From the 1920s to the Italian Miracle: the Political Discourse of La cucina italiana

This paper analyses La cucina italiana, one of Italy’s most influential cookery magazines, with a focus on how it constructed gender roles between 1929 and the 1970s. It examines how La cucina italiana navigated the tension between domesticity and female employment by offering competing images of women: as nurturing mothers or as participants in the workforce. Drawing on gender and food studies, the paper investigates how the magazine’s representations of women changed under different political regimes: Fascism, post-war reconstruction and the Republic. While La cucina italiana shared similarities with other women’s magazines in guiding female readers within socially acceptable boundaries, its focus on food enabled it to appeal to a wider audience, transcending class and gender. The magazine’s long-standing national presence amplified its role in normalising gender binaries and domestic ideologies, although multiple, and sometimes contradictory, models of femininity coexisted. In La cucina italiana, culinary recipes often served as metaphors for the construction of idealised femininity within Italy’s evolving social context.