"Per Voi, Signore": Gendered Representations of Fashion, Food, and Fascism in Il Progresso Italo-Americano during the 1930s

Abstract

IN APRIL OF 1935, Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the largest Italianlanguage newspaper in the United States, ran an advertisement for Florio brand marsala, an Italian fortified wine from Sicily. The advertisement featured an illustration of three incredulous looking men gawking at the body of a fashionable, but scantily clad, thin woman in lingerie. One of the men asked the lady, “At this age how do you conserve the beautiful complexion of a young girl?” The key to her girlish physique, the woman responded, is drinking eggnog every morning made with Florio’s marsala, “which nourishes me, without making me gain weight, and keeps my body slim and my spirit awakened.” This advertisement for an imported Italian food product, appearing in the Italian-language press, promoted a particular type of fashionand weight-conscious femininity valued in the U.S., yet reviled by fascists in Italy during the 1930s. These contradictory messages about womanhood and the consumption of food and fashion reveal how habits and identities changed as people and products moved back and forth across the ocean. That a figure no less than Benito Mussolini provided monetary support to immigrant papers like Il Progresso Italo-Americano, which included images of slender, consumerist women, while at the same time rejecting this American model for Italian women in Italy, demonstrates that Italian nationalists valued, yet sent mixed-messages to, Italian women consumers both at home and abroad. The disconnect between images of femininity and consumption in the Italian American commercial press and those in fascist Italy illustrates the peculiar position women held as symbols through which immigrants in the U.S. formed national and consumer identities during the 1930s. This article compares literature about, and advertisements for, fashionable clothing and food products—the most visible commodities represented and discussed in Il Progresso Italo-Americano’s women’s pages—to elucidate the paradoxical representations of women’s consumer and national identities in Italian American newspapers during the 1930s. By juxtaposing this