During the Fascist era, woman education went through a contradictory and ambiguous process of “authoritarian modernisation”. The diffusion of elementary and secondary education coexisted with a limitation of the public and social spaces open to women.
Following the immediate decrease in enrollment for both boys and girls, after riforma Gentile (1923), the 1930s saw an increase in female presence in schools. Especially in elementary schools, that girls and boys were theoretically obligated to attend, during 1927/28 only 77% of girls were enrolled, compared to 80% of boys.
Ten years later, in 1937/38, feminine enrollment reached 90% of those obligated. At the same time, feminine enrollment in secondary schools nearly quadrupled, from 72.297 in 1927/28 to 268.594 in 1937/38. Despite this, the overall picture of women education has few bright spots and many shadows. The school environment was influenced by Fascist totalitarianism; school was the way the Regime used to reach and indoctrinate the largest possible number of young people. Furthermore, as one progressed up the educational ladder, the spaces granted to women were almost non-existent.
Already in 1923, women could not become headmistress of classical or scientific high schools and they were forbidden from teaching certain subjects in high schools and technical institutes in 1926.
The Regime, indeed, tried to confine women to specific educational paths. From 1923 to 1929 there were Licei Femminili (Female High Schools), offering a non-professionalising education – similar to the one taught in 19th-century Colleges – to women from the upper-middle class. After Licei Femminili closed due to a lack of enrollment, the Regime focused its efforts in the 1930s on girls from lower-middle classes.
In 1929, three-year vocational preparatory schools for women were established. In 1931 the following schools were founded: three-year vocational schools for women, which could be attended by those who had completed vocational preparatory schools, and two-year Magistero della donna schools (Women’s Teacher Training schools), accessible with a women’s vocational school diploma. In all these institutions, the main subjects were home economics and feminine’s jobs: the idea that a woman’s “professional vocation” lays in domestic work was thus reinforced.