La « fonction essentielle » des femmes : Famille, travail domestique et salaire en Italie entre fascisme et République

The article analyses the political debate on the Housewives’ Wages in Italy. The debate begins with the Taylorist movement about the scientific organisation of domestic work, which develops in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, starting from the 1920s. After the II world war, the debate will resume on the occasion of the drafting of the brand-new Republican Constitution. The emblematic article 37 will renew the “naturality” of the maternal function and will stop the debate. The question of the “domestic salary” will re-emerge in the mid-seventies particularly in the political activism of the feminist group, based in Padua, Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle). In these same years, immigrant women begin to become predominant in this specific sector of the labour market.