What do Cesare Zavattini's film subjects reveal when women take center stage? Young female workers looking for jobs, wives trapped in unhappy marriages, girls seduced and abandoned, clandestine relationships, unspoken violence, denied motherhood, nuns torn by doubt and the desire for independence. Through the study of film subjects, especially those that were never made, this volume explores a territory in which the female figure becomes the privileged place for staging the contradictions of 20th-century Italy. Before production mediation and censorship, the archive papers reveal raw, often uncomfortable stories in which cinema becomes a critical tool for questioning the relationship between body, work, and society.