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Anti-fascism for children: Ada Gobetti's story of Sebastiano the Rooster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

Jomarie Alano
Jomarie Alano*
Affiliation:
Cornell Institute for European Studies, Ithaca, NY, USA
*
∗Email: jma49@cornell.edu
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Abstract

Ada Gobetti's Storia del gallo Sebastiano represents one of her many anti-fascist activities. By the time of the story's creation, Ada Gobetti had lived under fascism for 16 years. While Sebastiano descended from a long line of non-conformists in children's literature, it imparted a very specific ideological and political agenda, since Sebastiano was born at the height of fascism. Read by thousands of Italian children during the war, the story provided a clever critique of Mussolini's attempt to make children conform to the fascist ideal. Through Sebastiano, Ada Gobetti enlisted parents and their children in her efforts to urge Italians to resist fascism. After the war, as vice-mayor of Turin, the first woman to hold such a position in Italy, Ada Gobetti worked diligently to effect positive reforms in the schools, and fought openly for the rights of Italian women and children. She also wrote extensively on child rearing and devoted much of the remainder of her life to pedagogic activities to promote a ‘democratic education’ for both children and their parents.

Keywords

anti-fascismfascismchildreneducational reformMussoliniTurinItalyAda Gobetti
Type
Articles
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 69 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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