Italian unification aimed to ‘make Italian women’, as an equally important and complementary goal to that of forging men ‘of character’, worthy of being citizens of the new Italian nation. In the process of nation-building, women were entrusted with an essential role as educators and for this reason were subject to standardizing pressure by the cultural industry. There was a marked growth in the number of series of novels which served to instil moral and linguistic norms. The serial nature of these publications, the stereotypical social roles they depicted, and the paradigmatic nature of their stories — all transmitted in an accessible, Tuscanized Italian — ensured that a uniform model was presented to unmarried and married women. This article provides an analysis of a representative corpus of various genres of novel (e.g. moral novels, protest novels, romances) which reveals how women evolved from being passive and silent readers to authors of female-centred but not feminist novels, thus taking on a socio-political role, despite lacking the right to vote.