Women at Olivetti

Women at work in the Olivetti factory

In the historic photo that around 1920 shows Camillo Olivetti in the courtyard of the factory with the company’s workers, almost 40% of the employees are women. Their presence is concentrated above all in the offices and in service activities, while the factory remains a rare exception: mechanical processing and product assembly are still reserved almost exclusively for men.

The situation began to change as early as the 1930s, with the reorganization of work promoted by Adriano Olivetti, who introduced some of the principles of the scientific division of labor into the factory. With the fragmentation of the production process it becomes easier to identify tasks that are well suited to the manual ability of women; a trend that will later strengthen further with the development of electronics and automation.

Women at work in the Olivetti factory

Towards the end of the 1950s, to produce the memories of the Elea 9000, the first Italian electronic calculator, Olivetti made extensive use of female labor: the patient manual skill of women proved to be invaluable for their creation.

Economic and technological development and the evolution of the organization of production processes therefore contribute to increasing the demand for female labor in factories. At the same time, the social and cultural maturation of the country leads to the idea that the right to work must be recognized as an indisputable right of all citizens, men and women.

With the 1960s, a slow but unstoppable process of emancipation of the female condition also began in the workplace.

Women in the factory

Perhaps in order to demonstrate unequivocally that the Olivetti factories were also in the vanguard in terms of the protection and non-discrimination of women’s work, the company management commissioned the photographer Ugo Mulas to shoot a report on women in the factory.

In June 1962, Mulas travelled to the Olivetti factories in Ivrea, where he took numerous photos both in the offices and on the assembly lines. Some of these pictures would later be published in issue 80 (March 1964) of “Notizie Olivetti” accompanying a short article by Domenico Tarantini entitled “La donna nella fabbrica”.

Tarantini recalls that: “3,300 women work in the Olivetti factories in Ivrea. They are in the offices, from those of the presidency to the secretariats of the departments; but they are also numerous in the workshops, in certain press departments, at transfers, at assembly, at production controls’.

Olivetti for women

In Olivetti advertising, the woman does not appear as an instrumental support – almost an appendage of the advertised product – but is the protagonist or the qualifying interpreter of the message Olivetti wants to convey.

Some authors present the woman in her traditional office work roles; for others, the woman studies, travels, has her own independent work. Thus, not only secretaries or typists promoting office products, but also images of women with their own autonomous professional and social role.

Marisa Bellisario, woman and top manager

Marisa Bellisario (1935-1988) joined Olivetti’s Electronics Sales Division in 1960 to take care of programming and technical-application support for the Elea 9003 and remained in the Olivetti Group in positions of responsibility until 1980.

In her autobiography ‘Woman and Top Manager’ (ed. Rizzoli, 1987), recounting her experience working for Olivetti General Electric, she recalls how her presence in the mid-1960s was an exception in an almost entirely male world: ‘Gentlemen and Marisa is the beginning of all the international meetings I attend, the only woman in the midst of so many men’.