Autarchic Modernism: Women Workers and The Visual Language of Synthetic Textiles in Fascist Italy

In 1938 the designer Erberto Carboni produced a startlingly avant-garde book for the synthetic textile company SNIA Viscosa. With its graphic plastic overlays and photomontages of moths, babies, Mussolini, and ski outings printed in monochrome blues and reds, SNIA Viscosa: Le opere assistenziali presents a surreal, idyllic vision of life in SNIA’s company towns. Prominently featured are public laundries, daycares, schools, and pediatric clinics that promise to ease the domestic burdens of women workers. That same year, SNIA would inaugurate Torviscosa, a factory town built on the site of a former farming village in Friuli. With its brick towers in the shape of twin fasces and blocks of workers’ housing, the architecture of the viscose city trumpeted the fascist promise of modernity achieved through autarchic production, reliant on female workers.

Representations of women workers in these company towns were shaped by the contradictions of Fascist gender politics: by the 1930’s, the regime’s rhetoric idealized maternity, while women’s lower wages made them essential to the struggling industrial economy. Through publicity materials, the architectural traces of workers’ housing and archival documentation of policies towards women and children at Torviscosa, this paper investigates the visual language of synthetic textile production in the 1930s, and its construction of a fantasy of seamless cohesion between home and work. Finally, I ask what bearing the gendered social order of such textile communities had on their transformation in the 1940s into hotbeds of anti-fascist resistance, envisioning textile futures that surpassed and stymied the ambitions of the regime.