Topic 3: The Rise and Rule of Single-Party States
The “Woman Question” In Authoritarian Regimes by Claudia Koonz
Major Theme: Domestic Policies and Impact
Structure and Organization
of Government and
Administration
ITALY
- Mussolini took charge of the government and filled the
parliament with black shirts: Partitio Nazionale Fascista.
- Mussolini had to unite Italy despite the presence of the Vatican
and lack of national cohesion.
- “Everything is the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
against the state!”- Mussolini
SPAIN
- Had a weak parliament, a powerful church, and a vacillating
monarch.
- Falangists called for a separation of church and state, the
end of large landed estates, territorial expansion, and recruitment
of women into public spheres.
- Spain became a republic when King Alfonso abdicated (1930)
- Major civil war between republicans and conservatives.
- The conservatives won the war, when the republicans
surrendered.
GERMANY
- Entered the 1920s as a modern, industrialized, and democratic
nation.
- Weimar Constitution was ratified in 1919.
- Hitler assumed dictatorial powers four months after becoming
chancellor
- The police and Nazi Storm Troopers terrorized political
opponents and forced Nazi regime.
FRANCE
-France surrendered to Nazi forces on June 22, 1940.
- The Germans ran the north and Marshall Petain ruled over
southern France.
Political Policies
- When Spain became a republic in 1930, Spanish Republicans
initiated a legal revolution.
- Women’s suffrage, maternity benefits, no fault divorce,
civil marriage, and rights to children born of wedlock.
Economic Policies
Role of Education
Role of the Arts
Role of Media, Propaganda
- State-sponsored propaganda in dictatorial regimes urged
women to support militarism, political repression, racism,
nationalism, natalism (high birthrates), and autarky (economic
independence.)
- Authoritarian governments used media to create a wartime
atmosphere despite the lack of foreign dangers by warning
against domestic enemies.
- Post civil war, Spain portrayed feminists in terrible and
sometimes pornographic ways.
- Under Hitler, Germany majorly censored the media.
- French magazines glorified maternal roles.
Status of Women
- Previously misogynistic political leaders realized they needed
women to work for the war movement and decided that women
needed to work for their nation and also “revitalize feminine
roles.”
- Example: In 1909, Pope Pious urged women to enter
public life and defend Catholic values
- Pope Benedict followed suit and in 1919 defended
women’s enfranchisement because he believed that Catholic
women would vote against women’s rights.
- Women were marginalized so heavily that no women were
involved in policymaking in dictatorships.
- Many women leaders rallied behind nationalistic dictators who
said that women were “mothers of the nation” and “guardians of
ethnic purity.”
- Women in dictatorships found some degree of freedom through
participating in sports, youth group outings, wearing sporty
fashions, and escaping from family control in state-sponsored
peer activities.
- Maternal Role Paradox: Women were encouraged by dictators
to have many children yet were also called to give a lot of their
time working. There was an increase in family sizes yet a
decrease in family centrality.
ITALY
- Women were given the role of having many children and were
given no political say at all. They were to obey the men.
- Women were involved in many state-sponsored programs
ranging from aiding birthrates to support of the Fascist state.
- Individuals were punished for getting abortions or using
contraceptives yet the Italian population didn’t grow.
- Mussolini was heavily against wage earning women yet the
vast majority of women worked.
- To circumvent legal structures, employers hired women in part
time, temp, and clandestine jobs.
SPAIN
- Participated in mostly agricultural jobs.
- Women worked in poor job conditions with no legislature to
protect their safety within jobs.
- No high natalistic push at first.
- During the civil war, many feminist groups were established to
support their war causes
- When the republicans surrendered in the civil war, women
were told that their “only proper place is in the nursery.”
- After the civil war, women were pushed into maternal roles
quite aggressively.
GERMANY
- The Weimar Constitution guaranteed women’s suffrage and
equality between sexes.
- Hitler took over and saw women as vastly inferior.
-Women were to be the “breeders of the superior race.”
- Women groups were destroyed or brought under the Nazi
regime.
- Scholtz-Klink had considerable administrative authority
over the state-integrated women’s groups.
- Abortions were made illegal.
- In 1936, women were pushed into jobs as labor scarcities
mandated the hiring of women in factories, offices, and the civil
service.
- Done to prepare for major war.
FRANCE
-Female illiteracy had basically disappeared by 1900 and many
women were beginning to enroll in high education and obtain
gov’t jobs.
- French women working with the state had access to
technologically advanced communication networks.
- Equal education existed but women were pushed into
“feminine” areas and were taught home economics and racial
science.
- Financial rewards were given for having large families.
Treatment of Religious
Groups and Minorities
- Ethnic persecution was common in authoritarian regimes and
“ethnic purity” was a large concern.
- Except in Spain. Spain was all into diversity.
- Jews were heavily abused in Germany and France. Mussolini
eventually persecuted Jews of Italy after meeting Hitler.
- In June 1942, a law required that all Jews display a yellow star
on their clothing and full-scale deportations began. (France and
Germany)
Social Policies
- In 1919, the liberal coalition passed the Sacchi Laws, keeping
husbands from taking his wives earnings and kept women from
being excluded from civil service jobs. (Italy)
- In Germany, after Jan. 1934, the genetic health laws required
teachers and social workers to report the students and clients
they suspected of “genetic illness” to be screened by eugenics
specialists.
- By the late 1930s, 300,000 people had been sterilized in
Germany and about 120,000 were killed for being physically
“useless.”
- Eugenics and Euthanasia
-In France, the Family Code passen in 1939 strengthened the
patriarchal influence in households.
Religious Policies
Historiography
- Women who willingly served dictatorships did so because it
seemed more reasonable to support collective liberation instead
of trying to find a way into “male spheres.”
- Even though women across Europe had been fighting for
suffrage for decades, when WWI broke out they ceased to fight
for women’s rights and instead worked for nationalist victory.
- Women labor activists were pleased by the vast expansion of
employment opportunities created for women due to the war.
- Younger women regarded the first-wave feminists as “selfish”
and thought that liberalism was no longer useful.
- Many feminists believed that democracy had little chance of
surviving after seeing so many authoritarian regimes replace
democracy.
- Women accepted “second sex” status in order to join the
nationalist revivals found in authoritarian regimes.
- Women entered the national community of dictatorships when
they participated in wartime mobilization, expanding consumer
culture, and new media networks.
-In Italy, contradictions were running rampant as Mussolini was
both encouraging and discouraging women workers.
- “Fascism provided a model for integrating women by
recognition but not rights.”- In regards to Italy.
- In Spain, the large divide between those who believed
Catalonia should be the mecca of Spain and those who were
supportive of Madrid-based nationalism defined separation of
feminists. However, feminists across Spain did come together to
demand improved female education and expanded roles in
“feminine” public spheres.
- The Spanish Republic had difficulties because it had no
enforcement power, they weren’t moving fast enough for
radicals, and the threat of reform terrified conservatives.
- In Germany, the progressive state of the Weimar Republic and
all the rights it gave to women caused a backlash from
conservatives who attacked secular values and social liberation.
- Although Nazi propaganda celebrated motherhood, legal
chargers made women not want to get married.
- Vague laws regarding divorces gave judges broad
discretionary power and so the husbands’ wishes were often
followed.
- In 1943, Nazi planners faced a conundrum because they needed
more women in the work force. Higher wages was proposed but
Hitler thought that might make men feel bad.
- Solution was to draft nearly 8 million forced laborers from
26 Nazi-occupied nations.
- The oppression of Jews was not all the men’s fault in Germany.
Women all helped organize lists of Jews, turn in neighbors, and
turn their backs on their fellow man.
- Despite a large amount of natalism and familialism, Vichy
brought relatively minor institutional changes to the women of
France.
- In France, the Nazi occupation in 1942 shifted focus from
childbearing toward war production.
- France under Vichy rule “illustrated a terrifying potential for
even a democracy with a strong tradition of civil rights to
collaborate with a murderous racial state.”