Institutionally, the Fascist regime depended on the midwifing and medical professions in its programs of infant and maternal care. On an individual level, the general quantitative population policy depended specifically upon women, and ironically it was Fascism, with its emphasis on virility and the male domination of society, that first sought to engage women on a large scale in the life of the Italian nation. We can even speak of a Fascist women's policy whose essential points were: the discouragement of female wage-earning activity outside the home in the interest of lowering male unemployment, the more or less private entrusting of women with responsibility for Italian demographic expansion, and the more or less public call for female volunteerism in the area of infant and maternal care. These tasks constituted women's role in the national struggle, and Mussolini himself made the analogy when he stated that “war is to men what motherhood is to women” (Mussolini, vol. xxvi, p. 259 [26 May 1934]).

This policy can be construed as a simple attempt to reaffirm the traditional female role of child bearer and carer. The institutional aspect, however, as well as the appeal to a higher collective good were novel and constituted an invasion of the private sphere which carried with it various implications. The Fascist regime sought to mobilize the female masses both as prolific mothers and as volunteer social workers, and this mobilization seems to have led to a degree of political consciousness-raising. For the call to demographic action required either compliance or refusal, and this refusal, apparently widespread, might also be interpreted as a form of resistance.