If this were the beginning of a film, the scene would arrange aunts with exaggerated make-up and cousins with their shirts open down their chests around an extravagantly laid table. It would be one of the former, between a forkful of pasta and a sip of wine, who asks the inevitable question–”When will you have children?”–to be followed by an awkward silence only broken by the scraping of forks. Sure, it happens like this sometimes, but, more often than not, it’s more subtle. It’s your mother who expects to spend her old age surrounded by grandchildren, it’s the relatives who are waiting for you to “get your act together”, it’s the employer who looks at you doubtfully, trying to figure out when you’ll ask for maternity leave. It’s the female friends who drift away, sucked into a world of infants and other mothers, behind house walls that grow taller and thicker by the day, waiting for you to make the transformation too.
That’s because in Italy, if you are a woman between the ages of 20 and 40, what people really want to know from you is when you’re going to have children–not “if” you want them, but “when” you’ll have them.
Peel back the layer of morbid curiosity behind the question and you’ll find the core of Italian society, which bases its patriarchal system on the identification of women in the figure of the mother. After all, our Prime Minister made this pretty clear, even before becoming the first woman to govern Italy. (In fact, probably to win the favor to become such.) In her speech at Rome’s Centro Destra rally on November 19th, 2019, Meloni defined herself with what has since become a catchphrase (and has even been remixed in a song by Myss Keta): “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian.” In other words, to be an Italian woman, being a mother is one of the most important identifiers. This is your function and society is founded on this.
That is why, when the question comes up–whether at the classic lunch with the extended family, between friends who have not seen each other for a long time, or at a job interview–the answer you give is extremely important, even though it could end up spoiling the dinner, saying goodbye forever to old friends, or ruining a professional opportunity.
I’ll start with myself, just to open a window into an Italian everyday reality. Woman, in the second half of her 30s, born in a small town in the Northwest, educated abroad, lived around Europe, atheist, had a few love affairs that ended badly and a few periods as a single woman, finally found a partner. There wasn’t a specific time when I decided not to have children, but neither did I ever feel the need to have them. The only time I had some kind of instinct to procreate was when I was very young and living in Denmark. The security provided by a state system that offers functioning services and a society that is much more egalitarian than the Italian one (as far as genders are concerned) were tangible things, visible even to a 20-year-old student who had no intention of starting a family: handsome, young fathers taking their children to school at times of the day when, in Italy, they would be relegated to their offices, which seem to be unable to exist without their constant presences; tiny children bundled up in ski suits following their teachers down snowy pavements; strollers parked outside cafés where parents chat without the anxiety of that all-Italian specter that is colpo d’aria. There in Denmark, although it was a time when I was completely focused on myself, I would not have minded becoming a mother. Because I did not envisage a transformation from “me” to “mother”, but an evolution from a single person to a person with children, which all in all seemed possible to integrate into one’s life, no matter one’s gender.
Once I returned to Italy, I started to encounter friends who decided to have children, or were having them because it just happened. None of their lives seemed to me a particularly desirable choice. I do not want to diminish their joys of motherhood or the conviction of their paths, only that in no way could I see it coinciding with mine, and for exactly the opposite reason as what I had felt in northern Europe. In Italy, women are expected to stop being themselves after having children and simply become mothers. Of course, they are also expected to keep their jobs, lest people think we are a retrograde country!
The problem, however, comes well before the moment of motherhood and it concerns the working world. In the ranking released in June 2024, the Global Gender Gap report, compiled by the World Economic Forum, Italy dropped from the already bad 79th position to 87th (between Timor-Leste, 86th, and Ghana, 88th, and followed in Europe only by Hungary, 101st): a score in which the 111th place for the indicator called “Economic Participation and Opportunity” is particularly important.
Many women in Italy choose a part-time job either because they are planning to have children or because they already have them and are expected to take care of the young ones full-time. In fact, 49.49% of part-time jobs are held by women, while 23.03% are held by men. In return, 20.40% of women’s free time is spent on unpaid domestic and care work, while only 8.40% of men’s free time is used for this purpose. Add to this the wage difference when the work is retributed; data shows that Italian women are, on average, paid 6.1% less than men. The average, however, does not consider certain industries, such as the private sector, where the difference can be as high as 15.5%, or age; though the wage gap stands at 3% for those under 25, it reaches 15.8% at age 65. (This could mean that the gap is decreasing for younger generations, though it may also indicate that salaries diverge the higher one goes up the corporate ladder–or that men are given more opportunities for career growth.)
Given the free work expected at home, the low pay in the workforce, and a parental leave of 150 days, compared to the 14 provided for the father, it’s no surprise that many women abandon their career prospects, if only to not succumb to the heavy physical and mental strain. Once again, the figures do not lie: only 15.30% of Italy’s top management roles are filled by women, and there are only 11.59% of firms with female majority ownership.
Some may argue that the wage gap is actually a few points lower than the European average, but this is because many women remain outside the labor market. According to the Bank of Italy’s annual report, the employment rate for women aged 15-64 was 51.1% in 2022–high in comparison to the last three decades, but 18.1% lower than that for men; Italy has the lowest rate of female participation in the workforce in the European Union. Reasons are not just cultural but economical: it’s often not financially worthwhile for a woman to work, since the money she earns would barely be enough to pay for a babysitter. One could even venture that Italian society not only wants women to be mothers, but also wants them at home, as kindergarten and school schedules often don’t allow for two parents to have normal working lives.
To put it succinctly, per the European Gender Equality Index, “gender inequalities (in Italy) are strongly pronounced in the domain of work, in which the country has consistently occupied last place among all member states since 2010.”
Why is the topic of work so important when it comes to motherhood? Imagine a young woman who has studied and struggled to make her way in one of the many sectors presided over by male managers who are mostly over the age 50. Maybe it’s not the job she dreamt of at university, but a good, concrete alternative. The current maternity system, which does not require the father to question his job (and role), will slowly make her believe that it’s not that important if she loses her position, that in the end it was not what she really wanted to do, that it’s better for her to not to miss out on raising the children, better not to spend money on having them educated by strangers. So she will question herself every day, leaving a gap of years in her career, while her partner will carry on with his career path and never have to ask “Will it be worth it?”.
As someone who has spent her youth working all kinds of jobs to pay for her studies, chasing scholarships and academic degrees, the idea of not having the same opportunities as a man fills me with anger, not maternal love, just as the idea of giving it all up for “the sake of the children” would be an option that would make me, at the very least, sad and half-hearted.
Work, of course, is not the only issue at play when it comes to motherhood in Italy. We could talk about the Catholic interference in a government that never before has made it more difficult for women to have abortions. Or about a culture that sees women’s power as somehow related to that of the Virgin Mary. We could talk about the distressing numbers of feminicides and the equally terrible response of the media, which continue to portray each case as isolated and unpredictable, without delving into the dynamics of a society that does not protect women in the face of violence.
Beyond the data, as an Italian woman, what for me most overshadows idyllic dreams of a happy family is the total lack, as a society, of questioning the position of the father. Whether it be about making dinner, cleaning the house, or the expectation of not disrupting one’s life: I know very few cases in which the male half of a heterosexual couple has questioned his own social and private role as much as the mother. Am I generalizing? Perhaps. Unfortunately there’s no official data to support this and most women I know, when asked, will recount the ways in which their partner is “helping” them. But I think that answer, in and of itself, is an indicator: why should they be “helping” to run their own family, their own house? Shouldn’t it be a two-person job? In Italy, it, more often than not, isn’t, but many women are ashamed to admit it, as if they had failed the feminism they used to believe in, but that just can’t apply to their everyday lives.
The all-Italian way of taking this load for granted, of hearing it demanded by aunts and grandmothers, normalized by female friends or on TV, is a psychological violence that weighs on many more women than we think. Merging the role of woman with that of mother so deeply affects the identity and singularity of each one, relegating them to a forced, old model that has yet been so difficult to abandon in this country. (It must be noted that the women who manage to escape this dynamic in Italy are often those with the financial freedom to buy the support they need.)
Perhaps this is why my grandmother, after asking me “when are you going to have children?” while I was in dysfunctional relationships, eventually resolved to asking me why I didn’t just have them, with whoever came along, as if it didn’t make much difference if the father was present in the raising of the child.
So, to cut a long story short, a good answer to the question “when are you going to have children?” could be “when Italy stops being a sexist country, which discriminates against women in the world of work and expects them to annihilate themselves in order to raise children.” Another one, equally valid but breaking out of all paradigms, is “because I don’t want any.”
