Adrienne Matei writes:

In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.

To her audience – approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women’s magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz – Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called “the cradle and the ladle”, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.

“There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives” in Nazi Germany, says Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University. “It would be the equivalent of social media today.” Frauen Warte contained nothing too political – just broadly appealing lifestyle content about keeping a clean and well-provisioned home while raising a healthy family, with occasional debates about how much makeup one should wear. A barefaced look was preferred – much like the “clean girl” trend of today. “In a censored society everyone needs debates about harmless topics,” says Koonz.

Koonz is well-acquainted with the ways political strongmen rely on women’s labor at the family level to implement state ideology. Her 1986 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, describes how the ordinary women of Nazi Germany “operated at its very center”, incubating ideals of white supremacy, female subordination and sacrifice at home.

Thinkers including 20th-century German theorist Theodor Adorno and contemporary American political philosopher George Lakoff theorized about the paternalist personality of authoritarians, with Lakoff noting that in modern history, far-right authoritarian regimes institutionalize male authority through a family-like hierarchy: women are subservient to men and both obey the nation’s metaphorical “strict father”. In the home, paternal authority and maternal subservience prime children for a wider social order, teaching them to see women’s submission as stability, and to accept fear and conformity as the price of belonging.

“There’s been a reluctance to name this moment as fascism,” says cultural historian Tiffany Florvil, yet extreme authoritarian dynamics can be clearly seen in the American right today. (Indeed, Trump supporters can’t seem to stop calling him “Daddy”.)

The government’s unprecedented deportations of immigrants; use of Ice to unjustly detain people in detention centers fraught with human rights abuses; intimidation of judges, law firms and universities; and assaults on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy are prompting historians who specialize in fascism to leave the country.

And significant backlash against gender equality is under way. The idea that women’s bodies are state resources for sustaining population appears to be re-emerging; the Trump administration is encouraging traditional roles by rolling back workplace equity, restricting reproductive rights and policing gender identity.

A woman’s “most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation”, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, told an audience of women in 1933. Racially selective population growth was core to the agenda of such nationalist, fascist regimes as Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. The only path to honor for most women was birthing children, formalized through financial rewards and medals for prolific mothers. [Continue reading…]