“In Fascist Italy the most fascist thing women can do is ‘pilot’ many children. Piloting [airplanes] is a very serious business that ought to be left to men.” Or so Mussolini wrote in a telegram to the Prefect of Bologna in 1934 after seeing an ad in a newspaper that encouraged women to join the aviation club of the Emilian capital. Outrageous! By then the regime had been firmly established and the condition of women was crystal clear: they were to be “keepers of the hearth,” raising families, procreating and basically not competing with men in the labor market. After all, hadn’t the philosopher Giovanni Gentile proposed the same that year? “In the family, the woman belongs to her husband, and she is what she is insofar as she is his.” Even more prosaic is fascism’s so-called decalogue for the young Italian woman: “one also serves the Fatherland by sweeping one’s own house” (1935).