Unspeakable Women: Selected Short Stories Written by Italian Women During Fascism

Although these fictional works admirably show women's experiences of an oppressive regime from the inside, the subversiveness that Pickering-Iazzi (co-author of In Terza Pagina ) claims for them is not always apparent. A cogent introduction explains how women used what little power they had to protest Fascism (one woman claimed to have given birth to fewer children ``to spite Mussolini''). But some of the stories themselves have the unfinished quality of sketches, and most appear to address less the discomfort of being a female under Fascism than that of being a woman at all. Ada Negri's narrator watches as a spirited five-year-old with a commanding manner changes into a dull, blank-faced young woman. Carola Prosperi's Leila is shaken when her soon-to-be husband pushes her to demand money from her parents, then exhilarated when she finds the strength to refuse. Gianna Manzini's Fiore deals with a son who has returned home after two years at university, but who never speaks to her. An afterword examines how the artistic and political stances of women, who wrote prolifically during the Fascist period, led them to be ignored by ``the postwar critical establishment.'' (Nov.)