Women were imagined as vital determiners of national drinking habits and were singled out as crucial to both problematic drinking practices and the resolution of these, whether the problem was framed, in the anti-alcohol movement’s terms, as one of (mostly male) excess alcohol consumption, or, in the wine and beer producers’ terms, as a crisis of over-production and under-consumption of national products. Blame abounded: women employed outside the home, presumed neglecters of home and hearth, imperilled the anti-alcohol campaigners’ secure assumptions around male alcoholism.

Women who drank for pleasure in fashionable bars, hotels and nightclubs affronted norms of gendered public sociability. Women who failed to place Italian wines and beers on the family dining table, or to serve these to visiting friends, were deserting their duties as patriotic consumers and exacerbating the ‘wine crisis’. The fascist government itself vacillated but ultimately shifted from a position that, through its legislation in the 1920s, exhibited sympathy with the anti-alcohol movement’s concerns, to one more supportive of the alcohol industry lobbyists, whose propaganda programme encouraging consumption of Italian alcoholic beverages was by the 1930s in step with the régime’s developing autarky project.