Press advertising and fascist dictates: Showcasing the female consumer in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

This article provides a nuanced assessment of the process of politicisation undergone by press advertising during the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships in relation to the images of womanhood that were propagated in the press at the time. Conceived as key agents in the regimes’ demographic and economic crusades, women and their commercial representation acquired unprecedented relevance in the eyes of the Fascist and Nazi leadership, which sought to regulate it through a variety of measures. Despite these efforts, press advertisements never fully conformed to the required fascist ideal but rather continued to propagate a variety of fairly contradictory models that revealed a considerable level of continuity with their predecessors and post-1945 successors*and still partly fit within the broad modernising trends that characterised the European interwar press and advertising sectors.