muz_7

=Women - Battle for Births=

Aims
In 1927 Mussolini launched the Battle for Births. It was designed to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million by 1950. According to the Catholic Church, birth control and abortion were unnatural and offensive to God; this implied that the women's role should be that of wife and mother. As a result women were encouraged to have children and girls were discouraged from entering higher education. But Mussolini's aim was not simply to confine women to a domestic role - ** he wanted to raise the population dramatically so to provide soldiers for his armies and colonists for the new Italian Empire. **

Actions
Mussolini pursued a series of "//carrot and stick//" policies:


 * **Marriage loans** w ere offered to encourage couples to have more children, part of that debt was then cancelled for each subsequent child that a couple had.
 * A further financial inducement was that married men with at least 6 children was exempt from all taxation.

However...


 * **Bachelor taxes** w ere introduced as penalties for those who were reluctant to become parents. At one point the government raised 230 million lire simply from Bachelor taxes by 1939.

He also introduced a series of **Employment laws** designed to strenghten the Battle for Births:


 * By the late 1930's jobs and promotions in the civil service were only open to the fertile married.
 * Private companies only promoted married men.
 * State railway companies sacked all women who had been appointed since 1915, with the exception of war widows.
 * In 1933 a ** quota system ** was introduced into the public sector, ** limiting women to 10% of the workforce **. In 1938 it was extended to large and medium sized firms.
 * **BUT** the quota system was not applied to traditionally female, low paid occupations such as cleaners or waitresses.

Failures
Evidently from the above title, in signals that there were no successes to Mussolini's "//Battle for Births//". And so, despite Mussolini's efforts, the Battle was lost.
 * The rate of marriage remained __unchanged__.
 * The birth rate declined until 1936
 * His population target of 60 million by 1950 only reached 47.5 million.
 * In the workplace women still made