasis on “ideal conditions,” but there hygiene was linked to a control of procreation fascists later rejected. 34. I am grateful to Carl Ipsen for this reference. 35. In 1914 Cesare Artom, citing the botanist de Vries’ work on Oenothera lamarckiana—which purported to show the sensitivity of germ plasm to external variations—affirmed the need for “euthenics,” the goal of which was to improve the environmental factor without regard to the hereditary patrimony (Artom 1914). Also see the discussion in Pogliano (1984:63). 36. For Poggi, an important aspect of this euthenics or genofilassi was physical education. This emphasis on sport obeyed a neo-Lamarckian logic: “It is logical to think that sporting citizens will have healthy and resistant offspring, since exercise develops certain organs, and this development will over generations become a characteristic that will improve the somatic complex of the race—in other words, through euthenics it will become eugenic” (1939:895). For a discussion of the connections between neo-Lamarckianism and the hygiene and physical culture movements, see Nye (1982:35). 37. Herzfeld notes that in Gobineau’s thinking true race was always male (and aristocratic): “The necessity of [a race’s] dependence on female procreation is the source of its inevitable corruption by ‘female’ races” (1992:30). 38. A zoologist participating in the same session found it unimaginable that the male body could serve as an index of fertility (Ghigi 1933:74). 39. In 1932, as soon as the Fascists saw that the “battle” for births was a failure, they discovered that slender women generally have fewer children than fat women. They therefore started a new “battle,” which might be called the battle for the fat. The ideal for the Fascists is now the huge woman, weighing at least 300 pounds. So far only propaganda and “moral pressure” have been used. But on some nice morning the Duce will issue an order to put all slender women before a firing squad. Since they are barren and since barrenness is treason against the Fatherland, it is only natural that such treason should be punished by execution. We have not yet arrived at this phase of the “battle,” but we may expect its inevitable coming. (Salvemini 1933:66)

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CHAPTER IV 1. For an overview of fascist demographic programs, see Zingali (1933), Glass (1940), and two special volumes of the Annali di statistica (ISTAT 1934; ISTAT 1943). 2. Richard Saller and David Kertzer argue that “the issue of attempts by the state or other suprafamilial entities to wrest control from family groups recurs throughout the centuries.” They suggest, for example, that Augustus’s law against adultery of 18 B.C.E., part of a “larger program of social engineering,” already marked an “increasing state intervention in the private sphere” (1991:12). Though some social technicians in the interwar period would construct a similar genealogy, I want to call attention to the historical specificity (and modernity) of both the “private sphere” as constituted by liberal jurisprudence, and of projects of “social engineering” that relied on science to manage a newly imagined terrain, the “social.” 3. As Ungari notes, Pisanelli himself admitted it was “‘premature and dangerous’ to enter into such questions, legitimate in the context of a work [of revision] more profound and radical than the modest and limited [work] consented by circumstances, which did not justify departures from the scheme received from tradition” (Ungari 1974:117). 4. Also see Cicu (1940:179–80): “The superior nature of the end of the family justifies the most frequent and penetrating interference of the State, since the protection of superior interests can only be effected by a superior power.” 5. Adoption was, for Pisanelli, an aristocratic practice that did not correspond to the needs of modern society (Ungari 1974:169). The 1865 code required that the adopting person be at least 50 years old and have no descendants, and that the adoptee be at least 18. The adoptee was not presumed to have broken any ties with his “natural” family; nor did he fall under the patria potestas of his new “father.” 6. Divorce was possible only for non-Catholics in Parma and Piedmont, where there was a strong Jewish and Protestant presence. See Ungari (1974:125). 7. The king could, however, grant dispositions to the ages set by canon law (Article 68). 8. Massimo Livi-Bacci notes that in 1865, in anticipation of the new law, 205,621 couples were married, while in 1866 only 120,752 were married with a civil ceremony. These figures do not include Lazio and the Veneto, where the law did not take effect until 1871 (Livi-Bacci 1980:90). 9. This resistance was most pronounced in the provinces formerly 142

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under the control of the papacy. Because religious marriages were not registered, these provinces also had the highest rates of illegitimate children. See Livi-Bacci (1980:92). 10. Rocco had made a similar argument fifteen years earlier in his pamphlet on nationalism: The nationalists, who value above all the interest of the nation, in contrast to the democrats—who in their obsession to protect the individual against every constraint of the social organization, are naturally antireligious—recognize all the moral and national value of religion. The nationalists believe therefore that the State cannot ignore the very important and fundamental social phenomenon of Italians that is religion. And since the religion of the great majority of Italians is the Catholic religion, the Italian State cannot ignore the Catholic Church and the Catholic religion. It must instead take directly into consideration Italian Catholic interests, insofar as these are compatible with the interests of the nation.

There could be no question of equality. Rocco considered “the interest of the nation to be preeminent and absolute, and religious interests to be accessory and subordinate. . . . Only because [the nationalists] recognize that religion and the Catholic Church are very important factors of national life do they want to protect, as far as possible, Catholic interests as well, always maintaining the sovereignty of the State” (Rocco 1914a:81). 11. Law 27 May 1929, “Disposizioni per l’applicazione del Concordato dell’11 febbraio 1929 tra Santa Sede e l’Italia nella parte relativa al matrimonio.” 12. Article 7, Law 27 May 1929. Also see Rocco (1929:1084–85). 13. The project of a Carta del diritto was announced by Dino Grandi in a 1940 address to the Commission for Reform of the Codes: We in fact believe that the reform of the Civil Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, and the entire Codification cannot fully achieve the goal of molding and directing Private Law in the new fascist civilization and the Corporative State, if they are not supplemented by a clear enunciation of the inspiring Principles of the juridical Order of Fascism. These Principles, by framing in a hierarchical system the sources of Law, which are already fixed in fascist Doctrine and the legislative policy of the Regime, will serve as a guide to interpretation for jurisprudence and juridical science and will clarify the nature and ends of the various Institutions in the Mussolinian Codes, their historical status,

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their political motive, and the lines of their future development. (Grandi 1940:7)

Also see the discussion in Aquarone (1965:281–89). 14. This is, for example, the argument of Piero Meldini, according to whom “the objective of fascist legislation . . . [was] to resuscitate a family type that is authoritarian, hierarchical, fundamentally closed, and self-sufficient, modeled on the precapitalist patriarchal family” (Meldini 1975:123). 15. See, for example, Loffredo (1938) and Fanelli (1935). 16. De Grazia notes that the restrictions on paternity investigations were also challenged by socialist women before and after the war, though for different reasons (de Grazia 1992:62–63). 17. Paternity investigations were restored by the 1942 Civil Code (See Ungari 1974:169). 18. For example, Giulio Sapelli argues that the interventions designed to increase the cohesion of the family clashed with the program for the “fascistization” of youth undertaken by the fascist party: “familistic practices and ideologies did not accord well with the processes activated by fascist elites to promote a militaristic, nationalistic socialization. . . . This socialization had among its presuppositions the atomization of individuals, removing their formation from the parental universe” (Sapelli 1981:lxxiv). 19. A fascist party leader compared bachelors to “deserters, pimps, homosexuals, and thieves” (Carlo Scorza in Salvemini 1933:65). 20. Table 1 from Livi-Bacci (1980:127). John Hajnal (1960) has argued that this pattern was characteristic of Western Europe from the first half of the eighteenth century until the 1950s. 21. Alfredo Felici, “Regime fascista e famiglia fascista: Brevi considerazioni su di un articolo di S. E. Bottai” (undated typescript), in ACS, SPD, fasc. 242/R “Gran Consiglio,” sf. 15 “1937,” ins. A. 22. Royal Legislative Decree 2132, 19 December 1926. The rates were determined by a fixed tax linked to age, and a supplementary progressive tax. 23. There was also a rise in the average age of marriage (ISTAT 1943:59): Grooms under 30 Average Age (percent) at Marriage 1929–30 1931 1932 1933 1934

78.6 78.4 78.4 78.7 76.9

Grooms under 30 Average Age (percent) at Marriage

27.31 27.34 27.36 27.37 27.62

1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 144

75.6 74.7 75.6 73.8 70.2

27.80 28.06 27.95 28.20 28.48

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

24. The total tax from 1927 to 1931 was 417 million lire, and from 1932 to 1939 it was 1.364 billion lire (ISTAT 1934:52; ISTAT 1943:61). Felici argued for a tax on “sterile marriages” and on single-child families, regardless of whether the sterility was voluntary or involuntary. See “Regime fascista e famiglia fascista,” in ACS, SPD, fasc. 242/R “Gran Consiglio,” sf. 15 “1937,” ins. A. 25. As de Grazia notes, however, “in supporting the so-called tax on egotism, women failed to recognize that the arguments used to stigmatize male celibacy as deviant, parasitical, and antipatriotic behavior were similarly deployed against spinsterdom” (1992:70). 26. Progeny were not defined as necessary for salvation. . . . Consequently, when marriage was postponed, or foregone altogether, there was no imposed penalty deriving from the normative order, either for the prospective brides and grooms or for their parents. Whether marriage came early or late for the individual couples therefore depended on parental definitions of social, economic, and demographic circumstances—not on moral considerations. (Blake 1965:135)

On the absence of social stigma attached to celibacy, also see Dixon (1971). On the church and celibacy, see Goody (1983). 27. At the same time, however, there continued to be a moral component to the demographic problem. As one jurist noted, not all reproduction was socially desirable: People forget . . . that crescite et multiplicamini does not refer to pure quantity. It entails, on the contrary, a question of moral quality. . . . Promoting the demographic increase of a nation therefore means something other than producing—as is rumored among defeatists—“cannon fodder.” If the requirement of a State were only material, human flesh, it would be enough to open the gates of public decency or to suspend the application of a couple of titles of the penal code. (Maggiore 1934:290– 91)

28. Law 1070, 23 June 1927. The law also placed midwives under the control of public health authorities. 29. Treves suggests that this intervention had few precedents: “Never had liberal governments . . . wanted to enter with a specific politics into the delicate sphere of demographic comportments” (Treves 1983:229). Yet the interwar period is distinguished less by the fact of intervention than by the logic or rationality of intervention. For Mussolini, the need to make private behaviors public distinguished fascism not only from liberalism but also from Soviet socialism: “The Russians can permit themselves different laws; to them it 145

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may be all the same to have an annual increase of three or five million, or of only one. But this is a reduction of national force! If I allowed liberty in this matter, everything would quickly become private! On this point, we and the Russians are at opposite poles” (quoted in Ludwig 1932:165). 30. The provisions are detailed in Articles 112, 113, and 115, Capo III: “Delle tipografie e arti affini e delle esposizioni di manifesti e avvisi al pubblico,” which severely regulated the printed medium. It was even illegal to discuss contraception in love letters. These restrictions were not repealed until 1971. 31. In the preliminary project of the code, Article 553 [532] reads: Whoever publicly instigates practices against conception or engages in propaganda in support of these is punished with imprisonment of up to one year and a fine of up to twenty thousand lire. The same penalty is applied to anyone who, for purposes of profit, administers means designed to impede fertilization, unless the administration occurs for prophylactic reasons.

However, the second paragraph was later removed, Drago explained, because it would have “hindered the use of those precautions necessary to impede the spread of venereal disease” and “done more damage than good to the improvement of the race” (Drago 1939:574). Drago also reports that Catholic Action argued for retaining the paragraph but for removing the last clause: “unless the administration occurs for prophylactic reasons” (ibid.:573). 32. Also see Francis Ronsin, who notes that the French law of 1920, “by attacking neo-Malthusian propaganda, ruined the effort undertaken to popularize preventive measures for limiting births and ran the risk of causing an increase in the number of abortions” (1980:197). 33. Article 381, “Del procurato aborto”: “The woman who, with any means, used by her or by others with her consent, causes a miscarriage is punished by detention of from one to four years.” 34. For Longo, the classification of abortion as a crime against individuals represented a step forward from other codes, such as the Sardinian Penal Code, which had called it a “crime against the order of the family” (1911:397). 35. This question is, of course, also of central importance for those who would today identify a “right” to life. 36. These juridical ambiguities persisted well into the fascist era, even as the emphasis began to shift from the rights of the fetus to the interests of society. Luigi Perla, in the article on “aborto” in the Enciclopedia italiana, noted that some jurists believed the state should have a limited role in the prosecution of the crime: 146

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Modern codes, although universally recognizing the need to protect with penal sanctions the formation of the human person in the maternal uterus, given the social interest in the normality of pregnancies and births, have recognized abortion as a crime of lesser gravity than homicide. While the latter crime involves the destruction of a person, abortion involves the destruction of a simple hope, since one cannot know whether the fetus would have effectively arrived at maturity. . . . Given the lesser social alarm and the difficulties of proof of abortion, some modern criminal law specialists have wanted to conclude that this crime should be punished when a complaint is filed, but only exceptionally at the initiative of the state—when, having been performed by someone other than the woman, it results in her death or grave damage to her health. (Perla 1929)

37. Female children were thought by Aristotle and Pliny to receive their souls after eighty days. See Perla (ibid.:111). 38. According to one commentator, the new category, not present in any of the preliminary projects for the new penal code, was introduced at the insistence of Mussolini (Drago 1939:566). Drago further suggests that the location of this title before crimes against the patrimony, crimes against the person, and crimes against the family indicated the “fundamental importance” of the protection and defense of the stirpe. 39. Rocco’s report on the final project defined aborto as “any violent interruption of the physiological process of maturation of the fetus” (cited in Drago 1939:578). The 1930 code distinguished between miscarriage (aborto spontaneo or aborto patologico), criminal abortion (aborto procurato or aborto criminoso), and therapeutic abortion (aborto terapeutico), which was justified at Article 54 as growing out of a “state of necessity”—that is, a threat to the health or life of the mother. The distinction between criminal and therapeutic abortion was, however, rejected by the Catholic Church. In §64 of the encyclical letter on Christian marriage, Casti connubii, Pope Pius XI wrote: “As to the ‘medical and therapeutic indication’. . . Venerable Brethren, however much we may pity the mother whose health and even life is gravely imperiled in performance of the duty allotted to her by nature, nevertheless what could ever be a sufficient reason for excusing in any way the direct murder of the innocent?” (Husslein 1942:146). 40. As we have seen, the prevention of transmission of social diseases came into conflict with the desire to limit the use of prophylactics for contraceptive purposes. 41. In this as in other matters, the Rocco code was a compromise between classical jurisprudence (the protection of the spes vitae) and the logic of social defense. The tension between these legal traditions 147

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was also played out in the courts. For example, the Supreme Court ruled that a person could be punished for abortion even if the mother would have died before the child was brought to term (Drago 1939:580). Commenting on the case, the journal Giustizia penale argued that abortion did not consist in the mere interruption of pregnancy but in the interruption of a spes vitae, which is already extinguished if it is certain that the mother will die. But Armando Leone defended the decision, and the logic of the Rocco code: It cannot be said that the fetus is capable of rights, and still less that it has a right to life. The fetus, however, is the object of penal protection, because this [protection] need not coincide with the existence of individual rights. It is sufficient that it coincide with a social interest. Now, the social interest protected by penal law with the incrimination of abortive practices . . . is that inherent in the normal result of pregnancies, independent of the fact that a particular pregnancy is or is not able to come to term. (cited in ibid. :580–81)

42. Rape and sexual violence were themselves defined (and have remained so) not as crimes against the person but as crimes against public morality and decency. 43. However, the law continued to distinguish between abortion, feticide (killing during the act of birth), and infanticide. 44. Passerini notes that other official estimates placed the figure at closer to 150,000 abortions per annum. 45. Describing what she calls the “failure of fascist abortion politics,” Detragiache suggests the regime was a victim of its own legalism. On the basis of a 1941 report to Mussolini, Detragiache is able to outline with some precision the attitude of Italian magistrates toward criminal abortion. She notes that in this year women were tried three times more frequently than men were, and doctors were rarely prosecuted either for providing an abortion or being an accomplice. This was, in part, a consequence of the low social status of the women who came before the court, and of their reliance on midwives rather than doctors, except in cases of complications (Detragiache 1980:698). Yet circulars from the Justice Minister to the prefects indicate that provincial doctors did not exercise with diligence their function of surveillance over their colleagues, who in turn did not always denounce the abortions about which they had knowledge. ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Gabinetto, Atti (1934–36), fasc. 3.2.2, sf. 577 “Oggetto: Provvedimento in favore dell’incremento demografico,” n. 89–29. And if provincial doctors were lax, so too were the magistrates. The high number of acquittals (44.14 percent in Milan, the highest rate 148

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

in the country) reveals, according to Detragiache, “an attitude judged . . . to be much too indulgent on the part of the magistrature” (1980:713). 46. Royal Decree 1265, 27 July 1934, Article 103. Violations were punishable by fines of from one hundred to one thousand lire. 47. Denise Detragiache notes that there was a divergence between the Ministry of Justice and jurists in the interpretation of this and other sections of the code. For the first, the goal of the referto of abortions by doctors to the provincial doctor was penal repression. For the second, the second paragraph of Article 365 meant that the requirement to refer was different from the requirement to denounce abortion (as stated in Law 1070, 23 June 1927, Article 9). The referto was analyzed as an “obligation with a purely statistical and administrative goal, which applied moreover only to doctors with respect to the Provincial doctor, but not to the latter with respect to the authorities” (Detragiache 1980:711n.68). 48. This fear was shared by many physicians. See, for example, Palmieri (1930). For another penologist, the motives underlying professional secrecy were of a more base nature: “[A]nyone who is not overly ingenuous must recognize that the empty words [concerning secrecy] are only a veneer covering a narrow professional interest, and giving off an odor of omertà.” Physicians, the author continued, were above all afraid to lose clients (cited in Pagani 1938:22–23). 49. Also see the sections of the code concerning homicide and personal injury when consent is granted. 50. Royal Decree 2233, 30 December 1929; Law 461, 27 March 1930; Royal Decree 916, 7 June 1929. 51. Circular 2698, Interior Ministry, 17 November 1928; and Royal Decree 34, 13 January 1930, concerning postal employees. 52. Law 1024, 6 June 1929. In addition, married couples with children were to be given preference over other married couples. These measures were often complemented by similar initiatives of the cities, provinces, parastate agencies, and the fascist labor unions. See ISTAT (1934:47–49). 53. Duce’s Decree, 7 March 1936 and Royal Legislative Decree 1492, 12 August 1937, established marriage and birth bonuses for state employees and members of the armed forces. See ISTAT (1943:49, 65–66, 73). 54. Royal Legislative Decree 1542, 21 August 1937. From 1937 to 1939, approximately 14 percent of marrying couples (117,000) took advantage of these loans (ISTAT 1943:55). 55. Transportation Ministry Decree, 14 May 1935. In 1938 and 1939, roughly 12.5 percent of married couples took advantage of the 80 percent discounts. 149

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56. Law 1312, 14 June 1928. The law exempted the first 100,000 lire of total holdings from a variety of national and local taxes. A survey of large families conducted by ISTAT found that, as of 30 June 1928, 1,532,206 families had or had had seven or more children. Of course, many of these families did not have 7 dependent children or did not earn enough money to pay taxes. By contrast, from 1928 to 1931 only 101,978 families applied for the exemptions (ISTAT 1934:21). 57. Duce’s Decree, 7 March 1936. An additional prize was awarded in cases of multiple birth (ISTAT 1943:49). 58. The five municipalities with populations over 500,000, for example, accounted for 28.4 million of the 123.8 million lire spent on birth and marriage bonuses. And in the first year, 1932, 72 of the 78 municipalities awarding bonuses were in the north. The mandatory assistance to large families was, by contrast, much more widespread and somewhat more evenly distributed (ISTAT 1943:87, 222–27). 59. The total of concessions to large families, bonuses, marriage loans, family allowances, ONMI assistance, and other measures adopted by public agencies to favor the demographic campaign from 1932 to 1939 was 3.2 billion lire, 1.3 in 1939 alone (ISTAT 1943:135). 60. In his preface Mussolini also called into question the effectiveness of demographic legislation, picking up Korherr’s medical analogy: It is my conviction that even if laws prove to be useless, it is necessary to try, just as one tries every medicine even, and above all, when the case is desperate. But I believe demographic laws—both positive and negative—can nullify or at least retard the phenomenon [of decline], if the social organism to which they are applied is able to react. In this case, the moral habits and above all the religious conscience of the individual are more important than formal laws. If a man does not feel the joy and the pride of being “continued” as an individual, as a family, and as a people—if a man does not feel, on the other hand, the sadness and shame of dying as an individual, as a family, and as a people—laws can do nothing, especially, I would say, if draconian. Laws must be a spur to morals. (1928a:21–22)

61. Alberto De’ Stefani, “L’obbligo del matrimonio e della filiazione.” ACS, SPD, fasc. 242/R “Gran Consiglio,” sf. 15 “1937,” ins. A. 62. Law 2277, 10 December 1925, modified by Royal Legislative Decree, 21 October 1926. 63. I am grateful to the son and grandson of Sileno Fabbri, Avv. Comm. Vittorio Emmanuele Fabbri and Avv. Sileno Fabbri, for making this manuscript available. 150

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

64. Like other para-state organizations, ONMI distributed marriage and birth bonuses. 65. It is worth noting, however, that the logic of insurance is not necessarily the same as the logic of demographic increase. As Cherubini notes, The goal of maternity insurance is not, in fact, to reward the birth of children, but to safeguard the woman in the moment at which, because of abstention from work, she comes to lack the means of subsistence, exactly when events (birth or miscarriage) require greater financial expenditures. Nor is safeguarding the health of the child the same as awarding bonuses to large families, cherished as the foundation of the “eight million bayonets.” (Cherubini 1977:309)

In 1939 maternity insurance was abolished and replaced by marriage and birth bonuses. 66. The congregazioni di carità, public charitable institutions, were created to represent the interests of the indigent in each municipality and to administer the monies left generically to the poor. 67. Pro-memoria for the prefect of Milan, 25 January 1932. ASM, cart. 378 “ONMI/OND,” fasc. “Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia.” CHAPTER V 1. For a discussion of the sexual dimension of the opposition of city and country, see Jordanova (1980) and Williams (1973). 2. This opposition was retagged by fascist commentators as “physiological” growth versus “pathological” growth; thus, as we will see below, cities could be characterized simultaneously by pathological declines in fertility and by pathological growth. 3. For a discussion of rural and agricultural politics under fascism, see Preti (1980) and De Felice (1968). 4. Among other things, high rates of unemployment threatened to undermine the power and prestige of fascist labor unions and to further strengthen resistance to fascism in cities like Milan. 5. It should be noted, however, that the excess of births was due in part to the higher fertility of recent immigrants to the city. According to the 1929 report of the Provincial Economic Council, “In the legal population, deaths by now exceed births.” See Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia di Milano, “Relazione sulla lotta contro l’urbanesimo,” ASM, cart. 284 “Istituto per le case popolari, ecc.,” fasc. “Contro l’urbanesimo, 1929.” 6. The Marital Fertility Rate (MFR) is the number of legitimate live births per 1,000 married women between age 15 and 49. The MFR 151

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

dropped from 168.8 in 1901 to 83.8 in 1931 (Livi-Bacci 1977:126). The MFR for Naples, by contrast, declined by only 2.4 percent from 1901 to 1931. 7. The principal sources of migration to Milan in the 1920s were Lombardy, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Puglia, and Tuscany. Roughly 15 percent of immigrants came from the south. Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia di Milano, “Relazione sulla lotta contro l’urbanesimo.” 8. This trend continued into the 1930s. According to Paolo Sala (1983:210), immigration accounted for 87.2 percent of population increase in Milan between 1931 and 1940. 9. Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia di Milano, “Relazione sulla lotta contro l’urbanesimo.” 10. Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia di Milano, “Relazione sulla lotta contro l’urbanesimo.” The Council also disputed the assumption that a majority of immigrants to Milan were workers, peasants, and laborers. It cited statistics indicating large numbers of lawyers, selfemployed persons, clerical workers, merchants, and students. 11. Nationwide only 5 of 92 Provincial Economic Councils adopted any measures against urbanization (ISTAT 1934:61). 12. For example, in the sixteen months following the ordinance, “repatriates” to rural areas numbered 5,280. Of these, only 503 were expelled as a consequence of the anti-urbanization measure; 3,404 had been stopped for public security violations; and 611 had been released from prison, 77 from hospitals, and 685 from welfare institutions. “Elenco dei rimpatriati dal 15/2/1929 al 26/6/1930,” ASM, cart. 729 “Migrazioni interne,” fasc. “Prospetto statistico degli immigrati.” The reliance on public security laws, rather than anti-urbanization legislation, is confirmed by Anna Treves for other parts of Italy: “It is rather significant that [the prefects] relied on this tool, and not the power conferred by the law against urbanization—a sign that the measures they took were expulsions ad personam, not ‘compulsory ordinances’ of a general nature” (Treves 1976:97). 13. See, for example, the proceedings of the International Congress for Studies of Population (Gini 1933), which devoted special sessions to rural-urban migration and to the depopulation of mountainous areas. 14. A detailed discussion of urban planning in Milan is beyond the scope of this chapter. See Franchi (1972) and especially Consonni and Tonon (1976, 1977, 1981). 15. Istituto Case Popolari di Milano (hereafter ICPM), “Relazione del R. Commissario straordinario al ricostituito consiglio d’amministrazione sulla gestione 1923–1924,” ASM, cart. 284 “Istituto per le case popolari. ecc.,” fasc. “Ist. autonomo case popolari ed economiche di Milano (1926).” 152

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

16. Report to Mussolini from ICPM, signed by Gorla and Borgomaneri, 23 July 1930, ASM, cart. 284 “Istituto per le case popolari, ecc.,” fasc. “Istituto per le case popolari (1929–1930).” There were also plans to create women’s workshops (laboratori femminili) in the popular housing buildings. These would, according to some hygienists, have a variety of benefits: a hygienic benefit, because they would reduce the rates of tuberculosis associated with piecework in the home and bring women under the protection of labor legislation; a demographic benefit, because they would allow women with large families to supplement their husband’s income “without neglecting maternal duties”; and a political benefit, because they would make women more visible and accessible to social workers and propagandists (Fassio 1936; Salvini 1936:186). 17. Police records reveal that gossip and the informal, everyday surveillance of bodies and their functions were often important elements in the prosecution of abortion in the 1930s and 1940s. 18. Another survey of one thousand Roman schoolgirls between the ages of 16 and 18 found an aversion to domestic work, a preference for sports and the cinema over sewing and knitting, self-assurance, and a desire to command rather than obey, a vague interest in having a family, and a desire to limit the number of their children to one, or at the most two (Spolverini 1938). 19. The fasci femminili, and the broader role of women in the fascist regime, have until recently received surprisingly little scholarly attention. For a broad discussion see, in addition to de Grazia (1992), Bartoloni (1984) and Fraddosio (1986). The origins and functioning of the fasci femminili are discussed in Bartoloni (1982), Detragiache (1983), and Pieroni Bortolotti (1978). Also see the comments in De Felice (1981:78–82). General works on ideologies, policies, and institutions concerning women include De Grand (1976), Vaccari (1978), Santarelli (1976), Caldwell (1986), Meldini (1975), and Macchiochi (1980). 20. Also see the “Programma-statuto” of the Gruppo femminile romano, 4 December 1921: “The fascist woman . . . will avoid, unless required by absolute necessity, adopting masculine attitudes and invading the male field of action. The women of the Gruppo Femminile Fascista do not want to be politicians” (cited in Meldini 1975:25– 26). 21. As De Felice notes, Mussolini was motivated by a desire to present fascism in a modern and progressive light and to capture the sympathies of international pro-suffrage associations, as well as a desire to recognize the sacrifices made by women during the war. Among the limited numbers of women who would be allowed to vote were the mothers and wives of soldiers killed in action (1981:80). 22. ACS, SPD, fasc. 242/R “Gran Consiglio,” sf. 3 “1925.” 153

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23. Also see Fabbri (1932c:545): “The task of public assistance is quintessentially feminine, and only [the woman] who has love and the maternal instinct in her spirit and flesh can carry out this task with faith and tenacity.” 24. Activities of the party could be quite varied at the local level. In Milan, for example, the federation created a relief station (posto di ristoro) on via S. Vittore in January 1930, which fed between 800 and 900 persons daily and provided coupons for meals at selected trattorie to residents of other neighborhoods. The Central Office of Assistance also gave financial assistance to evicted families, helped others avoid eviction by paying back rent, and organized a workshop employing 120 women to produce winter clothing for the poor and unemployed. Finally, a variety of other forms of assistance—including free medical supplies and payment of utility bills—were made available to those who, after “thorough and detailed investigations,” proved worthy. As the economic crisis deepened, these “exceptional” welfare measures of the winter months gave way to an almost year-round relief program. The relief station on via S. Vittore was forced to remain open until June for “humanitarian and political reasons,” and another was opened at the Opera Pia Levi in October. 25. “Delegazione dei Fasci femminili della Provincia di Milano, Relazione mensile,” 31 March 1936. ASM, cart. 124 “Ordine pubblico 1936–1937,” fasc. “Situazione politica-economica nella Provincia.” 26. The relationship between ONMI and the party organizations such as the fasci femminili was not without problems. For example, in 1932 Sileno Fabbri insisted that ONMI centers exist apart from the gruppi rionali—each group could instead send a fiduciario who would be trained by the Opera. “Promemoria” [from Fabbri to the prefect], 25 January 1932. ASM, cart. 378 “ONMI/OND,” fasc. “Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia.” At the same time, the Federation Secretary of Milan Erminio Brusa proposed making the delegates of the fasci femminili the ONMI representatives for each rione. This would have the “double advantage of giving the fasci femminili a very powerful means of penetrating among women, especially of the lower classes, and would assure the Party, on the other hand, that the delicate branch of assistance to maternity and infancy be carried out with fascist character and spirit.” Report to PNF Secretary Starace, 15 February 1932. ACS, PNF, Servizi amministrativi, fasc. 3.2.1 “EOA, 1931–1932.” 27. Report from Brusa to PNF Secretary Starace, 15 February 1932. ACS, PNF, Servizi amministrativi, fasc. 3.2.1 “EOA, 1931–1932.” 28. “Delegazione dei Fasci femminili della Provincia di Milano, Relazione trimestrale,” 31 December 1932–31 January 1933. ASM, cart. 154

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

123 “Ordine pubblico 1933–1935,” fasc. “Situazione politica ed economica della provincia.” 29. “Fasci Femminili di Milano, Relazione mensile,” 31 October–30 November 1936. ASM, cart. 124 “Ordine pubblico 1936–1937,” fasc. “Situazione politica-economica nella Provincia.” Also see Foglio di disposizioni n. 670, 12 February 1936. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” 30. Foglio di disposizioni n. 232, 28 February 1934. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” The increased permanence, extensiveness, and visibility of party assistance, especially in the form of handouts, quickly became a source of embarrassment for the regime— testifying, as it did, to an inability to stem poverty and unemployment. A circular from the Interior Ministry to the prefects, dated 20 October 1930, warned that the institution of soup kitchens (cucine economiche), for example, “must be considered a necessary evil and must not instead be proclaimed and praised—as often occurs—as a merit of the Regime and the local authorities.” Such measures might be necessary and useful but were “nevertheless indexes of a grievous state of hardship and have a depressive effect on the public spirit.” ASM, cart. 403 “Assistenza invernale,” fasc. “Cucine economiche.” 31. To avoid duplication and fraud, the offices of the EOA required that each act of assistance be recorded in a welfare booklet (libretto di assistenza) and in a central file at the Casa di assistenza, established in 1933. See Foglio di disposizioni n. 261, 7 July 1934. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 340 “Fogli di disposizioni.” The booklets were first established by Article 64 of Law 6972, 17 July 1890, which regulated opere pie. 32. Foglio di disposizioni n. 323, 28 November 1934. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” 33. Foglio di disposizioni n. 516, 20 December 1935. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” 34. Foglio di disposizioni n. 322, 24 November 1934. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” 35. Foglio di disposizioni n. 214, 3 March 1934, and n. 251, 21 May 1934. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” The Federation of Milan organized courses for assistance to mothers and infants and for visitatrici in 1936. See “Fasci femminili di Milano, Relazione mensile,” 29 February–31 March 1936. ASM, cart. 124 “Ordine pubblico 1936–1937,” fasc. “Situazione politica-economica nella Provincia.” The PNF also established its own Scuola Superiore Fascista di Assistenza Sociale in 1938, to train social workers for the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists and Workers in Industry. See Foglio di disposizioni n. 1135, 18 August 1938. ACS, PNF, Direttorio, b. 339 “Fogli di disposizioni.” 155

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36. In December 1936 the fasci femminili of Milan announced a “Moral Crusade” to “remedy the moral distress in which many poor families in the case minime and on the periphery of the city live. . . . The fascist visitatrici selected for this work must above all speak to the hearts of these women, make them realize that the Regime today assists all those who have their dignity and who vividly feel maternal love, and that the home, the room looked after by a wise and thrifty woman, is the force of the Nation.” “Fasci femminili di Milano, Relazione mensile,” 30 November–31 December 1936. ASM, cart. 124 “Ordine pubblico 1936–1937,” fasc. “Situazione politica-economica nella Provincia.” 37. See the comments of Mary Willcox Glenn, cited in Dessau (1932:740–41). CHAPTER VI 1. On 20 December 1933, Mussolini observed: “Many adversaries of fascism have already noted that the demographic policy of the regime has so far failed to reach its objectives. It is useless to contest this, given the dramatic eloquence of the numbers. Until a few years ago, it could be said that the Italians were a people without space; in a few years it will be said that instead there is space, but the people are lacking” (Mussolini 1934d:125). By 30 January 1937, the prognosis was still more bleak: People have now begun to ask themselves whether the demographic policy of the regime, begun with the speech of 1926 and realized by an imposing and organic complex of material and moral measures, can be considered practically to have failed. It has practically failed. Because not only has the trend not reversed itself (and perhaps it was arrogant to hope that it would), not only has the decline not stopped, but we have seen this decline reach a catastrophic velocity, and natality drop to figures such that they will soon be at the level of the French. (Mussolini 1937:111)

2. See SVIMEZ (1961:80). 3. ACS, SPD, fasc. 242/R “Gran Consiglio,” sf. 15 “1937,” ins. A. 4. Michela De Giorgio and Paola Di Cori contrast this reaction with the effectiveness of appeals made by the Catholic Church (De Giorgio and Di Cori 1980:369). 5. We should not assume that procreative tactics were limited to urban areas or a recent innovation. As we have seen, many demographers between the wars contrasted the control of births with the “natu156

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI

ral rates of reproduction” that prevailed in the countryside. And even Anna Treves has suggested that fascist demographic programs were directed at a population that, “in its overwhelming majority, did not have the minimal awareness that one could affect natality or procreation in one way or another” (Treves 1983:232). However, anthropological research suggests that high birthrates in rural areas do not necessarily imply a lack of rationality (See, for example, Mamdani 1972). 6. De Grazia contrasts this attitude with the “amoral familism” described by Edward Banfield.

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✼

Index

abortion, 66, 79–80, 123, 146nn. 32 and 33, 147n. 41, 148nn. 43 and 44; and contraception, 81, 146n. 32; as crime against the fetus, 81–83, 84, 146nn. 34, 35, 36; as crime against the stock, 80, 83–84, 146n.36; midwives in, 87, 148n.45; and miscarriage, 85–86, 147n. 39; policing of, 84–88, 148n.45, 149n.47, 153n.17; and rape, 84, 148n.42 adoption, 68–69, 142n.5 alcoholism, 47, 97, 132n.21 analogies, organic, 20–21 anatomy: and criminality, 29; maternal, 64 anthropology: of the body, 129n.7; criminal, 29–32, 132nn.17, 18, 21, 22, 24; in Italy, 130n.8; of modernity, 4, 5; of science, 129n.1; urban, 106 anthropometry, 30, 64, 132nn.19 and 20 architecture, 100, 113 Artom, Cesare, 141n.35 assistance. See charity; social assistance; social insurance; social work; welfare atavism, 30 bachelor tax, 76–79, 90, 144n.22, 145nn.24 and 25 Baglioni, Silvestro, 134n.43 Bartoloni, Stefania, 125 Benetti Brunelli, Valeria, 116 Bertelé, Aldo, 25 Biagi, Bruno, 42 biology, 51, 136n.6; political, 24, 131n.12. See also physiology biopolitics, 7 birth control, 51, 58, 60–61, 63, 98, 140n.31, 141n.33. See also abortion; contraception birthrate. See fertility births, 97; bonuses for, 89–90; and preventive medicine, 43–44 Blake, Judith, 78–79, 145n.26 Bocchini, Arturo, 33

✼

body, 3–4, 18, 75–76, 94, 97, 123, 130n.2, 131n.11; city as, 96, 101; in criminology, 29–30; denaturalization of, 126; female, 64–65, 76–77, 79, 80, 97, 141n.39; and liberalism, 88, 94; male, 88, 141n.38; maternal, 64, 123; right to dispose of, 88; in the social, 18; society as, 18–25, 131nn.10 and 11; and work accidents, 40–42, 88, 134n.36 Boldrini, Marcello, 52 Bologna, 102 Bottoni, Piero, 113–14 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125 capital punishment, 132n.16 Caprino, Antonello, 33 Carta del lavoro, 40–41, 73, 91 Castellani, Maria, 116 Catholic Church, 72, 96, 98, 140n.32, 143n.10, 156n.4; and abortion, 147n.39; and assistance, 44, 115, 118, 134n.44; and celibacy, 78–79, 145n.26; and contraception, 146n.31; and eugenics, 60, 62; and the family, 67; and marriage, 69–72 censuses, 53–54, 55, 71, 72, 85, 137nn.12, 13, 14 Central Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), 20, 53–55, 137n.12 Cerletti, Ugo, 61 charity (beneficenza), 36–37, 38, 92–94, 115, 118, 121, 133n.30. See also social assistance; welfare Cherubini, Arnaldo, 36, 133n.30, 151n.65 Chiarelli, Giuseppe, 69 Cicu, Antonio, 67–68, 142n.4 city: as body, 96, 101; and declining fertility, 47, 58, 59, 95–96, 138n.21; and disease, 95–96; and fascism, 96, 99; and gender, 96, 98–99, 151n.1; Mussolini on, 95, 100; as sterile, 95–99. See also rural-urban migration; urbanism; urbanization

183

INDEX

civil code, 89; of 1865, 67, 69–70; of 1942, 73, 143n.13, 144n.17; Napoleonic, 34, 67, 69, 70 civiltà, 104, 106 Comte, Auguste, 21 construction, 3, 5–6, 21, 129nn.5 and 6 contraception, 52, 66, 79–81, 83, 87–88, 123, 146nn.30, 31, 32, 147n.40 Coruzzi, Cesare, 97–98 crime: against the family, 73, 83; and liberalism, 28; prevention of, 30–34; as social problem, 28; statistics and, 28–30; against the stock, 80, 83–84, 147n.38 criminal, body of, 29–30 criminality: and norms, 30; and responsibility, 29; as scientific object, 28; and social technologies, 31–32 criminology: classical vs. positive schools, 28–29; and penal code reform, 31–34 Darwin, Charles, 23 de Certeau, Michel, 10 De Felice, Renzo, 140n.28, 153n.21 degeneration, 30, 58, 96, 132n.21 De Giorgio, Michela, 156n.4 de Grazia, Victoria, 59, 81, 126, 130n.12, 144n.16, 145n.25, 157n.6 Delaney, Carol, 129n.1 Deleuze, Gilles, 11 demographic campaign, 48–49, 60–65, 75– 94, 96, 150n.60, 156n.1; and housing, 108, 111, 112 demography, 22, 53–55 De Napoli, Ferdinando, 62 depopulation, 47, 57. See also fertility Dessau, Fanny, 121–22 De’ Stefani, Alberto, 91 Detragiache, Denise, 148n.45, 149n.47 Di Cori, Paola, 156n.4 disease, 61, 63, 93, 96, 97–98, 120–21, 138n.19; and the body of society, 23; and the city, 95–96; declining fertility as, 3, 45; science of, 42; sexually transmitted, 83, 146n.31, 147n.40; social, 43–44, 47, 97; and urbanism, 100, 101, 108–9 divorce, 69, 142n.6 Drago, Sebastiano, 146. 31, 147n.38

Durkheim, Emile, 20, 22, 56, 131nn.8 and 10, 132n.14 duties, 12, 94, 144n.19; and the family, 68, 73–74; and gender, 12, 75–79; and insurance, 39–40; marriage as, 75–79, 91; reproduction as, 65, 75–79, 91; and welfare, 45; work as, 40 egoism, 52, 61, 79, 92, 93, 98, 125 emigration, 52, 105, 136n.10, 137n.11 eugenics, 50, 51, 53, 60–63, 77, 95, 108, 112, 128, 140nn.30 and 33 euthenics, 62–63, 141nn.35 and 36 Ewald, François, 37, 39 Fabbri, Sileno, 74, 79, 92–94, 119, 122, 154n.23 Fambri, Elena, 113, 114 family, 121–22, 126, 133n.34, 142nn.2 and 4, 144nn.14 and 18; crimes against, 73, 83; and the demographic campaign, 75; as natural, 67, 69; as social, 67–69, 72, 75; as social technology, 67, 68, 74–75 fasci femminili, 115–21, 153n.19, 154n.26 fascism, 7–8, 133n.25, 145n.29; and assistance, 38–40, 41, 44–45, 93, 115–21, 134n.44, 154n.24, 155n.30; and the city, 96, 99; and Milan, 102; and modernity, 8; and science, 8, 130n.11; and the social, 19, 130n.1; and social defense, 32–34; and the state, 26–27, 130n.1; women in, 115–17, 153nn.19–21 Federzoni, Luigi, 133n.25 Felici, Alfredo, 145n.24 feminism: and declining fertility, 58, 64, 77; and fascism, 115; and organicism, 19, 24, 130n.3; and science, 6, 129n.1 Ferri, Enrico, 29, 30, 31 fertility, 5; and aging, 59, 63, 139n.23; declines in, 3, 5, 45, 47, 51–52, 53, 57, 58–59, 64, 77, 99, 124, 126; differential, 51; European, 48, 58; in Milan, 47, 103, 151nn.5 and 6; and overcrowding, 113; promotion of, 88–90; and urbanism, 107, 110; and the virility of the nation, 59, 63 Figlio, Karl, 131n.13 Florence, 102

184

INDEX

foresight (previdenza), 37, 39–40, 133nn.32 and 35, 136n.9. See also responsibility Foucault, Michel, 7, 74–75 France, 34, 35, 37, 48, 56, 57, 138n.18, 146n.32 futurism, 96, 99 Gabbi, Umberto, 44 Garofalo, Raffaele, 29, 132n.16 gender: and city, 96, 98–99, 151n.1; and science, 9, 13; and the social, 9, 12–13 Germany, 35, 48, 57, 60, 90, 130n.11 Giannini, Gina, 91 Gini, Corrado, 9, 50, 51–53, 131nn.5 and 6; on eugenics, 77; on nationalism, 24–25; on neo-Malthusianism, 61; on organicism, 20–25 Giusti, Ugo, 54 Glover, James, 136n.7 Gobineau, Arthur Comte de, 131n.7, 141n.37 Grandi, Dino, 143n.13 Greece, 106 Guaccero, Alessandro, 43 Guidi, Dario, 41 Hacking, Ian, 7, 9, 11 Hajnal, John, 144n.20 Haraway, Donna, 5, 13, 129n.6, 130n.3 Hatzfeld, Henri, 37 health: of the body of society, 23; as duty, 94; as object of government, 44; as social good, 40–41; and urbanism, 108, 114 Herzfeld, Michael, 131n.7, 141n.37 Holsti, Rudolph, 136n.8 home: intervention in, 97, 108, 114, 119; rationalization of, 113–14; social technologies and, 102, 110, 112 honor, and abortion, 82, 84 housing, 95, 100, 153n.16; and the demographic campaign, 108, 111, 112; and discipline, 111–12; scarcity of, 96, 100, 105, 112–13 illegitimacy, 70–71, 74, 143n.9 Ilvento, Arcangelo, 43–44, 76, 111, 122

individual: in criminology, 28–29; and society, 24–28, 39–41, 44, 86–88 infancy, protection of, 92–93 insurance, 109, 122; logic of, 18, 39, 42, 45, 87–88, 151n.65; risk and, 36, 38, 40; and work accidents, 35–36, 41– 42, 87–88, 134n.38. See also social insurance International Congress for Studies of Population, 50, 55–56, 64, 78, 138n.15, 152n.13 International Union of Social Studies, 67, 78 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 127–28 kinship, 68, 70, 89 Korherr, Richard, 57–58, 79, 90–91, 138n.20, 150n.60 Lacassagne, Alexandre, 132n.22 Lateran Accords, 69, 71–72 Latour, Bruno, 7, 132n.22 law: and the family, 66–69, 73–74, 142n.3; and marriage, 69–73 Le Play, Frédéric, 38, 121 Levi, Ettore, 43 liberalism, 8, 88, 96; and abortion, 81–83; and assistance, 36–37, 90–92; and biology, 51; and the body, 88, 94; and the family, 67, 142n.2, 145n.29; as political rationality, 8, 11–12, 18; and public order, 33; and the social, 11–12, 18; and work accidents, 34–35, 41 Livi, Livio, 52 Livi-Bacci, Massimo, 54, 137n.13, 142n.9 Loffredo, Ferdinando, 91–92, 133n.34 Lombroso, Cesare, 28–31, 132n.21 Longo, Michele, 82, 146n.34 Lukes, Steven, 132n.14 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 56 Malthus, Thomas, 7, 58, 92, 138nn.17 and 22, 139n.24. See also Malthusianism; neoMalthusianism Malthusianism, 61, 66 Manunta, Ugo, 38–39, 122 March, Lucien, 136n.9

185

INDEX

Marciani, Corrado, 62 marriage, 69–73, 76–79, 142nn.8 and 9, 144n.23, 145n.26; promotion of, 88–90; and the state, 70, 72, 73 Martin, Emily, 129n.1 maternity, 64, 90, 98; as duty, 65, 75, 91; as object of government, 47, 92 Matteotti, Matteo, 137n.14 Maurras, Charles, 57 medical passport, 62, 63 medicine, 134n.43; political, 44, 134n.42; preventive, 42–44, 92; social, 43; and work accidents, 41–42, 134n.40. See also under metaphors Meldini, Piero, 48, 144n.14 men, bodies of, 88, 141n.38 Merchant, Carolyn, 19 metaphors: medical, 8, 23, 130n.9, 131nn.9 and 10; organismic, 18–21 midwives, 145n.28; and abortion, 87, 148n.45 migration. See emigration; rural-urban migration Milan, 96–97; assistance in, 117–18; and fascism, 102; fertility in, 47, 103, 151nn.5 and 6; housing in, 110–13; policing of migration to, 104–5, 152n.12; population of, 102–4, 152nn.7 and 8; tuberculosis in, 108–9; urbanism in, 107– 13, 152n.14 modernity: anthropology of, 4, 5; and fascism, 8 Monelli, Paolo, 136n.4 Mortara, Giorgio, 50, 56–57, 82–83 Murard, Lion, 140n.33 Mussolini, Arnaldo, 103 Mussolini, Benito, 9, 23, 115, 123, 133n.35, 137n.10, 138n.22, 139n.24, 145n.29, 147n.38; Ascension Day address, 46–48, 95, 103, 135nn.3 and 4; on the city, 95, 100; on declining fertility, 47, 58–59; on the demographic campaign, 150n.60, 156n.1; on marriage, 77, 78; on medicine, 43; on race, 59, 139nn.26 and 28; on statistics, 46–47, 53, 55; on women, 153n.21

Nalli, Francesco, 140n.30 Naples, demolitions in, 110 nation: as body, 3; life cycle of, 22–23; virility of, 21, 59, 63 National Agency for Maternity and Infancy (ONMI), 44, 74, 78, 90, 92–94, 117, 120, 154n.26 nationalism: and the city, 99; and the family, 67–68; and organicism, 24–27; and population, 57, 139n.24; and religion, 72, 143n.10; Rocco on, 25–27 natural, the, 4, 10, 13, 113; displacement of, 10, 13, 97, 123, 127; and the family, 67, 69; and reproduction, 4, 10, 58, 66, 99 Nature, 4, 13, 20, 23, 58, 98, 99, 113, 114, 122, 127, 129n.6 neo-Malthusianism, 61, 66, 79–80, 98, 140n.31 neo-organicism, 20–21 Niceforo, Alfredo, 51 normalization, 20, 75, 108, 114, 121, 122 norms, 13, 75, 101, 107, 113; and criminality, 30 Nye, Robert, 138n.18 organicism, 18–25, 130nn.3 and 4; and feminism, 19, 24, 130n.3; Gini on, 20– 25; and nationalism, 24–27; and neoorganicism, 20–21; and social technologies, 24 Padua, 120 Pagani, Piero, 85–88 Palmieri, Vincenzo Maria, 61 Passerini, Luisa, 81, 124, 131n.11 Pasteur, Louis, 30, 132n.22 paternity, 90; as duty, 65, 75–79, 144n.19; investigations of, 74, 144nn.16 and 17 penal code: of 1889, 31, 81–83; 1921 project for, 31–32, 132n.24; of 1930, 32, 33–34, 73, 80, 81, 83–84, 87–88, 147nn.38, 39, 41 Pende, Nicola, 64, 98, 131n.12 Perla, Luigi, 146n.36 Pezzè Pascolato, Maria, 116, 118 phrenology, 29

186

INDEX

physicians, 42–43, 62, 63, 97, 108; and abortion, 84–88, 148n.45, 149n.47; and professional secrecy, 85–87, 149n.48; and social investigations, 101, 109, 114 physiognomy, 29, 30 physiology, 24–25; and social sciences, 19–23 Piccoli, Umberto, 112 Pini, Giorgio, 139n.28 Pisanelli, Giuseppe, 67, 69, 70, 142nn.3 and 5 Pitkin, Donald, 106 Poggi, Igino, 141n.36 political rationality, 8, 11–12, 18, 49 population: aging of, 59, 63, 139n.23; and imperialism, 48, 59, 135n.2; and mercantilism, 56, 95, 138n.16; of Milan, 102–4, 152nn.7 and 8; and nationalism, 57, 139n.24; as object of government, 47, 50, 55, 56–57, 63, 106; optimum, 50, 51–52; as social problem, 49–51, 57–59, 138n.17 poverty, 36, 37, 38, 133n.31 pregnancy, declaration of, 84–85 premarital certificate, 62–63 prevention: of crime, 30–34; and the demographic campaign, 91–94; and euthenics, 63; in medicine, 42–43, 92; of poverty, 37–38; and social defense, 32–34, 133nn.27 and 28; and social work, 121; and urbanism, 101, 108; of work accidents, 42 previdenza sociale, 36, 38 problematization, 5, 11, 27, 49, 95, 106, 128, 129n.2 Procacci, Giovanna, 133n.31 Proctor, Robert, 130n.11 pronatalism, 48, 60–61, 63–65, 66, 75–90 Quételet, Adolphe, 22, 30 Rabinow, Paul, 129n.4 race (razza), 59–60, 62, 132n.21, 139nn.26, 27, 28, 140nn.29 and 30, 141nn.36 and 37. See also stock (stirpe) Rapp, Rayna, 129n.1 Rappard, William, 136n.6

rationality, 130n.10; penal, 31–32, 34; political, 8, 49 recovery (risanamento), 108, 112, 122 repression: of crime, 31–34; of disease, 42– 43; and fascism, 32, 133n.25 reproduction: “artificial,” 4; biomedical technologies of, 4, 123, 127; as duty, 75– 79, 91; and the female body, 64–65; intervention in, 66–67, 125; as natural, 49, 58, 99, 127; problematization of, 5, 49; rationalization of, 52, 58; as scientific object, 49–51; social technologies of, 5, 66, 125–26; tactics of, 125, 156n.5 resistance, 10, 111–12, 125–26; and censuses, 54, 137n.13; and the “demographic strike,” 124; and marriage law, 71, 142n.9; and rural-urban migration, 105–6 responsibility: and criminality, 29; and poverty, 37, 38; and welfare, 45; and work accidents, 34–35. See also foresight (previdenza) Riley, Denise, 12, 13 risk, 45; and criminality, 28, 31; and insurance, 36, 38, 40; and work accidents, 35, 42. See also social dangerousness Roberti, Roberto, 41, 134nn.36 and 38 Rocco, Alfredo, 9, 32, 87, 132n.16, 139n.24; on birth control, 63; on crimes against the stock, 83–84; on the family, 67–68; on marriage, 71–72; on nationalism, 25– 27; and 1930 penal code, 33–34; on religion, 72, 143n.10 Rome, 95, 96 Ronsin, Francis, 138n.18, 146n.32 rural-urban migration, 95, 109, 152n.13; industrialists’ attitudes toward, 103, 104, 105, 152n.10; as pathological 100, 105; policing of, 100, 104–5, 152nn.10 and 11. See also urbanization ruralism, 8, 96, 100, 106, 112 Salvemini, Gaetano, 64, 81, 124 Salvini, Guido, 101, 108–9, 114, 122 Sanger, Margaret, 50, 141n.33 Santarelli, Enzo, 48–49

187

INDEX

Santoro, Giuseppe, 84–85, 86 Sapelli, Giulio, 144n.18 Saraceno, Chiara, 75, 78, 124, 126 science, 23, 122, 127; and fascism, 8, 130n.11; feminist studies of, 6, 129n.1; and gender, 9, 13; and government, 50–51; natural and social, 6; and reproduction, 49–51 sexuality, 98 Siliato, Leonardo, 133n.33 social, the, 99, 127; as construction, 3, 5; as displacement of the natural, 13, 97, 127; and duties, 12; and the family, 67–69; and fascism, 19, 130n.1; as gendered domain, 9, 115–16; as scientific object, 3; spaces of, 11–13 (see also spaces); and statistics, 11 social assistance (assistenza sociale), 36, 37– 38, 93, 121, 134n.39 social dangerousness, 29–31 social defense, 19, 27–28, 133nn.27 and 28; and crime, 32, 34; and the demographic campaign, 60, 65; and fascism, 32–34 social experts, 11, 31 social facts, 7, 22 social hygiene, 60, 61, 62, 140n.33 social insurance (previdenza sociale), 36, 38– 40, 93, 122, 133nn.32, 33, 34, 35, 134n.39. See also insurance social problem, 5, 11–12; crime as, 28; declining fertility as, 5, 47; population as, 49–51, 57–59, 138n.17; poverty as, 37, 133n.31 social sciences, 6, 131n.6; and physiology, 19–23; and vision, 18 social technologies, 3; and criminality, 31– 32; and the family, 67, 68, 74–75; and the home, 102, 110, 112; and organicism, 24; of reproduction, 5, 66, 125–26 (see also technologies, reproductive); women and, 12–13 social work, 38, 107; and detection of need, 119; manuals of, 120–21; professionalization of, 114, 119–22, 155n.35; sites of, 118, 119; and women,

114, 115–22, 154n.23, 156n.36. See also social assistance society: as cultural object, 129n.4; and the individual, 24–28, 39–41, 44, 86–88; life cycle of, 22–23; as organism, 18–25, 131nn.10–11 spaces: of the family, 66–68, 75; political, 115–16; private, 112, 125, 142n.2; social, 11, 12–13, 75, 107, 111, 113, 116, 125, 142n.2 Spengler, Oswald, 57–58 Starace, Achille, 119 state: and the family, 66–74, 142nn.2 and 4; and fascism, 26–27, 130n.1; and marriage, 70, 72, 73; and intervention in reproduction, 66–67, 125 statistics, 36, 38, 50, 61, 74, 101, 109, 122; and crime, 28–30; and fraud, 54; and government, 46–47, 55, 56; Mussolini on, 46–47, 53, 55; and organicism, 22; and the social, 11; and work accidents, 35 stock (stirpe), 44, 59–60, 139n.27; crimes against, 80, 83–84, 147n.38; defense of, 63, 95, 147n.38. See also race (razza) Strathern, Marilyn, 127 suicide, 47, 56 Sweden, 48, 130n.12 technologies, reproductive, 4, 123, 127. See also under social technologies Tovo, Camillo, 41–42 Treves, Anna, 48, 56, 137n.14, 145n.29, 152n.12, 157n.5 Trevisiani, Roberto, 40 Trivulzio, Lena, 118 tuberculosis, 47, 96, 97, 108–9, 120–21 Turati, Augusto, 130n.1 Turin, 47, 81, 102, 124 unemployment, 96, 100, 105, 117, 151n.4 Ungari, Paolo, 70, 71, 72, 73, 142n.3 urbanism, 100–102, 107–14; and demolitions, 101, 110; and disease, 100, 101, 108–9; as medical intervention, 101; in Milan, 107–13, 152n.14; negative and

188

INDEX

positive, 100; and ruralization, 112; and tuberculosis, 108–9 urbanization: and fertility declines, 47, 99; as pathological, 100, 151n.2. See also rural-urban migration Verri, Pietro, 138n.16 virility, 21, 59, 63, 65, 99, 131n.7 Visco, Antonio, 60, 80, 88, 140n.29 Vuoli, Romeo, 133n.32

women: bodies of, 64–65, 76–77, 79, 80, 97, 141n.39; employment of, 98; in fascism, 115–17, 153nn.19–21; and social technologies, 12–13; and social work, 114, 115– 22, 154n.23, 156n.36 work accidents, 34–36, 41–42, 88, 97, 134nn.36, 38 World Population Conference (1927), 50–53, 136n.5 Worms, René, 21

welfare, 36–40, 45, 92–94. See also charity; social assistance; social insurance; social work

Zanardelli, Giuseppe, 82, 87 Zingali, Gaetano, 78 Zylberman, Patrick, 140n.33

189