Conference Program

This paper examines the work of female teachers in a rural school in Vicenza during the Fascist period in Italy (1922–1943). Specifically, it explores women’s teaching labor within a context of intense political and symbolic discipline as an ambivalent space between subordination and agency. The study conceptualizes the teacher as a figure situated at the intersection of gender, professional identity, rural context, and institutional constraint, adopting a historical-critical perspective and engaging with gender pedagogy. Furthermore, it interrogates whether and to what extent women’s educational work functioned not only as a mechanism of ideological reproduction, but also as a site of professional self-definition and emancipation.

Drawing on the analysis of school registers, classroom reports, and personal files preserved in the school’s historical archive, the research reconstructs several professional trajectories, highlighting how women’s educational work simultaneously functioned as an instrument of the regime’s ideological project and as a daily practice of care, mediation, and civic responsibility. The sources reveal the material and symbolic conditions shaping teaching practices, including moral surveillance, political expectations, limited resources, and the naturalization of women’s pedagogical roles.

Within a highly hierarchical structure shaped by authoritarian control, female teachers developed differentiated strategies of adherence, adaptation, negotiation, and subtle resistance in response to imposed norms. Primary schooling thus emerges as a site of tension: a space where disciplined models of femininity and political directives were reproduced, but also one in which professional competences were exercised and meaningful educational relationships were formed. Through everyday classroom practices, interactions with families, and the management of local social dynamics, these teachers contributed to processes of literacy, socialization, and community cohesion that extended beyond the regime’s ideological objectives.

From this perspective, women’s teaching can be interpreted as a form of professional care work - often undervalued and institutionally marginalized - yet capable of producing long-term social effects. Even within an authoritarian system, such labor generated processes of professional autonomy and forms of civic engagement that later constituted important preconditions for democratic citizenship. By analysing the epistemic dimension of women’s educational role, the paper aims to restore visibility to women historically overlooked in official narratives. Furthermore, it contributes to broader debates on women’s work, agency, and the complex and ambivalent paths toward emancipation.