Gloria Steinem. Indian Journal of Women and Social Change. Volume 1, Issue 1. June 2016.
If you have not been at an anti-abortion rally lately, read justifications of anti-abortion rally lately, read justifications of anti-abortion terrorism or stumbled on the right wing efforts to achieve a constitutional ban against abortion, then the quotations you have just read may seem bizarre and exceptional.
Certainly, the groups that use these and other inflammatory arguments do not trust the major media. (The same Professor Brennan quoted above, for instance, went on to compare the American press with that in Nazi Germany and to condemn it for ‘concealing the facts’.) That is why they have created their own media world of right wing newsletters, pamphlets and books distributed through churches and local organizations or through computerized mailing lists for which they claim 10 million names, plus television shows that reach 14 million homes weekly.
But feminists who have been working especially on the issues of reproductive freedom, and those few reporters who research the ultra-right wing, have been sending back warnings of this increasingly vicious campaign ever since the 1973 Supreme Court decisions on abortion. By 1974, for instance, Marion K. Sanders, a distinguished reporter for Harper’s magazine, reported that ‘the analogy with Hitler’s extermination program … has proved potent propaganda. The implication is that legal abortion is only a first step toward compulsory abortion for “undesirables,” raising the specter of genocide for black people.’
As it turned out, most of the black community rejected this genocide argument based on its source if nothing else: overwhelmingly white, right wing groups that also opposed most integration and civil rights efforts. If some black women were having a disproportionate number of abortions, as the anti-abortion groups often cited as proof of ‘genocide’, it was because they had less access to contraception. In fact, the white birth rate declined proportionately as much as the black birth rate after contraception and abortion became legal, and it remains lower than that for black Americans. More important, a very disproportionate number of the women whose health and lives are saved by safe, legal abortion are black. (For instance, in New York City’s Harlem Hospital alone, in the first year following the 1971 liberalization of New York state’s abortion law, there were about 750 fewer admissions of women suffering from self-induced or illegal abortions.) Finally, legally available or Medicaid-funded abortions have meant that poor women are less vulnerable to racist ‘bargaining’: a safe abortion, in return for agreeing to be sterilized.
Altogether, many of the anti-abortion groups seemed more motivated by concern with the decline of the white birth rate to a low unprecedented in American history—even producing too few ‘adoptable’ white infants to meet the demand—than with the need to protect the reproductive rights of the poor. (In some states, anti-abortion leaders and legislators had advocated withholding welfare from women with three or more children unless those women agreed to be sterilized.) The self-description of ‘abolitionist’ by groups working to abolish legal abortion tries for an emotional connection between the anti-choice movement and the movement against slavery. So does their equating of the Dred Scott and the 1973 Supreme Court decisions, as if denying legal personhood to a slave and to a fetus were the same thing. But right wing literature now focuses less on blacks and more on those who fear change most: the white middle class, the elderly, religious fundamentalists and others who feel that their power and their lifestyles are endangered.
To them, abortion is constantly presented as the symbolic beginning of some horrifying future. It will destroy marriage and morality by removing childbearing as the only goal of sex and as God’s will; it will limit the number of future people like them, thus jeopardizing the future of a white majority; it will endanger old or handicapped people by paving the way for euthanasia; it will masculinize women by allowing them to choose rather than being passive vessels for other people’s lives and finally, it will be the same as legalizing murder.
The nature of the fear may vary, but the metaphor for terror is the same: Hitler’s philosophy and concentration camps—the closest modern memory can come to an earthly version of hell.
‘Is there much difference between the concept of a “Master Race” (quality race)’, Dr and Mrs J. C. Willke ask rhetorically in their handbook on Abortion, ‘and the “quality of life” of our modern pro-abortionist social planners?’ According to this obscurely published, widely distributed paperback (with a photograph of a white teenage girl listening attentively to a white male doctor on the cover), the answer is no. ‘Although never legalized, abortion had become in fact the accepted answer for the mother’s social problem in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany’, the Willkes allege. ‘The above physicians, accustomed to accepting the killing of one group of humans who were socially burdensome (the unborn), were apparently able to move logically to killing other classes of humans.’
By focusing only on the doctor and ignoring the rights and requests of the patients, these authors equate two opposite acts: an abortion performed at the request of a woman who has freely chosen it (and who has a logical right to decide whether or not a pregnancy will use her body and all its life-support systems), and the death of an autonomous person who has requested no such thing (not even, presumably, the right to suicide or a planned and peaceful death). The crucial questions of who decides and where the authority lies are never discussed in these emotional comparisons between abortion and death camps; between a belief in reproductive choice as an individual right against the dictates of government, and a Nazi authoritarianism that opposed the very idea of individual rights.
‘True idealism’, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, ‘is nothing but the subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community… The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species.’
Does this begin to sound familiar? It should, because the second flaw in the libelous equation of pro-choice advocates with Nazis is that Hitler himself, and the Nazi doctrine he created, was unequivocally opposed to any individual right to abortion. In fact, Hitler’s National Socialist Movement preached against and punished contraception, homosexuality, any woman whose main purpose was not motherhood, men who did not prove their manhood by fathering many children and anything else that failed to preserve and expand the ‘Aryan’ people and the German state.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, ‘We must also do away with the conception that the treatment of the body is the affair of every individual.’
Those words were a direct slap at the feminist movement of Germany in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, an influential force for, among other things, divorce, contraception and abortion; in short, for a woman’s right to control her own body.
Not only did German feminists share these goals of their sisters in other countries, but they had won some earlier and greater successes. They achieved the vote in 1918, for instance, as part of the Weimar Constitution that followed World War I. By 1926, moderate feminists had elected 32 women deputies to the Reichstag, the national parliamentary body that politically symbolized this brief burst of democracy, just as it was culturally symbolized by the great German novelists, the Bauhaus and the between-the-wars flowering of literature and art. (In the same era, there were only 15 women members of the British Parliament, and women in the United States Congress had reached a total of three.) Radical German feminists had also begun to organize against the protective legislation that kept women out of many jobs, and to work towards such international goals as alliances with their counterparts in other countries, demilitarization and pacifism. German families had become much smaller, married women had gained the legal right to keep their own salaries and both married and single women were joining the paid-labour force in record numbers.
Precisely because such changes were both obvious in daily lifestyles and profound in their potential effect, they were often resented by those who longed for the old male supremacist, hierarchical, ‘undefeated’ days before the war. As unemployment and inflation grew worse, feminists in particular and women in the work force in general were scapegoated along with Marxists, Jews and any group that challenged the Aryan idea of power based on race and sex. Because of right wing pressure, the Weimar Republic began to ban married women from competing with men for government jobs. Because of that pressure plus alarm at the declining birth rate, access to contraception was also restricted. But the Nazi party promised much more, and much worse.
‘The right of personal freedom’, Hitler explained in Mein Kampf, ‘recedes before the duty to preserve the race.’ The Nazi leaders said they would not deprive women of the vote, but they ridiculed feminists, liberals and socialists who were ‘masculinizing’ women by treating them the same as men. Their own answer to women was gleichwertig aber nicht gleichartig (equivalent but not the same).
A return to a strong family life; women’s primary identity as mothers; tax penalties for remaining single; loans for young married couples and subsidies for childbearing; prohibition of prostitution, homosexuality, contraception and abortion: all these were positions that the Roman Catholic church, the Catholic Center party and the Nazi party could and did agree on. True, they disagreed bitterly on which patriarchy should prevail, the church or the state, but the place of women and the need for the authoritarian family was a shared platform, bond and reason for coalition.
As British historian Tim Mason (1976) wrote, ‘This type of partial or apparent consensus on a basic issue among different sectional interests and elite groups was one of the most important foundations of Nazi rule… Antifeminism was not a minor or opportunistic component of National Socialism, but a central part of it.’
Once Hitler came to power, popularly elected in part by a backlash against feminist successes, he delivered immediately on his promise to restore male supremacy.
Whether moderate or radical, feminist organizations were disbanded. Feminist publications were closed down or censored. At the same time, traditional women’s organizations, such as the Evangelical Women’s Association or the National Association of German Housewives, were strengthened by being welcomed into Frauenfront, the Nazi women’s association. In 1933, feminists were removed by law from teaching and other public posts: the same law that removed all ‘non-Aryans’ from such jobs. All women, feminist or not, were banned from the Reichstag, from judgeships and from other decision-making posts.
To the extent that labour needs allowed, married women were persuaded or forced to stay at home and leave paid jobs to men. Propaganda portrayed the ideal woman as healthy, blond, no makeup, a chaste and energetic worker while single, a devoted wife and a mother as soon as possible. The magazine advertisements for contraception that had been commonplace were outlawed as pornographic (as many right wing groups suggest today). Birth control and abortion clinics were padlocked (as some anti-abortion groups are demanding today).
Under Hitler, choosing abortion became sabotage—a crime punishable by imprisonment and hard labour for the woman and a possible death penalty for the abortionist. It was an act of the individual against the state; an exaggeration in degree, but not kind, of current fundamentalist arguments that women must have children ‘for Jesus and the church’ or, as the Supreme Court ruled in denying poor women the choice of Medicaid-funded abortion, for ‘legitimate government interest’.
As Hitler wrote, ‘It must be considered as reprehensible conduct to refrain from giving healthy children to the nation.’
The key word was, of course, healthy. Since non-Aryans were ‘racially impure’ and thus ‘unhealthy’, Jews, gypsies, Poles and victims of serious handicaps and diseases (Hitler was, for instance, obsessed with syphilis) were all discouraged or prevented from reproducing by methods that varied from segregation of the sexes, threats, labour camps and forced abortion or sterilization, to imprisonment or death in a concentration camp. The choice of method depended largely on whether and for how long the ‘unhealthy’ were needed as workers. It also depended on convenience. A pregnant worker was easier to gas than to coerce into an abortion.
Nonetheless, the horrors of concentration camps appear over and over again in current right wing literature as the analogue of abortion clinics. These extremist arguments may well incite, consciously or not, such violent and increasingly frequent acts as the fire-bombing of abortion clinics, harassment and death threats of patients and doctors, the picketing and actual invasion of clinics, the sabotage of telephones and other private communications and the taunts of ‘baby killer’ for pro-choice elected leaders.
There are anti-abortion activists who also fear such results. Dr Bernard Nathanson, a physician who once performed abortions and who then co-wrote a militantly anti-abortion book, Aborting America, explained, ‘As a Jew, I cannot remain silent at this facile use of the Nazi analogy, though I realize that some anti-abortion Jews use it. If this argument is so compelling, why do Jews remain generally favorable toward abortion?’
Liberal Catholic publications, like most individual Catholics, are alarmed by these false comparisons, especially coming from a Right-to-Life movement that is publicly identified with the Catholic hierarchy. ‘There is something wrong in a movement’, the National Catholic Reporter editorialized, ‘which in spite of its current clever adaptation of abolitionist sloganeering, can value life in just one stage of human development.’
But even such objectors may use words like exaggeration, as if abortion were lesser in degree, but similar in kind.
We still need to draw the clear line of difference based on where the power lies if we are to identify authoritarianism in all its forms. Though Hitler stated the crucial difference between the individual’s right to choose and the state’s right to impose—whether it was abortion or anything else—today’s religious ultra-rightists obscure that difference with rhetoric.
‘If you are pro-life and then support capital punishment or the arms race’, a student was reported as arguing at a Right-to-Life Convention in St Louis, ‘you’re inconsistent.’
‘But’, the report continued, ‘a common rebuke to that argument among Right-to-Life members was that unborn life is “perfect” life, born life “imperfect”.’ In fact, there is a high correlation between those who are anti-abortion and those who favour both capital punishment and military spending. It is okay to kill life that is not ‘innocent’, and it is the state that decides.
The same reservation is repeated in secular form in The Phyllis Schlafly Report, the publication of the Eagle Forum, which advocates only ‘the right to life of all innocent persons from conception to natural death’. That proviso allows the killing of the ‘guilty’ through both capital punishment and the military.
Interestingly, Hitler also supported capital punishment, ‘because of its deterrent effect’.
The only argument among authoritarians is what level and kind of patriarchal power will be supreme—national or international, secular or religious. What all seem to agree on, however, is that the patriarchal family is the basis and training ground for any authoritarianism. It was the basic cell (Keimzelle) of the state for Germany’s National Socialism. In the more mixed philosophy of the Eagle Forum, it is just ‘the basic unit of society’. For more religious groups like the American Life Lobby, it’s a three-step progression of authoritarian units—‘the family, the nation and the very laws of God’.
But at that first level of the family—and the resistance to any self-determination for women within it—authoritarian preachings sound alike. For that matter, even some civil libertarians who cherish individual rights against the state will not guarantee individual and equal rights to women within either state or family. Individuals are men, the family is their basic unit of security in which the state has no right to interfere, and women are nowhere. It is as if a basic right of men is to dominate women and the family.
A current and popular anti-abortion argument includes a description of a family with poor health, many members and great hardship. When the audience agrees that the mother should have the right to an abortion under those circumstances, the lecturer says, ‘Congratulations. You have just killed Bach.’
In fact, the rationale sounds like this, ‘Supposing Bach’s mother, after her fifth or sixth or even twelfth child, had said “That’ll do, enough is enough”—the works of Bach would never have been written.’
That last quote comes from Heinrich Himmler, founder of the Schutzstaffel (SS), head of all concentration camps and originator of the Lebensborn homes where Aryan pregnant women who were unwed, deserted or having children by lovers other than their husbands were encouraged to have the children Himmler feared might otherwise be illegally aborted. They could choose to keep the child and be supported by the state, or give it up for adoption to a good Aryan family of carefully matched social background. What they could not do was to choose not to have the child, and thus seize control of the means of reproduction, their own bodies, in defiance of the patriarchal state.
There are echoes and parallels here between Germany between-the-wars and the United States after the 1970s: a hopeful burst of individual rights, both racial and sexual, followed by an ultra-right wing backlash; economic troubles and unemployment and a loss of international prestige through the loss of a war. Perhaps anti-abortion groups that accuse feminists and the pro-choice majority of being Nazis have done us an inadvertent favour by sending us back to read history.
In Germany before World War I, when Adolf Hitler himself was still a child, nineteenth-century feminism was already accomplishing a great deal. Women in industry, offices and the professions were not oddities anymore, and politicians and the press were gradually becoming more sympathetic to their goals. Unlike feminist movements in most other Western countries, this one was giving organizational support to radical feminist demands for sexual and economic equality, the same rights for ‘illegitimate’ children as for those of married parents, an end to the idea that childbearing was the only purpose of women or of marriage, and a ‘new morality’ that required equal rights and consideration for women and men in or outside marriage.
In addition, most activist women were focused on issues that seemed more immediate than achieving the right to vote. Top-down change always seems remote at best, and in Germany before World War I, parliamentary democracy was a very new and limited possibility. But German feminists had won public support for their unprecedented campaign to decriminalize prostitution (its illegality created the familiar result of brothels protected or run by the police), and they almost succeeded in their careful lobbying effort to delete abortion from the criminal code completely by arguing that ‘the competence of the modern State … is limited by the necessity of preserving the freedom of the individual over his [or her] own body’.
This challenge to the sexual caste system met great resistance from the more agricultural, religious and military parts of German society, as well as reservations from some reformist or religious women who worked to replace radical feminist leaders of national organizations with those who cited motherhood and ‘superior morality’ as reasons that women should be given more (but not equal) rights. The national obsession with a declining birth rate, combined with new Darwinian theories on who should or should not be encouraged to reproduce, encouraged these non-feminist reformers to cite healthy German motherhood as their justification for education and other rights.
Nonetheless, feminists in the early 1900s were changing minds and eroding public hostility by the end of a half century or so of activism. They were, that is, until 1912 when a small group of military officers, conservative politicians, racist geneticists and academics resentful of female competition (all of whom, as the press noted, shared the distinction of being unknown or so out-of-date as to be ‘among the living dead’) formed the League for the Prevention of the Emancipation of Women.
For the first time, there was an organized anti-feminist group turning out anti-equality propaganda. As a tribute to both German conservatism and feminist successes, the ‘Anti-League’ felt compelled to issue an antifeminist manifesto. In a press report of its first congress, an ultra-right wing aristocrat explained, ‘The German Empire was created with blood and iron. That was man’s work! If women helped, [they] stood behind their men in battle and fired them on to kill as many enemies as possible. (Fervent applause.)’
By 1913, the Anti-League had gained support from a white-collar union of male clerks who were convinced that Jews, the lower classes and ‘the invasion of female elements into the profession’ were taking their jobs away. Union leaders condemned feminists as ‘men-women’, ‘degenerate’ and ‘perverse’.
In 1914, the Anti-League imported Lady Griselda Cheape, an English anti-suffrage leader—perhaps the Phyllis Schlafly of her day—to give lectures in Berlin and to tour the country.
Though feminists were divided on whether to take this challenge seriously or ignore it (some thought it ridiculous enough to be inadvertently helpful), its theme of woman-hating struck a deep chord in patriarchal society. Groups such as the Anti-League never had many members (just as the Eagle Forum or Beal Women and other anti-equality groups spawned here in the 1970s did not), but they did publicly scapegoat feminists in particular and active women in general for all that was difficult in modern life. This was something that the military, the church and other traditionalists could agree on, even when they could agree on nothing else.
As Richard Evans (1976), one of the few male scholars to take women’s history seriously, explained in The Feminist Movement in Germany: 1894-1933, these antifeminist arguments
were based on the belief that Germany was subject to growing hostility and danger from forces inside the country and without. … The women’s movement was creating fresh divisions by … destroying the family … by encouraging married women to take jobs, by supporting unmarried mothers, and by urging women in general to be more independent. It was endangering Germany’s military potential by discouraging marriage [plus encouraging family planning and thus lowering the birthrate]. It was outraging nature by campaigning for the systematic equalization of the sexes and by inciting women to do things they were unsuited for. It was international in spirit and unpatriotic.
In other words, the later Nazi post-World War I campaign against feminism as anti-German, subversive—and therefore an obvious product of a Communist-Jewish conspiracy—was not invented by Hitler or by the philosophy of National Socialism. His promise to return women to ‘Children, Cooking, Church’ (Kinder, Küche, Kirche), and thus to restore the male-dominant family as the model of an authoritarian society, was an appeal to religious and other ultra-right wing discontent that had been around since the early twentieth century. True, that discontent was deepened into bitterness by Germany’s humiliation during and after World War I, but the atavistic elements of this obsession with male supremacy and restoration of ‘the Fatherland’ were already there. It just took a national leader willing to pander to such desires, by adding the respectability of a party platform in which they were key emotional planks.
In 1972, a group of American historians became concerned enough about apparent parallels between modern political tensions in the United States and in the Germany of the Weimar Republic, the period that preceded Hitler’s popular election, to hold a special conference on the subject. Given such similar developments as race-and sex-based challenges to traditional power reduced influence in the world, division over Vietnam, pressures of inflation and unemployment at home and an increasing impatience with elected leadership, could Americans go down the same authoritarian path?
Their conclusion was no. After all, the United States had a much longer tradition of democratic government and acceptance of diversity than did the Germans after World War I. Even developments that seemed alarmingly similar in kind were still very different in degree.
In the years since then, America suffered its first humiliating defeat in war. The loss of 57,000 soldiers in faraway Vietnam is hardly comparable to Germany’s homeland devastation and loss of two million in World War I. Furthermore, many fewer Americans perceived our government’s defeat as unjust or due to weakness: years before it happened, polls showed 70 per cent support for United States withdrawal. Nonetheless, justifications of our military presence in Vietnam continue to get big emotional responses from some powerful constituencies. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) gave Ronald Reagan an ovation for describing Vietnam as ‘in truth, a noble cause’ during his 1980 presidential campaign and broke an 80-year tradition of non-endorsement to support him. A spate of revisionist theorists, from Norman Podhoretz to right wing members of Congress, maintains that the only tragedy in Vietnam was our unwillingness to use our full military strength—and our ultimate departure.
In addition, the international pressure of an energy crisis has made us intimately dependent on and vulnerable to ‘foreigners’—and on non-Westerners and non-Christians at that. United States industrial and trade supremacy has also leveled off, inflation and unemployment are populist concerns, the challenge from racial minorities and women of every description continues, confidence in our elected leadership is low and visible right wing leadership now legitimizes an especially militaristic, religious and ‘back-to-basics’ kind of patriotism.
In a 1976 Gallup poll, Americans were asked if they thought the country needed ‘really strong leadership that would try to solve problems directly without worrying about how Congress or the Supreme Court might feel’ and 49 per cent agreed. By 1979, 66 per cent of those questioned in a New York Times-CBS poll said they would vote for ‘someone who would step on some toes and bend some rules to get things done’.
This impatience with our national situation does not mean, as right wing wishful thinkers often insist, that ‘the whole country has moved to the right’. On almost every issue of social justice—from more equitable distribution of income to a new equality based on race and sex, even a willingness to cut back on material living standards if it makes environmental sense to do so—there is majority support. In national polls, these majorities continue to grow. When right wing candidates who do not represent these majority views get elected, it is mainly because the majority of Americans are not voting.
But a tolerance of or desire for strong ‘top-down’ leadership was also a hallmark of the Weimar Republic in which National Socialism grew, and not all such longing came from the traditional right wing. Hitler presented himself as a champion of the lower classes against inherited wealth and power (hence his ‘socialism’), as well as against the ‘international conspiracy’ of powerful Jews. From a working-class family himself, he replaced upper-class superiority with race superiority, thus justifying his own right to rise to the top. Basic texts like ‘The Nazi Primer emphasized hard work and talent as the ways any real German—that is, any Aryan-German—could succeed’ (hence, ‘National Socialism’).
A repressed would-be architecture student shocked by the sinfulness of Munich; a vegetarian who did not smoke or drink and was obsessed by imagined sexual attacks on nice German girls (though only if the attacks came from ‘the black-haired Jewish youth [who] lurks in wait’, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf); an obscure and angry worker who felt exploited by the rich and powerful—this was Adolf Hitler when he entered the city’s beer halls and workingmen’s clubs. His gift for emotional speechmaking unlocked dreams of revenge.
Evil is obvious only in retrospect. It is important to remember that Hitler, champion of every man against the rich and aristocratic, often seemed both selfless and charming. ‘The Führer comes to greet me with outstretched hand’, a woman journalist for Paris-Soir wrote in 1936. ‘I am surprised and astonished by the blue of his eyes, which look brown in photographs, and I prefer the reality—the face that brims with intelligence and energy and lights up when he speaks. At this moment, I comprehend the magical influence… and his power over the masses.’
The message of the interviewer’s own second-class status as a female was sugarcoated and was a parallel to the national socialist description of non-Aryans: ‘No real differences in quality, but rather differences in kind.’
‘I grant women the same right as men, but I don’t think they’re identical,’ Hitler explained jovially. ‘Woman is man’s companion in life. She shouldn’t be burdened with the tasks for which man was created. I don’t envisage any women’s battalions … women are better suited to social work.’
However sugar-coated, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.
If the man’s world is said to be the State … [the woman’s] world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home … Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, a battle waged for the existence of her people… It is not true… that respect depends on the overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes; this respect demands that neither sex should try to do that which belongs to the sphere of the other. [Hitler’s speech to the National Socialist Women’s Organization, September 1934 (Reeves, 1982)].
‘[T]he attack on the family is an attack on civilization itself … Men are by nature mobile and aggressive, whereas women are by nature committed to stability, permanence, and futurity… Welfare, day-care centers, and affirmative action or preferential hiring of women diminish the role of the male as a provider… They thus promote the dissolution of society.’—From a pamphlet entitled ‘Communism, the Family, and the Equal Rights Amendment,’ Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, California, March 1975 (Reeves, 1982).‘Perhaps the three points most stressed in family theory’, US sociologist Clifford Kirkpatrick wrote in 1937 about Nazi Germany, ‘are reproduction, sex differences, and strengthened homelife.’
‘Ninety per cent of our problems with children’, explained a booklet distributed by members of the Pro-Family Caucus at the 1981 White House Conference on Families, ‘are probably the result of a mother who has 1) failed to learn how to really love her man and submit to him, 2) tried to escape staying at home, or 3) hindered her husband in the discipline of the children.’
‘A Child’s Declaration of Rights’, published by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, includes the right: ‘To be taught from textbooks that honor the traditional family as a basic unit of society, women’s role as wife and mother, and man’s role as provider and protector.’
No funds [will be] authorized… under federal law [for] purchase or preparation of any educational materials or studies relating to the preparation of educational materials, if such materials would tend to denigrate, diminish, or deny the role differences between the sexes. (The Family Protection Act, an omnibus federal bill introduced in 1979 by Senator Paul Laxalt (Reeves, 1982) (It would also forbid federal laws against child abuse and federal funding of battered women’s shelters, abortion rights, school desegregation, gay rights, etc.)
If we grow callous in our earliest, most intimate world to a power difference among our own family members, how much easier is it to accept all other hierarchies? If one sex is born to greater power, then why not one race? If women were allowed to marry and have children with men of their own choosing, how could race and class be kept ‘pure’? If a man is not allowed to dictate to a wife and children beneath him, how is he to tolerate the dictation he must accept from above?
‘The slogan “Emancipation of Women” was invented by Jewish intellectuals… ‘Our National Socialist women’s movement has in reality but one single point’, Hitler told women in his 1934 speech, ‘and that point is the child.’ In Mein Kampf, a copy of which was presented to every newly married Aryan couple in Germany, he wrote, ‘Just as [the Jew] himself systematically ruins women and girls … it was and is Jews who bring Negroes into the Rhineland … ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization … rising [himself] to be its master.’
‘Russia has an ERA and their birth rate has fallen below population zero’, reported The Thunderbolt, a publication of the avowedly white-supremacist National States Rights party. ‘The time is now to act to protect the family and motherhood itself… Laws requiring men and women to be separated in prison would be invalidated [by the ERA]. A negro judge has already used these equality laws in Chattanooga to lock a White woman in the same cell with a black man. She was then raped.’
Father Paul Marx, director of the Human Life Center, an anti-abortion ‘think tank’ in Minnesota, has traveled to more than 30 countries as part of his campaign against abortion and contraception. As characterized and quoted by the Minneapolis Star, he fears that ‘the white Western world is committing suicide through abortion and contraception’, and explains, ‘I guess we have 250,000 Vietnamese here already, and they are going to have large families—the Orientals always do. There are Koreans, and Filipinos… God knows how many Mexicans come across the border every night… And if we ever have to fight the Russians, I wonder if these people will be willing to stake their lives.’
Extreme ideas? Maybe. But the belief that men must control women—if men are to maintain race and class divisions, control the supply of workers and soldiers for the state, and keep ownership of their own children—is the root injustice from which all these flowers of evil grow.
In pleading for women’s freedom 70 years ago, one German feminist said, ‘Woman has often been reduced—callously, if unconsciously—to the level of a childbearing machine, her children regarded as the property of the State while still in the womb.’ Another said angrily, ‘If we women do not take a stand for our own responsibility for ourselves here, in the most female of all tasks in life, that of “giving life”, if we do not take a stand against our being regarded merely as the involuntary producers of cannon fodder, then in my opinion, we do not deserve to be regarded as anything else!’
Many women in Hitler’s Germany did take a public stand against his sexual caste system, as well as against the anti-Semitism that, as a punishment from which many men also suffered, was better understood as an injustice. ‘National Socialism has grown big in its fight against Jews and women’, said a leader of Germany’s largest feminist organization. ‘Today, I am for struggle.’
Many demonstrated in the streets against Hitler’s closing of family planning clinics, an act that one German feminist, now a resident of this country, remembers as ‘the first thing Hitler did’. The individual right to abortion was so suppressed that even women who miscarried had to prove they had not tried to abort or else risk criminal prosecution.
Other activist women tried unsuccessfully to save their organizations by becoming less ‘political’, by fighting the Nazi diatribe against them with dry ‘factual corrections’ or even by using Hitler’s own racist arguments to get Aryan women into positions of influence where they might reform from within.
Jewish women in Germany were not only purged from any important jobs, but often abandoned by their own non-Jewish husbands or friends. First discouraged from marriage or having children, then forced out of both, they were eventually used as forced labour or sent to concentration camps. (Ravensbrüch, the one camp exclusively for women, was also the site of most Nazi ‘medical experiments’. Though Jewish men underwent similar atrocities elsewhere, Aryan male doctors seemed better able to disassociate from bodies so different and despised.)
Meanwhile, Hitler assumed that women were or should be attracted to his military image. He stayed single partly to inspire the devotion and romantic fantasies of women followers. (Privately, he was reported as saying that he would not have children because no son of his, being partly the product of a woman, could be as great as he.) Though some national socialists claimed ‘it was the women’s vote that brought Hitler to triumph,’ that was no more true than the current argument that women voters defeated the ERA. Hindenberg, president of Germany from 1925 to 1934, got more women votes in 1932 than did Hitler, both in absolute numbers and percentage.
But some women did vote for National Socialism. Most were the young who knew little or nothing of past feminist struggles, and were excited by the romance of Hitler’s heroine-goddess images of German womanhood. Others wanted to stay at home as housewives instead of being poorly paid workers and housewives. Still others were attracted by Hitler’s promise of a bridegroom for every young woman, a seductive if unlikely campaign promise in a country where World War I had decimated the male population.
Ironically, women’s traditional workload and their skepticism about getting help from any men, including national socialists, saved many from Nazi involvement. ‘The mass of German women did not want to be organized’, wrote historian Jill Stephenson, ‘and their passive resistance to attempts to involve the housebound housewife, above all in the “women’s work of the nation,” ensured that the Nazi women’s organization remained a minority concern.’
There can be no doubt that feminists would have been more effective in opposing Hitler if they had possessed local centres as did the churches, or work communities as did the unions, or an international network as did both.
As it was, their major organizations were dependent on public meeting places and communications, so they were easily outlawed or taken over. And their diverse, multi-issue approach was no match for the simple, driving emotionalism of the opposition. ‘Whereas the cause of women’s emancipation’, explained historian Tim Mason (1976):
[was] promoted by a very wide range of small and normally uncoordinated groups with different partial goals and political outlooks, the cause of the restoration of men’s preeminence could be made to appear a relatively simple single issue and could be preempted by a single political movement of incomparably greater power.
The result was tragic for men as well as women, not only in Germany, but in every area decimated by German expansion. Feminists had been virtually alone in challenging the patriarchal family as the basic unit of an authoritarian society, and in trying to replace its primacy with the primacy of the individual rights, and thus the possibility of democratic families. Many of the powerful religious groups supported Hitler’s view of the family and of women—and supported the early growth of National Socialism because of it. True, they disagreed with state supremacy over the church—a development that came after Kinder, Küche, Kirche—but by then it was too late. Even liberal, radical and union groups that had supported women’s rights in the marketplace and the voting booth had abandoned that support at the family door.
According to our own current right wing, anti-equality backlash, the major goal is to protect and restore a family clearly defined by them as male-led and hierarchical. Thus, they condemn as ‘anti-family’ any direct guarantee of rights to women or to children. Thus, the ERA is anti-family. So are laws against child abuse and funding for battered women’s shelters. So is an individual right to sexual expression outside the family, whether homosexual or heterosexual. So are abortion, contraception and any other means of separating sexual expression from childbirth.
This authoritarian thrust is further reflected in right wing tax policy, media censorship and interference in public schools to establish family ownership of children and control of what they may read or study. The nightmare of turning abortion into a crime against the state, punishable as murder, is also promised by the right wing-sponsored Human Life Amendment that would confer legal personhood on a fertilized egg. In all ways, the family is to be the basic unit. Women are to be subordinate within it.
Many Americans are surprised that our right wing groups focus on issues of the family and reproduction. Some of our most able and democratic political leaders are unwilling or unable to deal with issues that seem to them unfamiliar, embarrassing or small.
But many Europeans are surprised that we are surprised. They say: Where have you been? Where do you think authoritarianism starts? Have not you ever seen fascism?
They have been through this before.
There are other disquieting parallels between past and present. The current spate of right wing efforts to censor school libraries starts with books that are ‘anti-family’, often those written by family-planning experts, feminist authors and black authors. Is this a less dramatic version of Nazi-style book burnings that also started with anti-family, ‘anti-German’ books by family planners, Jews and feminists? Could the effort of some current politicians to appease the right wing by giving in on ‘social issues’ be as disastrous a mistake as the concessions made by the Wiemar Republic on women in the work force and other domestic concerns?
Certainly, there are enormous, and let us hope lifesaving, differences in degree as well as in content. Our nationalism does not use anti-Semitism as an internal and external danger. Yet our own obsession with anything seen as ‘anti-American’ sometimes borders on paranoia, and is used to condemn internal critics as ‘bad Americans’. Hostility rarely forces women and minorities out of responsible jobs. Yet there is an increase in subtle scapegoating of such groups for everything from divorce and juvenile delinquency to crime and unemployment. A white male who does well economically is a public-spirited creator of jobs, but women and men of colour who do well may be seen as a selfish part of the ‘Me Generation’.
Furthermore, feminists still seem to be the only cohesive force taking on the right wing about family issues and individual rights—from the bottom up. Anti-equality forces may see this more clearly than our liberal allies do. ‘Orthodox feminism is an especially militant manifestation’, warned the Human Life Review, an anti-abortion quarterly, ‘of a larger, increasingly prevalent social philosophy which holds that the “needs” of the individual are self-validating and that no person or institution may restrict those needs.’ This is heresy for those who worship family, church and state.
As in Germany, there is also a disquieting sameness between those who wish to enforce the traditional family, and those who want increased military spending and a more confrontational attitude towards the world. Most disquieting of all, this sameness is found in high places. A political cartoon of Ronald Reagan showed him in a Western hat, saying, ‘A gun in every holster, a pregnant woman in every home. Make America a man again.’ It was a brilliant summing up of the link between anti-feminism and militarism.
It all sounds a little too familiar. But at least we know that feminism has a history. It is the keystone of any lasting democracy.