| Abstrakt: |
During the difficult Italian state-building in the 19th century, values and bourgeois prerogatives produced social and gender discrimination through laws and liberal institutions. Among them, in Italy, there was the Cavour Rule on prostitution, a tool for controlling and protecting public order, hygiene and morality. The Regulation affected a particular female component: the rural one involved in mobility and urban development processes. Economic, social and political transformations, resulting from the Italian unification, were handled by the peripheral administration which, among other things, applied the Cavour Rule not only in the most developed urban realities but also in the provinces where the process of modernisation was not started, or was just at the beginning. The women for this bureaucracy, for prejudices and for social control was the protagonist of the building of a role: the prostitute. Women, however, sometimes accepted this role, but often opposed it. This contribution intends to revisit the features of the Cavour Rule, its supporters and opponents, examining its application in the southern province of Basilicata. The Italian woman, in the second half of the 19th century, on the basis of a regulation not approved by parliament, was discriminated for her sexual behaviour, because she was considered as an alternative and dangerous social model or just because she was useful for the social order in the role of a prostitute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
