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From private to public: Alba de Céspedes' agony column in 1950s Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2016

Penny Morris
Penny Morris*
Affiliation:
Italian Section, Department of Modern Languages, Hetherington Building, Bute Gardens, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G128RS. E-mail: P.Morris@italian.arts.gla.ac.uk
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Summary

A unique, if problematical, historical source for the study of the ‘private sphere’, the problem page has, as yet, been the subject of little serious attention. This article initially considers the problem page in general terms, and with particular reference to 1950s Italy, a time when a notable feature of the changing patterns of cultural consumption was the emergence and upsurge in popularity of the weekly magazine. The rest of the paper is devoted to an analysis of best-selling author Alba de Céspedes' agony column, ‘Dalla parte di lei’, published in the magazine Epoca. The article shows that the column provides intriguing insights into the state of family and marriage during a time of transition. It discusses the idea of the agony column as a commodity, but also highlights de Céspedes' aim of providing a kind of compendium of lay morals, arguing that any attempt to provide an alternative to the Catholic Church, and the prevailing conservative attitudes of the time, was a matter of careful negotiation.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Special Issue: gender and the private sphere in Italy since 1945 , May 2004 , pp. 11 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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References

Notes

1. Aspesi, Natalia, Questioni di cuore: una mappa dell'Italia in amore , Teadue, Milan, 1995, p. 7.Google Scholar

2. In fact, as Kent, Robin has indicated, in recent times in Britain women's magazines with intellectual pretensions have made the point of not having a problem page at all (Kent, Robin, Problem Pages through the Ages , W.H. Allen, London, 1987, p. 29).Google Scholar

3. Of the few studies entirely devoted to problem pages published in English, the most exhaustive is Kent, Problem Pages. Others, such as Jordan, Terry, Agony Columns 1890–1980, Macdonald & Co., London, 1988, and Ratcliff, Rosemary, Dear Worried Brown Eyes, Robert Maxwell, London, 1969, tend to be rather thin anthologies with little analysis or historical background, or studies restricted to single magazines, such as Tohka, Laura, I Suggest You Accept Everything: Women's Own Agony Columns in 1950, 1970 and 1990, University of Tampere Research Institute for Social Sciences, Tampere, 1993. Brief mention of problem pages may be found in studies of journalism, particularly those dealing with women's magazines, such as Ferguson, Marjorie, Women's Magazines and the Cult of Femininity, Heinemann, London and Exeter, NH, 1983; and Ballaster, Ros, Beetham, Margaret, Frazer, Elizabeth and Hebron, Sandra, Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Women's Magazine, Macmillan, London, 1991 (see pp. 41–42, 92). There has been no broad analysis of problem pages in Italian and they are not mentioned at all in traditional histories of journalism and newspapers. Anthologies that have appeared are usually drawn from one publication. These include two volumes edited by Tognetti, Carmelita, Reverendo Padre: amore, famiglia e sesso in Italia, Libreria della Famiglia, Milan, 1977 and Reverendo Padre: Religione, società e costume in Italia 1978, Libreria della Famiglia, Milan, 1978, which are collections of letters sent to Famiglia Cristiana from 1942 to 1977 (the first includes a useful preface and introduction); Zega, Leonardo, I volti dell'amore: lettere al Padre di ‘Famiglia Cristiana’, Garzanti, Milan, 1999 (letters from 1980) and Aspesi, Questioni di cuore. One anthology, Le italiane si confessano, Parenti, Florence, 1959, edited by Parca, Gabriella, had a great impact when it was published. According to its author, it was based on the letters to two unnamed women's magazines (of the comic type, typical of the 1950s) and revealed the true anxieties and desires of Italian women. In his preface, Cesare Zavattini agrees, commenting that ‘Italy is still an huge harem’ (p. 11) and Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his presentation, judges it to be the most interesting book he has read in years. In 1961, Zavattini directed a film based on the book: Le italiane e l'amore. The anthology clearly aimed to be polemical, if not scandalous, and it does provide a fascinating insight into the kind of concerns readers of these magazines had. As a study of problem pages, it only tells one side of the story, as the answers to the letters are not reproduced. A more recent academic study, Triglia, Maria, Lettere di donne ai giornali: i casi di ‘Famiglia Cristiana’ e Grazia, LAS, Rome, 2000 (based on correspondence from 1992–98), is of interest, but limited in scope.Google Scholar

4. Undoubtedly some letters were invented, but it seems unlikely that journalists would ignore a source of readily available questions and dilemmas.Google Scholar

5. It should be remembered that, as Lumley, Robert has pointed out, literacy rates in Italy were well behind other countries in the developed world in the 1950s. He quotes one survey which found that 64.5 per cent of the population in 1956 never read anything at all ( Italian Journalism: A Critical Anthology , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996, p. 4).Google Scholar

6. Caldwell, Lesley, Italian Family Matters: Women, Politics and Legal Reform , Macmillan, London, 1991, p. 151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Doria, Anna Rossi, Diventare cittadine: il voto alle donne in Italia , Giunti, Florence, 1996.Google Scholar

8. There remains a good deal of work to be done on women and the 1950s. See, for example, Simonetta Piccone Stella's convincing argument that more attention should be paid to the specificity of the Italian situation in ‘”Donne all'Americana?”: Immagini convenzionali e realtà di fatto’, in D'Attore, Pierpaolo, (ed.), Nemici per la pelle: sogno americano e mito sovietico nell'Italia contemporanea , Franco Angeli, Milan, 1991, pp. 268–279. For an analysis of the legal situation, see Caldwell, , ‘Divorce and the Family Law: Postwar History’, chapter 4 of Italian Family Matters, pp. 69–86, and Amato, Diana Vincenzi, ‘Il diritto di famiglia dal 1919 ai nostri giorni’, in Melograni, Piero (ed.), La famiglia italiana dall'Ottocento a oggi, Laterza, Rome–Bari, 1988, pp. 658–696.Google Scholar

9. Marco Barbanti maintains that there was a widespread moralistic obsession in the 1950s concerning sexual relations and family morality (especially regarding divorce, abortion, illegitimacy and contraception), ‘La “battaglia per la moralità” tra oriente, occidente e italocentrismo 1948–1960’, in D'Attore, (ed.), Nemici per la pelle , pp. 161–198, p. 161.Google Scholar

10. As Bruno Wanrooij comments, in the 1950s anything to do with sexuality or marriage in general was regarded as strictly private, ‘Pro aris et focis: morale cattolica e identità nazionale in Italia 1945–60’, in D'Attore, , (ed.), Nemici per la pelle , pp. 199–216, p. 200.Google Scholar

11. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana del dopoguerra 1943–1972 , Laterza, Rome, 1974, pp. 205–207.Google Scholar

12. Gundle, Stephen, I comunisti italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca , Giunti, Florence, 1995, pp. 114–115. My translation from the Italian. This section does not appear in the English version of Gundle's book.Google Scholar

13. Mondadori, Milan. A film made from the novel, directed by Alessandro Blasetti, was completed in 1943 but released only in 1945.Google Scholar

14. The journal appeared from September 1944 until January 1948 and, according to de Céspedes in the foreword to the first edition, aimed to rediscover Italy's authentic voice and start up a dialogue with other countries again ( Mercurio , 1 September 1944, p. 4). Foreign writers published in the journal included Jean Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway.Google Scholar

15. Both were published by Mondadori. In the 1970s and 1980s, de Céspedes' writing was largely forgotten and, if remembered, she tended to be thought of as a writer of romantic fiction. This idea is not supported at all by her novels (except perhaps in that they have female protagonists) and may well have had more to do with the fact that she had been an agony aunt. More recently, de Céspedes has begun to receive the critical attention that she deserves. To date, the only extensive studies of her work are Carroli, Piera, Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Céspedes , Longo, Ravenna, 1993 and Gallucci, Carole C. and Nerenberg, Ellen (eds), Writing Beyond Fiction: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, 2000. A very useful source of biographical and bibliographical material (including an inventory of the Archivio Alba de Céspedes in Milan) is the catalogue of an exhibition held in 2000, Zancan, Marina, (ed.), Alba de Céspedes, Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, Milan, 2001.Google Scholar

16. Pseudonym for the writer Irene Brin (in fact also a pseudonym, her real name was Maria Rossi).Google Scholar

17. Her real name was Colette Rosselli.Google Scholar

18. A comparison of de Céspedes' agony column with her other, fictional writing would prove very fruitful, but is beyond the scope of this article. De Céspedes herself notes in a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, ‘until now, for my magazine column I have used the same recipe, as it were, that has proved to be successful in my novels: that is, I deal with love and its problems but always linking it closely with the morality and customs of our time’ (31 July 1953, Fondo Arnoldo Mondadori, Fondazione Mondadori, Milan. All letters from Alba de Céspedes to Arnoldo Mondadori quoted in this article are held here).Google Scholar

19. De Céspedes herself intimates that this is the case in a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori (12 April 1954).Google Scholar

20. Writing to Arnoldo Mondadori, de Céspedes stated that the number of answers on a particular subject on her problem page was strictly representative of the proportion of letters she received on that issue and that she had received more correspondence on divorce than any other matter (31 July 1953).Google Scholar

21. Despite the fact that the title of the column is that of her best-selling novel published in 1948, no letter refers directly to the plot of the novel in which the protagonist ends up murdering her husband, having been entirely misunderstood by him, and by society. If there ever was such a letter, de Céspedes chose not to publish it. Bearing in mind the plot of her novel, the use of the same title for the agony column might seem to be deliberately controversial, yet it seems that, possibly under pressure from her editors, de Céspedes chose to play down any polemical intent. For Mondadori, publisher of both Epoca and de Céspedes' novels, there was an obvious commercial advantage to using the same title.Google Scholar

22. Interestingly one of Epoca's main competitors, L'Europeo, did not have such a column and simply had one main letters section. In 1955, two specialist subsections on legal and medical questions were introduced in L'Europeo, but all other topics were dealt with together. Thus there are letters raising questions on the rights of women to work, divorce, the beat generation and so on, but they are not dealt with in any great detail in this section and may be found alongside other letters on very diverse subjects including enquiries as to how often it is necessary to wash, what can be done about the state of public toilets, and whether or not television presenters should be allowed to wear short socks.Google Scholar

23. Letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 31 July 1953. There was another regular letters column as part of a section entitled ‘L'Italia domanda’, which was the responsibility of Remo Cantani. As far as de Céspedes was concerned, the difference between them was that Cantani's column responded to requests for information on any topic, while hers dealt with enquiries of a moral and psychological nature.Google Scholar

24. Paola Masino's column, ‘Confidatevi con Paola Masino’, would often be made up almost entirely of responses to poems and short stories she had received. Her comments are often amusing, but her problem page has nothing like the breadth and depth of de Céspedes'.Google Scholar

25. Epoca , 30 August 1952, p. 74.Google Scholar

26. Epoca , 4 January 1953, p. 9. The notion of a transition from one generation to the next appears frequently in de Céspedes' novels. In Quaderno proibito, for example, the protagonist, Valeria, becomes aware that, while her struggles have not materially improved her own position as a wife and mother, they will allow her daughter to have greater freedom in life (Quaderno proibito, p. 245).Google Scholar

27. See for example ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 29 November 1952, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

28. By contrast, women's magazines treated such problems as women's problems, for the individual to solve. See Lilli, Laura, ‘La stampa femminile’, in Castronovo, Valerio and Tranfaglia, Nicola (eds), La stampa italiana del neocapitalismo , Laterza, Bari, 1976.Google Scholar

29. 17 September 1950, in Tognetti, , Reverendo Padre , Vol. I, p. 60.Google Scholar

30. 26 April 1959, Reverendo Padre , p. 62.Google Scholar

31. See, for example, ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 25 September 1955, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

32. ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 13 May 1956, p. 27. In another answer, she pointedly includes maids and housewives in her definition of workers (Epoca, 20 June 1954). Of course, being a housewife at the time did not provide financial security, but de Céspedes thought that it should, and often reminded her readers of the way that the economy relied on this ‘free’ work performed by women.Google Scholar

33. See Stella, Piccone, ‘”Donne all'Americana”’. It also counters Barthes‘ assertion (which rests partly on the assumption that such columns only appear in women's magazines) that agony columns always support the status quo and the subordination of women (‘Celle qui voit clair’, in Mythologies , Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1957, pp. 125–128).Google Scholar

34. Bruno Wanrooij observes that women's work was often viewed by Catholics as threatening the fabric of society (‘ Pro aris et focis ’, p. 209).Google Scholar

35. Letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 31 July 1953.Google Scholar

36. This may well have been the reason, plus the general pudore (reserve) of the time, for the presence of euphemisms such as passioni or, occasionally, desideri to refer to sexual relations. Likewise, she only ever alludes to contraception.Google Scholar

37. See Epoca , 5 July 1952, p. 74 and a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 25 January 1957.Google Scholar

38. Such views are clear from her answers to readers but also stated explicitly in a letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 25 January 1957.Google Scholar

39. See ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 26 February 1956, p. 12, for a discussion of this ‘generation gap’.Google Scholar

40. See, for example, ‘Dalla parte di lei’, Epoca , 2 May 1954.Google Scholar

41. We have only de Céspedes' word for this, as the collection was never published, but she does refer to it again in a later letter saying that, in a forthcoming visit to Paris, she aimed to deliver the collection of letters to Gallimard, along with the preface that Sartre had promised (letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 9 December 1956). The plans to publish an Italian version never came to fruition.Google Scholar

42. See, for example, letter to Arnoldo Mondadori, 6 August 1952.Google Scholar