Nazi Feminists?

Vol. 2, No. 3. 1987.

Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics by Claudia Koonz.

I first turned to this book, by a professor of German history, out of my interest in Nazism, the Holocaust, and right-wing movements in general; a study of Nazi women, I knew, would also illuminate a great deal about Nazi men. As I expected, Mothers in the Fatherland demonstrates the significant contribution of feminist analysis to our understanding of conservatism and authoritarianism. As I did not expect, however, it also raises troubling and stimulating questions about feminism.

Koonz discusses many aspects of women’s participation in Nazi life but focuses particular attention on Nazi women’s organizations. Over four million women participated in the Frauenwerk, Nazi government-sponsored women’s activities; five million belonged to the women’s division of the Nazi Labor Front. The Nazi purpose in encouraging such organizations was to mobilize women for all aspects of the Reich’s programs: production, social control, “purification of the race,” war. Nevertheless, many of these women joined in the belief that they were thereby working for the advancement of women. … Women leaders often protested the slighting of women’s interests by the Nazi party and government. Indeed, one of Koonz’s central arguments is that women joined these organizations for many of the same reasons they have joined progressive and feminist movements: They were rebelling against the low status and confinement of women’s conventional role and were seeking recognition, an arena for political activism, and power. She does not dismiss these conservative women as dupes of men, inauthentic to a true female character, but emphasizes the degree of genuine conviction among them. …

If femaleness does not protect us from Nazism, what about feminism? Germany had a relatively strong feminist movement—not, perhaps, as strong as in the U.S. but stronger than elsewhere in Europe. Why, then, was there no evidence of feminist or woman-centered resistance to the Nazi takeover? Koonz tells many ugly stories of women’s organizations agreeing without protest to the expulsion of their Jewish members, for example. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the German women’s movement was deeply split between its bourgeois-liberal and its socialist varieties. The former organizations were so driven by their class interests that they could not experience the world through the eyes of their poorer sisters. Putting it another way, their feminism, like all feminisms, had class as well as gender content. …

Feminism is not only complex and varied but also contains contradictory perspectives: There are, for example, feminisms that assert women’s difference from men, and those that assert their essential human similarity. … At its edges feminism shades imperceptibly into non-feminist women’s movements. One may disagree with many, but I would be loath to label any of them inauthentic without a serious attempt to understand their motivation. In some of the most conservative, intolerant rantings, we may nevertheless recognize the same thwarted but unstilled aspirations that drive our own movements. The goal is not reconciliation, but a better explanation of conservative women’s activism. …

The Nazi promise to restore women to their place in the family, and thereby to restore stability to the family and authority to men, was a vital part of its appeal, as it has been in many conservative social movements. As Koonz suggests, the apparent traditionalism of Nazi family policy helped mask the radicalism of its other policies. Moreover, as in the U.S. today, the accommodation of liberal, socialist, and even feminist movements to these mythically nostalgic yearnings weakens their ability to resist conservative and authoritarian “solutions.”

This gender analysis of Nazism—seeing it, in part, as a movement for the restoration of patriarchy—offers insights about anti-Semitism, particularly connections between anti-feminism and anti-Semitism. The rhetoric of conservatism is rich with such connections: Jewishness = modernism, individualism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism—all of them the breeding ground of women’s rights. As Gottfried Feder, a Nazi ideologue, put it, “The insane dogma of equality led as surely to the emancipation of the Jews as to the emancipation of women. The Jew stole...