Right-Wing Women in Women's History: A Global Perspective: Introduction

Summer and autumn 2003 represented something of the end of an era in the history of inter-war fascism, and especially in that of the history of women's encounters with fascist leaders. In August, Diana Mosley, wife of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and Hitler's confidant and defender, died in Paris at age 93. The next month, Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi filmmaker, propagandist, and prototypical Aryan woman, died at age 101. The passings of Mosley and Riefenstahl, both of which received ample coverage in the press, signify the conclusion of a live discourse and mark the end of their participation in the writing of their own histories. Their deaths should be seen as an invitation to historians to reassess their personal narratives (indeed, at least one of Diana Mosley's biographers agreed to delay publication of her book until the subject's death), to view these women as historical subjects and agents, and, more generally, to regard the events of the first half of the twentieth century as no longer contemporary but as decisively past.

Especially within the last two decades, the autonomous field of women and fascism has significantly expanded, raising a range of empirical, methodological, and theoretical questions, many of them at the heart of vexing debates in modern historiography. Assuming that women are culturally constructed and defined by their biology, their ability to mother, and their political instinct towards "social motherhood," historians of fascist women are confronted with the thorny question of how women can support political movements that negate all humanitarian instinct, relegate them once again to the domestic sphere, and place a premium on their role of breeding sons for future wars. The examination of the relationship between women and reactionary, rear-guard, and racist politics has been a particular challenge to the women's historians working within a feminist framework; fresh paradigms from the related paradigm of gender history have not necessarily made the analytical task any easier or any less morally, spiritually, and politically daunting.

Taken together, the deaths of these two women who were among the last living subjects able to give testimony and to assert their own roles in the murky world of fascist elites, and the proliferation of the scholarship on women and fascism—with the welcome expansion of the research beyond European case studies—would suggest that it is an ideal time for feminist scholars of Europe, America, South America, and beyond to take stock, compare notes, and consider the future direction of their research.

The objectives of this special section are not to retell the narrative of events, or to superimpose a female dimension onto one of the most male-dominated, if not misogynist, political movements of the twentieth century. Those objectives have already been met in a significant library of national case studies, comparative works, and interdisciplinary studies of the far Right, and women's historians continue to mine the rich seam of evidence held in archives, private collections, and revealed through personal testimonies. The approach here is more reflective, self-reflexive, and in the form of a dialogue. The contributors to this special section—each representing a specified national or geographical parameter—present an overview of their field as it now stands, offer insight into the intellectual and even the emotional costs of working on (if not working directly with) the "evil" women of history, and make suggestions to future directions for research and theoretical speculation.

We have all considered three sets of questions, and engaged with these within our own geographical, thematic, and chronological specializations. First, we have sought to identify the overarching historiographical and theoretical issues that apply, in different degrees, to all of our areas. Second, we are concerned with the relationship between the far-Right and feminism, and whether the politics and language of feminism have been or are ever compatible with female politicization on the far Right. Third, we are interested to contest the uncertain lines of demarcation that sequester conservatism from fascism, and see how these shifting and unstable ideological taxonomies modify feminist approaches, and how they inform our final...