Furies, Workers and Organizers: Women and Anti-war Protest in Italy, 1914–1918

Between 1914 and 1918, the Kingdom of Italy was the scene of periodic waves of protest against the war, with varying characteristics, intensity, geography, and outcomes, within which women played a significant role. The forms taken by the state of exception and by industrial, agricultural, food supply, and civil mobilization were inextricably intertwined with these phenomena. By analysing documents preserved in court archives, police sources, periodicals, and memoirs from the time, the characteristics of protest movements emerge, which for a long time were underestimated in historiography. Social conflicts always had a political meaning and played an important role both during the year of neutrality (1914–1915), in the central phase of the war, and in the final year of the conflict, after the defeat of Caporetto (1917), and had significant consequences on the postwar period and the so-called biennio rosso (1919–1920), when the rise of squadrismo and fascism gained strength.