Perpetrators or Victims?: Dangerous Women and Mussolini's Special Tribunal, 1927-1943

From 1926 to 1943, some 16,000 individuals suspected of posing a danger to the Italian State, Mussolini or the King were referred to the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, the extraordinary court created by the Fascist government.  Of these, 5,600 stood trial including 122 women --- from Violet Gibson, the Irish “lunatic” who shot Mussolini in a failed assassination attempt in 1926 to Laura D’Oriano, the naturalized Swiss citizen charged as a spy for the Allies in 1943 who was the only woman executed by order of the Court.  The paper will analyze the experience of these women as well as the hundreds of others detained by the Tribunal but never formally charged as both perpetrators and victims of violence in the Fascist state.  It will focus on the ways in which gender-based assumptions rooted in positivist (nineteenth century Lombrosian) notions of the “criminal woman” influenced Fascist definitions of women as “dangerous” and affected their treatment by the Court in a society that considered women as best suited to the roles of homemaker and child rearing in support of intellectually and physically superior men and, at the same time, saw them as hysterical, unstable beings or dangerous temptresses leading men astray.  Finally, it will explore the processes by which women, considered as “objects” of the law, became “subjects” of the Italian Fascist state bent on prosecuting them for violent acts that endangered or challenged the ideal Fascist social order.