Maddalena Santoro tra posizioni emancipazionistiche e adesione al “modello muliebre” del regime

The formative experience of the Great War and the hectic subse-quent years bring out an unusual social relevance of women, as highlighted by numerous contributions on the consent to the war effort by an elite of privileged women due to their socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. The emotional and ideological transition from patriotic interventionism to fascism, combined with the contradictory process of female emancipation, is read in this essay through the individual and professional path of the writer Maddalena Santoro, a successful publicist and novelist in the years between the two wars. The communicative scope of her writings (from articles for the magazine “Humanitas” in the midst of the conflict to the novels of the fascist period) expressed on the national-patriotic values conveyed by the war and progressively canonized by fascism, offers the opportunity to grasp the transition that unites many intellectuals, from the search for female independence to joining the project of the "new Italian", in the wake of that ambiguous balance between the “female model” touted by the regime and the wide freedom of morals practised in the private sector.