Fascism’s face changes, but its sexism remains

Women in Nazi Germany with Adolf Hitler in 1940

Fascists spread sexist ideas about women being lesser than men while venerating them as wives as mothers.

They frequently warn that “our women” are under threat from minority groups. At the same time, fascist ideology assigns women the task of producing the future citizens, soldiers and mothers of the race and nation.

This was reflected in the ideology of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany. Adolf Hitler argued that the “woman’s world” was “her husband, her family, her children and her home” while the “man’s world” was “the state”.

Another leading Nazi, Alfred Rosenberg, held that the state should be based on “male warriors” and not influenced by women.

The Nazis fought to reinforce the centrality of the family with propaganda directed at women that focused on “children, kitchen, church”.

White women were key to a larger, “racially purer” population and the Nazis aggressively encouraged “racially pure” women to give birth to as many children as possible.

This happened through marriage loans, family income benefits for each new child, publicly honoured “child-rich” families and bestowing the awards on women who had four or more babies.

The Nazis banned white women from having abortions or access to birth control. But they allowed—or even forced—women deemed inferior on the basis of race or health to have abortions.

The regime forcibly sterilised nearly 200,000 women to stop what they called the propagation of “lives unworthy of life”.

All this was possible because the Nazis had broken working class organisations, and other spaces that existed outside of the state’s control. This led many to see the home and family as a place of sanctuary.

The Nazi regime couldn’t escape capitalism’s need for labour—and, as men were mobilised into the military, it had to rely more on women workers.

But there was never a single woman in the Nazi regime’s state apparatus and the party was over 90 percent male.

That’s different to some fascist parties today—Marine Le Pen leads the RN in France and Giorgia Meloni is the head of the Brothers of Italy.

This reflects how fascist ideology had to adapt after the defeat of Germany and Italy in the Second World War and respond to changes in society afterwards.

The horrors of the Holocaust, for example, meant that it cloaked its racism around a defence of “Western culture” rather than biological racism.

Fascists and the far right hate the women’s liberation movement and the gains it won after the 1960s. But, in order to mobilise a backlash, they weaponise women’s rights by making it part of their racist propaganda against Muslims and migrants.

Fascists sought to “destigmatise” their parties, and wining women members can be part of that process. 

Le Pen has been most successful at this strategy. She presents herself as any other working single parent “constantly juggling work, shopping, children and this wretched feeling of guilt planted in the heart of every mother”.

She paints migrants “as a threat to the family and a sexual threat to female citizens”. They are a threat to the “construction of gender and the family on the one hand, and of cultural difference and the nation on the other”.

The underlying ideology of a woman’s role centred on the family remains. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban introduced a loan system to encourage higher birth rates, stating, “We want Hungarian children. Migration for us is a surrender.”

And far right Dutch politician Geert Wilders posed the fertility rates of Muslim migrants as a threat to the country.

Although fascism changes faces, there are constant threads running between the relationship of women and fascism. One is sexism towards women—the promotion of subservient roles, opposing abortion and enforcing traditional roles within the family.