‘Lontane da Voghera’. Italian Housewives as Consumers and Spectators between Public and Private Spheres

In this paper, we will discuss a spectatorial and sociological model of the average Italian housewife, the so-called ‘casalinga di Voghera’, through the lens of media consumption. In particular, we will focus on the period of ‘the long economic miracle’, following Silvio Lanaro’s definition, which were years of both affluence and contradiction.2 At the same time, it also represented a decisive moment in the redefinition of the role of women within the family. To this end, our analysis will transcend the public/private dichotomy: through the lens of media consumption, we will question both the notion of the public sphere as a site for positive (masculine) values, linked to cultural, economic, and political production, and the conventional idea of the private as a feminine sphere, tied to tradition, care, and reproduction. Media consumption provides an invaluable key to understanding how women transformed their homes into sites of cultural production and resistance, and how they actively negotiated their marginalized condition through the powerful experiences of their everyday life. With this in mind, we have drawn upon various sources in order to portray the multifaceted nature of media consumption by Italian housewives, and to stress the contradictions between institutional representations and everyday experiences. In a preliminary section, we will propose a short historiographical overview of female media consumers, situated within a wider history of audiences. We will offer a brief overview both of the ‘casalinga di Voghera’ label, in order to frame our discussion in relation to the cultural debate on media consumption, and of the relationships between domesticity, feminism and Americanization. Then, we have divided what remains into two main sections: the first will offer a general overview by means of quantitative analysis (audience investigations carried out by the Doxa Institute and Rai in the 1950s and 1960s) and the second will focus on qualitative sources (letters that female readers sent to popular weekly magazines). Adopting this dual yet integrated methodology, we will read these historical sources through an ethnographic approach, which enables us to reinterpret the relevance of cultural consumption for women’s identities in the crucial years of the economic boom.