Paola Ojetti and Maria Basaglia: Two Women Workers in Fascist Italy’s Cultural Sector

Putting into dialogue scholarly studies on Italian Fascism with a wide range of newly identified film and media history resources, the authors reconstruct and compare the career paths of Paola Ojetti (1911-1978) and Maria Basaglia (1908-2000) in the 1930s and early-1940s, with a specific focus on their cinema-related activities such as dubbing, film criticism, screenwriting and on-set assistance. By shedding light on the microhistory level of professional routines and social interactions, the article seeks to contribute to a history of women workers in Fascist Italy’s cultural sector grounded in the concrete life experiences of women intellectuals. The career paths of Ojetti and Basaglia show that the mastery of foreign languages was a key requisite for women wishing to enter the field of cultural production: translation work was considered especially fitting to women because it was generally poorly paid, mostly carried out at home, held in lower esteem than authorial work, and thus perceived as less threatening to male privilege. The cases of Ojetti and Basaglia also show that no matter their talent and diligence, women intellectuals in Fascist Italy often had to put themselves under the mentorship or in the employ of male colleagues, who enjoyed greater civil liberties and career advancement opportunities than their female counterparts. The women who met these conditions accessed the cultural sector, working through the ranks of a specific branch, reaching out to one another to create useful networks of mutual support and collaboration, and eventually building an eclectic and at times non-normative career for themselves. While confirming the existence of a repressive system that exploited women’s intellectual work, the article proposes that there were ways for women to partially break through the narrow boundaries of subordinate work established by the discriminatory policies of the Fascist regime.