A vivid, engaging, and cross-disciplinary account of women’s work in postwar Italy.

Women’s Work in Post-War Italy explores women’s labor following World War II and Italy’s new republic. War and national reconstruction have typically been framed as masculine undertakings in Italy, but Flora Derounian shifts that frame to investigate the labor that Italian women were doing at this critical time of political, social, and ideological change, as well as how it was viewed by society and by women workers themselves. Drawing on original oral history interviews, Derounian compares women’s own words with the very different ways they were pictured in film, giving voice to the under-represented, and exposing the profound difference that work made to women’s lives.

Flora Derounian is a lecturer in French at the University of Sussex.