In June 1946, Italy stood at a crossroads. The war was over. Fascism had fallen. The country was exhausted, bruised, and trying to imagine a future beyond rubble and ration cards. On the ballot was a decision that would reshape the nation: monarchy or republic.
For the first time, Italian women were invited into that decision.
They arrived dressed carefully, often in their best coats, hair set, gloves pulled on. Many wore lipstick. And at polling stations across the country, they were told to remove it.
This is not a footnote of trivia or a quaint anecdote. It is a story about how women’s bodies are policed at moments of power. About how femininity is framed as a threat to legitimacy. And about how even the smallest acts of control reveal deeper fears about women’s autonomy.
The vote that changed Italy
On 2 June 1946, Italians voted in a referendum to decide whether their country would remain a monarchy or become a republic. On the same day, they elected representatives to a Constituent Assembly that would draft a new constitution.
It was the first national election in which Italian women could vote.
The right itself had been won only months earlier. After decades of exclusion under a patriarchal legal system and then outright suppression under Mussolini, women’s suffrage was introduced in 1945. The vote was framed as a reward for women’s wartime contributions as carers, workers, and partisans. Yet the tone was cautious. Gratitude did not equal trust.
Roughly 12 million women turned out. Their participation rate rivalled men’s. They queued, they waited, they voted. And in many places, they were instructed to wipe their lips.
Why lipstick mattered
On the surface, it sounded neutral. Practical. Almost reasonable.
But the instruction was not applied equally. Men were not asked to prove their mouths were free of residue. Women without lipstick were not questioned. The concern was not saliva. It was the visible sign of femininity.
Lipstick became a proxy. A way to single women out as potential risks to the integrity of democracy.
It is difficult to separate this from the cultural context of post-war Italy. Lipstick had been discouraged, even demonised, under Fascism. The regime promoted an ideal of womanhood that was modest, maternal, and self-sacrificing. Painted lips suggested vanity, sexuality, and influence. Things women were not meant to wield.
So when women arrived at polling booths with colour on their mouths, it was read not as personal expression but as disruption.
Respectability politics at the ballot box
The request to remove lipstick carried a clear, if unspoken, message. To participate in public life, women needed to neutralise themselves. To be taken seriously, they had to erase signs of pleasure, adornment, and choice.
This is respectability politics in action.
Women were welcome to vote, but only if they complied with an unspoken code of restraint. The act of voting was framed as civic, rational, masculine. Lipstick was emotional, frivolous, feminine. One could not coexist with the other.
The irony, of course, is that women had been trusted with far more during the war. They ran households under bombardment. They carried messages for resistance groups. They kept families alive on nothing. But when it came time to place a piece of paper in a box, they were asked to prove they would not smudge it.
Control disguised as concern
It is tempting to dismiss the lipstick rule as a product of its time. To say it was about logistics, not ideology.
But rules do not appear in a vacuum. They emerge from assumptions about who is trustworthy, whose bodies are neutral, and whose presence requires monitoring.
Men’s bodies were treated as default. Women’s bodies were treated as variables.
This pattern repeats across history. Dress codes that target girls in schools under the guise of distraction. Workplace standards that police women’s appearance while calling it professionalism. Political commentary that focuses on what women wear instead of what they say.
In each case, the stated concern is order. The underlying anxiety is power.
How women responded
Accounts from the time suggest a range of reactions. Some women complied without fuss, wiping their lips on handkerchiefs before entering the booth. Others were annoyed, embarrassed, or quietly angry.
There is no record of mass protest at polling stations. This was not that kind of moment.
Instead, what followed was something subtler. Women voted anyway. They did not turn back. They did not leave the queue. They participated in overwhelming numbers, despite the small humiliations layered into the process.
And many put their lipstick back on afterwards.
This matters. Resistance does not always look like confrontation. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Sometimes it looks like refusing to be deterred by indignity.
The symbolism we underestimate
Lipstick seems trivial until you ask why it provokes such strong reactions in moments of female agency.
It is not just pigment. It is visibility. Choice. A declaration of self that is read, rightly or wrongly, as sexual, confident, and unapologetic.
For centuries, women’s political legitimacy has been judged against how well they approximate male norms of seriousness. The less feminine they appear, the more credible they are assumed to be.
The lipstick ban at Italian polling booths was an early expression of this logic. If women were going to be citizens, they needed to look less like women.
That expectation has never fully disappeared.
From 1946 to now
Today, women vote across the world. They lead governments, sit on courts, and shape constitutions. Lipstick is no longer wiped off at polling stations.
But the scrutiny remains.
Female politicians are still assessed on appearance in ways their male counterparts are not. Too polished and they are vain. Too plain and they are cold. Wear makeup and it is a distraction. Do not wear it and it is a statement.
The question is never just about lipstick. It is about whether women are allowed to occupy power without apology.
The story of Italian women in 1946 reminds us that inclusion often arrives with conditions attached. Rights are granted, but only if they are exercised in ways that do not unsettle existing hierarchies.
Why this story matters now
At SheThrives, we talk often about the quiet mechanisms that shape women’s lives. The rules that are never written down. The expectations that are framed as common sense.
This is one of those stories.
It shows how even landmark progress can be accompanied by subtle forms of control. How women’s entry into public life is frequently managed, moderated, and made conditional on compliance.
It also shows something else. That women keep showing up anyway.
Italian women did not wait for perfect conditions to claim their place in history. They voted in a country still rebuilding, in a system still suspicious of them, with lipstick removed or intact.
They helped usher in a republic. They helped draft a constitution that would eventually enshrine equality. And they did it knowing they were being watched.
The legacy of painted lips
There is a temptation to romanticise the past, to smooth over its frictions in favour of neat progress narratives. But remembering the lipstick rule complicates the story in useful ways.
It asks us to notice how power operates in small, embodied moments. How women’s choices about their own bodies are often the first things negotiated when they step into civic space.
And it invites us to consider what we are still being asked to wipe away in order to be heard.
Ambition. Anger. Softness. Style. Care. Confidence.
None of these should be prerequisites for participation. None of them should disqualify us either.
A final reflection
The image of a woman pausing at the threshold of a polling booth, dabbing colour from her lips before casting her vote, is quietly arresting. It captures the tension of that moment. Inclusion paired with constraint. Progress shadowed by control.
Yet it also captures something enduring.
She was there. She was voting. And whatever she wiped off at the door, she carried her voice with her inside.
That is not a small thing.