Interacting with the lively debate on petitions and the various forms of appeal to the authorities written in different spatial and temporal contexts, the article deals with the analysis of a group of “discrimination” requests addressed to the General Directorate for Demography and Race by a sample of female Italian citizens qualified as belonging to the “Jewish race” in Autumn 1938. Women’s petitions represented a minority within the broader corpus of requests for derogation from the Anti-Semitic Fascist legislation. They are nonetheless a source of great importance, both to illuminate the relevance of the “discrimination” procedures from the persecuted point of view, and to shed fresh light on the “dilemma of women’s citizenship” debate in unified Italy.