To the Women of Italy
By Benito Mussolini
First of all, I would like to thank you for having received with the greatest spontaneity and solicitude the appeal that the highest organ of the Regime has addressed to you in your recent session.
You have every right to constitute the vanguard of that Italian women's army to which the Regime has entrusted the task of methodically reacting with energy and inflexibility against the obnoxious economic siege that strangles Italy.
The Party and the Regime therefore count on you, on your sensitivity, on your patience, on your tenacity, and above all count on that spirit of burning patriotism that quivers in the hearts of all Italian women.
During the glorious and tragic years of the World War, when that painful news was delivered your doorstep, if someone had told you that one day it would come to pass that the countries to which you had offered your young sons lives would one day supply Italy's enemies with explosive weapons to use against Italian troops, you would have rejected such a notion as an evil fantasy.
That is the reality of today. It is not without emotion that yesterday I read the letter of Filippo Corridoni's mother, who recalled the message sent by her son to the Milanese Syndical Union, when departing for the Front: "We are going to fight for martyred Belgium, for invaded France, for threatened England..."
Now those same people whom we helped are conspiring against Italy. But what is the crime that Italy supposedly has perpetrated? None, unless it is a crime to bring civilization to backwards lands, to build roads and schools, to spread hygiene and modern progress. It is not the economic aspect of the sanctions that bothers us so much. The economic sanctions, in a certain sense, will be useful for the Italian people. Today we have finally realized that we have many more raw materials than we previously thought.
What we despise about the sanctions is their moral character. They dare to equate Ethiopia with Italy as if they were equals, they dare to compare them with the Italian people, the Italian people who gave so many contributions to the civilization of the world, a people whom the experts at Geneva now treat as lab rats upon which they can perform their cruel experiments with impunity.
Even when all this is over, we will not forget it: the memory of these sanctions will remain deep in our soul.
I do not wish to add anything else because everything I have said and could say is already present within your souls. I am certain that, upon returning to your cities, you will pass on these words from the bottom of your hearts and spread them everywhere so that they become the "order" of all the women of Italy and of the whole Italian people.
