Swimming with Cloelia, Running with Atalanta, Playing Ball with Nausicaa: The use of Classical Women in Fascist Italy 1930s’ Controversies about Women’s Sport

Women’s sports were quite controversial in 1930s Fascist Italy. On the one hand, the regime promoted them: healthier girls would in time become healthier mothers, who would one day give birth to Mussolini’s future soldiers. Yet a large part of Italian society, led by conservative Catholics, protested the most innovative activities, such as public athletics and swimming competitions. In 1933, a big controversy broke out between Il Littoriale (sports newspaper, mouthpiece of Fascist sports policy) and L’Osservatore Romano (Vatican newspaper) about “immoral” women’s sportswear. An interesting feature of this controversy was the use, by both Fascists and conservatives, of Classical (both mythological and historical) women, such as Cloelia, the Amazons, Atalanta, and Nausicaa, cited as archetypical figures of sportswomen. Nausicaa seemed to be the most frequently used and diverse archetype, because she was better suited (more than Cloelia) to the Fascist vision of the future Italian donna nuova “new woman”: she was young, she had a healthy body, she was ready to embrace her “natural” fate (being a mother). The corpus used for the analysis is composed by journalistic texts (newspapers and magazines) and a sports novel, in order to test the spread of these archetypes in 1930s mass media: in order to fix this new image of the sportswoman, the Fascist regime had to find some well-known female figures that could be easily admired by the Italian people