The absence of many men who were called to arms to fight the Austro-Hungarian army brought about very serious economic and social consequences.
Most families were of peasant origin, tied to the customs and to the traditions of the past: male members had the task of working outside the home while women performed their duties inside the households, taking care of children and seeing to the daily chores. Things were not much different even for "working class" families where the only difference consisted in the employment of men in factories rather than in fields.
This situation changed considerably in 1915. The places of work of many peasants and workersthat were left empty were taken over by those who stayed behind and who would never be called to the warfront: women. This was a very important moment for the social history of the country. The role of women, for the first time, moved from that of "an angel of the domestic hearth" to an active member of the economy and of collective society.
Women were not completely new to this type of experience: many of them were already used to contribute to work on farms while, at the industrial level, they had already participated in the textile sector. But now their number increased considerably and they participated in sectors that were completely new such as the steel industry (that was adapted to meet military demand), machineryand transport and work of an administrative nature.
Obviously this process was not without pain: since no division of labour had been envisaged, women were obliged to carry out the same work as their male colleagues, even the heavier duties. On farms it was necessary to move haystacks or sacks of grain, look after the livestock and use all the heavy agricultural machinery. In the same way heavy weights had to be carried inside factories and certain actions and movements had to be repeated over and over again in a mechanical manner.
Women took the place of their husbands (or sons) even in household chores that are typically associated with men such as bureaucratic issues, the purchase and sale of agricultural products and legal problems.
This sort of "emancipation" at the workplace was not, however, accompanied by greater personal freedom: and in the absence of working-age men, quite often it was elderly persons who remained inside households and who, in line with tradition, continued to exercise their authoritarian role within the family. Besides, an attitude of mistrust as well as a rejection of this situation was noticeable among moralists and traditionalists: "The presence of women in engineering factories was sometimes perceived, especially by old workers, as undermining the natural order and an attack against morality." (Antonio Gibelli, La Grande Guerra degli Italiani, BUR, Milan, 2009, page 193). This way of thinking worsened as time went by when younger girls increasingly left home in search of work.
