Sexism is on the rise.1 “Misogyny is 2025’s Biggest Trend”, claimed Glamour.2 “Misogyny has reached ‘epidemic scale’ among young people, education chiefs say”, the Independent reported.3 Powerful currents within the global far right glorify and promote violence against women. Others are reviving the idea that domesticity and motherhood are women’s destiny, as determined by both god and nature. Women are reduced to nothing more than symbols of men’s virility and power.4 The far right brings in its wake overt sexism, attacks on women’s rights and violence against women.
Much recent scholarship focuses on the role of the internet in generating this intensifying sexism. This year, the United Nations and Amnesty International have both produced reports on online misogyny and the rise of the “manosphere”.5 This focus is reinforced in books by, for instance, Laura Bates and Lois Shearing.6
This article takes a different approach. Although acknowledging that the internet can amplify and intensify sexism, this online sexism reflects changes in the wider world, changes that result from the rise of the global far right.
Many commentators struggle to explain why women are leading, voting for and joining far-right parties, which claim that men have become the victims and women the privileged oppressors. Women leading major European far-right parties include Siv Jensen, Pia Kjaersgaard, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Rikka Purra, Beata Szydlo and Alice Weidel.7 Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN) won 30 percent of the female vote in the June 2024 elections, compared to 32 percent of the male vote. Some 52 percent of white women voted for Trump, compared to 58 percent of white men. Support for Reform UK among women aged between 18 and 26 rose from 12 percent to 21 percent in the first six months of this year.8 Sociologist Erwan Lecoeur has described the end of the “radical right gender gap”, according to which women tended to vote for left of centre parties.9 Women are also visible on far-right street mobilisations. In September 2025, they were a visible presence on the fascist Tommy Robinson’s march through London. Lorraine Cavanagh is the organiser of the Pink Patrol, which tries to mobilise women to protest at the Britannia Hotel, in the Isle of Dogs. Explaining this presence of far-right women by pointing to the surge in online grooming is unconvincing because it has happened before, long before the internet.
In the 1920s and 1930s, millions of women gave their support to fascist regimes in Europe. The far right has updated its messaging, but it regurgitates the same gender politics as Benito Musslini, Hitler and Oswald Mosley. This article draws out the continuities between the fascism of the past and the far right of today, in order to more effectively map out strategies for resisting it.
The acceptable face of fascism?
Far-right culture warriors bond over their shared contempt for women—but the women they despise are also useful to them. The presence of women creates a veneer of respectability and legitimacy. Women can be more powerful recruiters of other women.10 It is hard to claim beer-swilling racist grandads are anything other than bigoted thugs, but women with children in buggies can pose as “concerned local citizens”. This pose is now central to the evolving far-right project.
Journalist Amelia Gentleman explains that the “[f]ocus on the pressures posed by immigration on jobs, housing and schools have increasingly been replaced in the prevailing anti-immigration rhetoric by the characterisation of migrants as sexual predators”.11 It may be more accurate to say the far right is pursuing ideas of a sexual threat as a conduit through which multiple grievances can be expressed. Creating the idea of an immediate sexual threat to women and girls legitimises more violent forms of direct action. The idea of protecting women from sexual abuse by Muslim men draws on the mainstreaming of Islamophobia and older stereotypes about oversexed black men.
Nigel Farage told the 2025 Reform UK conference that the issue of refugee hotels has moved on from questions of fairness, of asylum seekers being given too much “nice stuff”, to being “very much about the safety of women and children”.12 Farage’s poison is amplified by the Tories. According to Chris Phelp, asylum hotels have created “a public safety crisis, especially for women and girls”.13 Robert Jenrick says he is scared for his daughters because of the existence of refugee hotels and migrants’ medieval attitudes to women.14 Keir Starmer fanned the flames by telling a radio interviewer that he would not want to live next to an asylum hotel.15
Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, explains that the rhetoric of protecting women and girls has three aspects. Firstly, it legitimises violence by seemingly protecting the vulnerable from rape and abuse. Secondly, it feeds the stereotyping of immigrants as violent criminals and rapists. Finally, it identifies a clear and present danger that mobilises people to take direct action.16 So, posing as protectors of women and girls benefits the far right, and women can buy into the idea that allying themselves with the far right will offer a defence against violence, invisibility and marginalisation.
Are women complicit?
Historians of fascism have tended to see women as marginal, playing no prominent roles in the state or party hierarchies. Writing in this journal, Judith Orr argues that the National-Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, (National Socialist German Workers Party, NSDAP), did seekto win the support of women, but on the basis that their position was always to be completely subservient to men. The Nazis confined women to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church).17 Historian Donny Gluckstein writes, “One striking feature was the very low proportion of women who joined the NSDAP. Between 1925 and 1932 they formed just 7.8 percent of all joiners, falling to just 5.1 percent by 1933”.18 However, these figures underestimate the role women played in the fascist movements of Italy, Germany and Britain. Nazi women may have been subservient to men, but they helped to build fascist organisations and were responsible for constructing important elements of the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.
Koontz explores how women used Nazi idealisation of the family and motherhood to create a public role for themselves.19 Italian historian Victoria De Grazia demonstrates how Italian women also used the idea of separate spheres for men and women to justify women’s public activism and their control over social policy.20 The British fascists also attracted women with a combination of the veneration of motherhood and promises of increased gender equality and a role in public life.
The gender politics of fascism were always deeply contradictory. They offered some women new opportunities for social activism—opportunities built on the extraordinary levels of repression and violence dealt out to women who did not comply with fascist ideas: Jewish, disabled, Roma, Communist women. Assertions of male power and female subordination coexisted uneasily with the idea that some women could make an important contribution to constructing the fascist fatherland.21
The contemporary far right gains support when their extremist ideas about race and gender are amplified by mainstream politicians.22 The fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s also drew strength from the racism and sexism that infected mainstream politics, as well as from disillusionment with mainstream politics. The First World War was a political catalyst for women motivated by nationalism and patriotism.23 They wanted a public role, they wanted to feel part of something important, but, after the war, the mainstream parties tended to patronise and ignore them. Women were expected to quietly leave the factories and engineering plants and trot off back to their homes. The far right fed on their frustration. Historian Claudia Koonz argues: “The Nazi party made women feel valued in a way that more liberal parties didn’t.”
There were antecedents for right-wing female organising in Edwardian society.24 The deeply reactionary, pro-Empire Primrose League allowed women to join on the same basis as men and to create their own organisations. The League claimed some 2 million members in the 1890s. This may have been an exaggeration, but it was a huge organisation.25 The Women’s Loyalty League was set up in 1922 to fight communism, and the Victory Corps was set up in 1923 to promote patriotism. In 1928, “general” Flora Drummond, who had once been Emeline Pankhurst’s bodyguard, set up the Women’s Guild of Empire to assist in strike breaking. Another ex-suffragette, Mary Allen, formed the Women’s Auxiliary Service, which allowed women to cosplay police officers and hunt out immorality.26
The Italian fascists and the NSDAP were also able to recruit women from right-wing, nationalist parties and women’s organisations, women who were schooled in racist scapegoating and antisemitism. The Völkisch [Folkist] movement was an extra-parliamentary movement that aimed to protect Germans from racial, foreign infiltration.27 The Queen Luise League, a nationalist women’s organisation that banned Jews from joining, claimed some 200,000 members.28 These organisations provided fertile recruiting grounds for fascism.
Female fascism in practice
In 1922, Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party, PNF) became the first fascist organisation to take power. The PNF was a men’s party. Very few women were present when the black shirt movement was founded in March 1919, and few participated in its violent activities.29 However, in March 1920, the Fasci Femminili (Women’s Fascist Groups) were established. Most female Fascisti came from lower middle-class backgrounds, with a few from a higher social class; some had been active feminists.30 Mussolini simultaneously encouraged women to participate in female fascist groups and asserted that women’s most important role was to have babies for the fatherland.
The party’s new programme promised women the vote, but only wealthy women. At the annual congress in June 1924, fascist women’s groups demanded autonomy. In 1925, however, the party secretary, Roberto Farinacci, closed down independent women’s groups and publications. The following year, the next party secretary, Augusto Turati, refused to allow fascist women to wear black shirts, arguing, “The black shirt is the virile symbol of our revolution and has nothing to do with the welfare tasks that fascism has given women”.31
In 1925, the regime clamped down on civil liberties and some former feminists left, but Teresa Labriola, daughter of the famous Marxist Antonio Labriola, was one of several prominent feminists who stayed. Labriola promoted her idea of “Latin Feminism”, which emphasised women’s maternal duty to family and nation.32 A new magazine, La Donna Fascista (The Fascist Woman), aimed to convince women they had a role to play in the new society. Between 1930 and 1931, women’s groups were encouraged to expand as part of a recruitment drive. By 1932, it was compulsory for every branch of the PFN to set up a Fascio Femminile. One historian claims that the fascists were the first modern political party to attempt to build a mass female membership, although the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party, SPD) built a mass female membership ten years earlier.33
Some women had entered politics as supporters of Italian imperialism in the late 19th century. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1937 was framed as a war for Italian men’s honour but it also encouraged an expansion of women’s role on the “home front”. “Day of Faith” ceremonies, in which women publicly sacrificed their wedding rings to be melted down to help the Italian war effort in Ethiopia, proliferated. Women who wedded themselves to attacking the labour movement, to imperialism and increasingly to racism and antisemitism were rewarded with a role in the fascist regime.
The first British fascist organisation British Fascisti (BF) was set up by a woman, Rotha Linton Orman, in 1923. Orman’s “feminised fascism” appealed to women to do their duty, serve the nation and defeat the “Red Menace”.34 Fascist women were to use the skills they learnt in the war to prepare for a fight against the working class. They were to establish children’s clubs to rival those set up by the socialists and Communists, and they were to carry out Special Patrols for which they learnt jujitsu.35 Women also boycotted foreign goods and drove scab vehicles during the General Strike of 1926.
Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), formed in 1932, attracted support from the rich and powerful, including women from the aristocracy, and was feted by the right wing press.36 The Daily Mail’s “Hurray for the Blackshirts” headline was followed by a Sunday Dispatch article, “Beauty Joins the Blackshirts”, explaining, “The Blackshirt movement is essentially one of youth. The women’s sections are now adding—Beauty. The women and girls of Britain are flocking to the movement. Many of them are strikingly beautiful”.37 The right-wing press celebrated both fascism and sexism.
The BUF pledged to support equal pay for women and to end the marriage bar, which forced women out of their jobs when they got married. A women’s section of the BUF was set up in March 1933. It published a fortnightly paper, the Woman Fascist, but the paper only lasted from March to September 1934. The women’s section was led by Lady Makgill, followed by the ex-suffragette Mary Richardson and then Mosley’s mother Maud Lady Mosley.38 In May 1934, the BUF lifted its ban on Fascist women speaking in public. Women were seen as effective canvassers, sellers of literature and organisers of social events.
In the early 1930s, around 25 percent of Mosley’s supporters were women.39 The leadership of the BUF was exclusively male, but it ran women candidates and employed women organisers.40 The later 1930s saw dissent and splits over the role of women in the movement. There were resignations of some leading women who objected to their marginalisation. The women who rose to prominence in the later 1930s expressed nothing but devoted loyalty to Mosley and the BUF. However, women’s participation grew after 1938, when the BUF turned its attention to opposing any future war between Britain and Nazi Germany. In September 1938, the BUF launched its National Campaign for Britain, Peace and People.41 It also held its own Women’s Peace Campaign, which launched a series of local events and rallies. Women engaged in what they euphemistically called “peace mongering”. When war began, they broke up meetings of anti-war fascist organisations in January 1940.42 The war against Nazi Germany helped to crush the BUF.
The NSDAP was deeply hostile to feminism, but it permitted a huge woman’s organisation to flourish. Millions of women participated in creating the Nazi regime, in its crushing of all democratic expression, in its violent repression, its pursuit of imperialist conquest and the mass murder of the Holocaust. The NSDAP was an irrelevant sect until the impact of the Great Depression of 1929 rocked German society. In the 1928 Reichstag elections, where men and women polled separately, just 2.6 percent of men and 1.8 percent of women voted for them. However, in the election of September 1930, the NSDAP became the second biggest party, after the SPD, with 18.3 percent. Where votes were counted separately, 17.4 of men and 15.3 of women voted for the NSDAP. By March 1933, the Nazis were receiving a larger share of female votes than male votes. In September 1930, the Nazis had 7,625 female members. By January 1933, a further 56,386 women had joined. The NSDAP’s “Reichstag majority was due to the strong support of female voters”.43
The Nazi doctrine created a society structured around “natural” biological poles.44 They sacked women from the civil service. Hitler decreed that women became citizens only when married, while Goebbels insisted that women’s duty was looking pretty and having babies.45 Nazis did not allow women to stand as candidates to protect them from “the dirty business of parliamentary politics”.46 Koonz summarises how, “Never in German history have so many women streamed into any political party and never has a party so degraded women as the National Socialist Party.47
The Nazis also appealed to women to help halt the spread of Bolshevism and “Jewish Marxism”. Gregor Strasser, for instance, justified appeals to female activism: “The conquest of power is the concern of men but sustaining it is the duty and obligation of women”.48 Within the Nazi state, women had the opportunity to create what they claimed to be the largest women’s organisation in history. Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, chief of the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women’s League, NSF), told an interviewer: “All your feminist efforts have placed a woman or two here and there in conspicuous places. But have you touched the lives of average women? We did”.49 Scholtz-Klink was an unapologetic Nazi and by no means a reliable observer of events. Yet, her reminiscences give a sense of how widescale female support allowed fascism to penetrate German society.
The NSF was established in October 1931. Elsbeth Zander brought the 4,000 members of the Deutscher Frauenorden (German Women’s Order) into the NSF.50 This boosted its membership to 19,382 by December. A year later, membership had leapt to 109,320. The NSF was under the control of male Nazis, and Gertrude Scholtz-Klink was always subordinate to men. However, she organised thousands of courses, programmes, outings, lectures and radio shows, aiming to indoctrinate women in Nazi ideas. Millions of women participated in the vast network of organisations.51
Fascist organisations had different characters and emphasised different elements of their gender politics. However, they all shared the capacity to promote the idea that women could never play the same role as men, that women must always be subordinate, and they all allowed women the space to create their own organisations to build support for the fascist project. They established a model of how bigoted misogynists can appeal to women by allowing them the space to organise other women in support of the far-right project. That model is being deployed by the Make America Great Again (MAGA) right today.
Violence against women and girls
The American president is a rapist, a man who once bragged about grabbing women’s genitalia. Today, Trump is attempting to reinvent himself as a protector of women. He now brags, “I will protect women, whether they want it or not” and he talks about defending the “suburban women who are under attack”.52 It is not just Trump. Reform UK MP Richard Tice suggested recently that groups of men, vigilantes, should roam the streets to protect women, saying it is our “Neighbourly duty to protect our own”.53 The far right’s attempts to coopt the idea of protecting women is always racialised.
The far right is obsessed with the issue of “Asian Grooming Gangs”. In a series of posts on X, Elon Musk falsely claimed that Tommy Robinson was imprisoned for telling the truth about them. The global far right spread the lie that in Britain, hundreds and thousands of “little British girls” are being raped and murdered by these gangs, which, moreover, are protected by woke police and politicians. The far right has created an atmosphere in which “it is a man’s duty to protect women—even when it means breaking rules or using force”.54 This protection masks a drive to exert control over women’s bodies. Musk’s X platforms fascists such as Nick Fuentes, who promoted the phrase “your body, my choice”.55
Of course, according to them, not all women deserve far-right protection. Black women, brown women, migrant women, women attacked by white men and women who oppose their narrative do not deserve protection. So, Musk called Labour MP Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and a “wicked witch”. As journalist Elizabeth Peason has written, “This is protection without care, protection as means of control”.56
The far-right demonisation of Muslim men feeds from a longer tradition of Islamophobia. Since the War on Terror, a barrage of state-sponsored Islamophobia has popularised the idea that Islam is a uniquely backward religion that is hostile to women’s rights. On New Year’s Eve 2015, sexual assaults took place in the city centre of Cologne, Germany. Far-right activists seized on these events in a selective way (for example, they were not at all concerned about assaults by white men) to decry the “rapeugee” crisis, claiming asylum seekers brought with them a culture of rape and violence against women. Marine Le Pen went further. She baited the left, writing, “I am revolted today by the unacceptable silence and, therefore, tacit consent of the French Left in the face of these fundamental attacks on the rights of women. I am scared that the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights”.57 Sara Farris, in her influential book Femonationalism, describes how the far right instrumentalises certain feminist issues to justify anti-immigration in the name of women’s rights. Previous articles in this journal also explore similar themes.58
The association of racialised groups with sexual violence against women did not begin two decades ago with the War on Terror. It extends back to the European imperialism of the late 19th and early 20th century, which created breeding grounds for fascist ideas. This colonial racism exploded in Germany in June 1920, when a mass movement against the “Black Shame” or “The Black Horror on the Rheine” erupted. The French government occupied the Ruhr with black troops recruited from their empire, mainly Senegal and Morrocco. A hysterical campaign focussing on the supposed sexual threat black soldiers posed started. Fake stories of rapes and murders were widely circulated. The racist campaign was supported by British pacifists including Betrand Russell and E D Morel in a series of articles for the left-wing Daily Herald. Morel wrote of the “barbarians belonging to a race inspired by nature with tremendous sexual instincts” being thrust into the heart of Europe.59 Women of all parties, except for the socialists, organised a petition to the League of Nations claiming that “white flesh was being offered to black beasts”.60 The campaign against “black savages” threatening German women continued until 1930. The collusion of women of all parties, with support from the pacifist left, opened the door to support for the Nazis.
The racist events ran parallel with a campaign to demonise Jews as a threat to women. Historian Emma Wilkins has described how, while the antisemitism rife in Nazi propaganda is well-established, the portrayal of the Jewish male as a seducer, seeking to corrupt the Aryan maiden has been overlooked.61 The association of Jewish men with sexual threat was rooted in moral panics over Jewish refugees and the white slave trade in Britain and the US in the early 19th century. Miscegenation between Jews and Aryans posed the most fundamental threat to the Nazi vision of an Aryan future. Julius Streicher’s notoriously vicious Stürmer published vile cartoons that depicted Jewish man’s supposed attempt at “race defilement” (Rassenschande). One cartoon, “The Kidnapper”, published in the Stürmer between 1932 and 1938, shows an Aryan maiden who is helpless against the Jewish male’s attempts to defile her.62
The black troops sent to the Rheine and Jewish men were not particularly responsible for violence against women, nor are asylum seekers and migrants today. The violence women face, however, is all too real. In July 2024, the National Police Chiefs Council and College of Policing described violence against women and girls as a “national emergency”. Violence against women makes up 20 percent of all recorded crime in England and Wales. In the year between March 2023 and March 2024, 1.2 million women were victims of domestic violence in Britain. Keir Starmer has promised repeatedly that he will half violence against women in a decade. This pledge was in Labour’s 2014 election manifesto. However, ministers continue to appear “oblivious” to the scale of harm caused by violence against women and girls, MPs reported in May.63 Without any additional funding, women’s refuges continue turn away 65 percent of the women who appeal to them for support.
The failure of successive governments to take violence against women seriously has left the door open to the far right to pose as women’s protectors. They obscure the causes of violence against women: sexism, the commodification of sex and the privatised family. Some 90 percent of violence against is perpetrated by intimate partners. Some 40 percent of the men who were arrested on the violent racist protests of the summer of 2024 had been reported for domestic violence. The Runnymede Trust think tank points out that the impact of identifying migrants with sexual violence serves to intensify racist assumptions about who is civilised, and it suppresses truth about where violence against women comes from—not from migrants but from the sexist system.
Fascism as anti-feminism
Opposition to “gender ideology” is one of the ideological glues that cements far-right coalitions. Anti-feminism is a core radicalisation tactic that promises to restore the traditional gender roles ruined by woke metropolitan elites.64 In far-right propaganda, women entering the workplace is not a victory for equality and independence but a victory for a hostile state concerned with maximising its tax revenues. Feminism destroys the natural order, dethrones men from their rightful position and makes women deeply unhappy. Fascist Tommy Robinson wrote on X:
Well done to all the ideologically captured lonely spinster females who are so full of hate. You too can become lonely, evil, barren misandrists by listening to dried up feminists angry at the world. Or you could embrace tradition, have a husband, kids and live a fulfilling life as nature intended.65
In this swamp of nonsense swim the tradwives who spend their lives performing acts of housework and childcare, not for their families, but for their social media followers. This is domesticity as a product, a brand, which also appeals to religious fundamentalists’ veneration of “traditional womanhood”.66 Women are at best too kind and compassionate, and at worse degenerate sluts who trick “beta simps” into marrying them. White women who reject a subservient role “must be protected from themselves to save the West”.67
There is a tension between the far-right hostility to feminism and its attempts to appeal to women. Some pay lip service to “women’s rights” to further an Islamophobic agenda. In 2022, Marine Le Pen published a “Letter to French Women” that articulated women’s demands for greater equality. Her party’s manifesto promised more support for single mothers and pledged to make challenging domestic violence a priority.68 This apparent support for women’s rights is intrinsically linked to racism and Islamophobia. An RN lawmaker, Helen Laporte, told the French press, “No-one can tell us that the RN is against women’s rights. The reason we’re fighting Islamism, for example, is to protect women’s freedom”.69
The leader of the fascist party Alternative für Deutschland, (Alternative for Germany, AfD), Alice Weidel, is a lesbian, raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born partner Sarah Bossard. In January 2025, Weidel was the party’s candidate for chancellor, endorsed by Elon Musk. The AfD is anti-LGBT+. It excludes families such as Weidel’s from what they consider “acceptable”.70 Weidel is fully on board with far-right hostility to migrants: “Immigrants are made up of burqas, girls in headscarves, knife-wielding men on government benefits and other good for nothing people”, she wrote.71 Some queer theorists have argued that gay people can tie their fight for rights to a far-right narrative, just as women can.72 Pim Fortuyn pioneered this approach in the Netherlands. It is politics and class, not gender identity, which is fundamental to shaping the politics of the far right.
“I am a mother”: fascism and motherhood
When Georgia Meloni became the leader of the Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) (brothers? sic!) she revived Mussolini’s slogan, “God, country, family”. She told the press, “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian, and you can’t take that away from me”. Journalist Isabel Heinemann argues that the German AfD was able to enter the mainstream by championing the traditional family and firmly demarked gender roles. Marine Le Pen claims she leads France “like the mother of a family with common sense and consistency”. At Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally, far-right activist Sarah White told the march, “I stand before you today not as a politician, certainly not an expert—but what I truly am, a mother.” This maternal stance gives far-right voices a sense of authenticity and legitimacy. It connects traditional family values with the idea of a racially defined nation state. Pro-natalist politics have a veneer of valuing white women, giving them a sense of pride and purpose as the gatekeepers of race and of civilisation.73
The veneration of motherhood can have a resonance with some women because they face an unsupportable burden when raising children. Women work long hours for low pay and cope with a housing crisis that makes raising children much harder. They also face what has become known as the “Motherhood Penalty”, where women are disadvantaged by rocketing childcare costs and discrimination at work.74 The two child benefit cap is just one illustration of the contempt the Labour government has for working women. Far-right promises to respect women, to value those who raise children, to create a world where women can stay at home and care for their children can be appealing only because women have been repeatedly failed by the establishment.75
Closely connected to the veneration of mothers is an obsession with falling birth rates. Musk tweets about how the “population apocalypse”, low birth rates, are a much bigger risk to humanity than climate change. He posts about “mass extinctions”.76 JD Vance told an anti-abortion rally in 2025, “I want more babies in the United States of America”—by babies, he means white babies.77 The Great Replacement Theory (GRT), is now mainstream among conservatives. The theory dates back to the antisemitic conspiracy theories of the late 19th century when “white extinction anxiety” prompted new laws restricting immigration. These ideas were codified in the writings of Renaud Camus and his 2010 book The Great Replacement, which argued that immigration and falling birth rates among white women were threatening Western civilisation.78
Contemporary iterations of the theory blame “global elites”, a code for Jewish people, for deliberately replacing well-paid white workers with lower-paid, more easily exploited, black and brown workers. The GRT is the point at which hostility to migrants and hostility to women’s bodily autonomy intersect and reinforce each other. If global elites are trying to replace white workers with migrant labourers, then it must be women’s duty to protect the white race, to be the “birthers” of the nation.79 If they cannot be persuaded to drop babies voluntarily, then defending civilisation requires the criminalisation of contraception and abortion.
The right’s obsession with babies can be traced back to the first fascist regime. Mussolini’s Battle for Births began in 1927, with tax breaks for those with children and tax hikes for those without. In 1928, Mussolini made the link between fertility and the state clear, declaring, “A nation exists not only because it has a history and territory, but because human masses reproduced from generation to generation. The alternative is servitude or the end. [Georg] Hegel, the philosopher of state, said: ‘He who is not a father is not a man’”.80 The fascist state banned information about family planning and contraception. Women also had a role in welfare activities, including distributing baby milk, running sewing groups and girls’ groups, and organising nurseries for peasant women.81
Women who did not comply with fascist ideals of fertility were severely punished. During the two decades of the Fascist regime, thousands of women were locked up in asylums in terrible conditions for refusing to conform to fascist ideas of morality. The state created new categories of “deviancy”. Many were incarcerated for being “degenerate mothers”, overwhelmingly women who worked outside the home, who experienced depression, who were sex workers or who refused to have more children.82 Those who did conform to the demand for babies also came under the control of the fascist state. In 1925, Mussolini established the Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia (National Organisation for the Protection of Maternity). It took control of 5,700 institutions that cared for women and children. In 1926, birth control and abortion were banned as “crimes against the race”. Italian motherhood, childbirth and breastfeeding were rationalised and run like factories. Childbirth became a form of mass production known as “Industrial Motherhood”.83
The same contradiction between coercion and incentive shaped Nazi attitudes to childbirth. They demanded that “Aryan” women produce babies while viciously repressing the fertility of non-Aryan women. The Nazis attributed low birth rates to degeneracy, homosexuality, abortion, venereal disease and family planning. Raising birth rates was pursued as a vindication of Nazi ideas, a crucial part of establishing a virile and strong society.
Hitler was handed the chancellorship of Germany on 30 January 1933 and immediately began implementing laws based on racist eugenics and ideas of “racial hygiene”. Women who could not or would not conform to the Nazi ideal of patriotic motherhood were incarcerated, forcibly sterilised or exterminated. In July 1933, the Nazi dictatorship passed a law that established special courts, which condemned around 400,000 Germans to forced sterilisation based on mental health conditions such as alcoholism, depression and epilepsy. Hundreds of women died as a result of the tubal ligation sterilisation procedure. In September 1935, another law criminalised marriage or sex between Jews and non-Jews. In October 1935, unions between the “hereditarily healthy” and the “genetically unfit” were banned. Hundreds of thousands of women were deprived of their right to have children. The Nazis drew on legal examples and precedents from the United States, in the Slave Codes and Jim Crow laws. These laws, and thousands of extra-judicial lynchings, were justified by the widespread acceptance of the myth of the black male rapist.84
The Nazis attempted to coerce “racially pure” women into having more babies. Those who limited the number of children they had were accused of committing a “racial crime” by depriving Germany of good Aryan stock.85 Women were offered tax incentives to give up work and have children and penalised if they failed to reproduce. Women who had lots of children were awarded the Mother’s Cross. In December 1935, Heinrich Himmler established a Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron, SS) agency, the Lebensborn (Well of Life). The Lebensborn agency offered help to SS soldiers who had large families. It also offered support to unmarried mothers who could prove they were racially pure. The cash incentives and new maternity homes fell far short of what was necessary to boost birth rates, even within the SS itself.
All these incentives, propaganda and intimidation failed to influence women’s behaviour. Women continued to use contraception and abortion. A popular saying among working women in Italy was, “Mussolini won’t raise it”. Judith Orr estimates that abortion in Italy was “probably running at about 30 percent of births in 1930”. The birth rate in Germany collapsed in the 1930s, reaching an historic low of one million live births in 1933.86 Millions of women continued to work outside the home and numbers increased during the war, where women have access to further education and to jobs outside the home, birth rates tend to decline.
Falling birth rates continue to be an obsession of the far right—a marker of society’s virility, of the stability of the family and a bulwark against immigration. In February 2025, Nigel Farage told the right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, “Of course family matters enormously, of course we need higher birth rates.” Farage called for some “very, very big cultural changes” to persuade British women to have children.87 However, women have proved very resistance to such changes.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s far-right leader, is among the right-wing figures drawing on tactics first used by Mussolini and Hitler to push women to have more children. The country spends more than five percent of its gross domestic product on various subsidies. Woman who have four children are exempt from income taxes, and newlywed heterosexual couples are given large loans that are forgiven when they produce children.
Despite all these measures, Hungary has failed to create an increase in birth rates. The nation’s fertility rate for the first half of 2024 was the lowest in the last decade. Many have pointed fingers at Hungary’s stance toward immigrants, the poor and LGBT+ families to explain the falling birth rates.88 Hysteria about falling birth rates can justify bans on abortion and restrictions on contraception, but these are two of the least popular ideas promoted by the far right. Some women might be convinced by racist ideas, they may be attracted by the idea of being valued as mothers, but they do not want themselves or their daughters to be driven back into the backstreets.
Conclusion: women against the far right
Fascism is a counter-revolutionary movement against workers and the left. It was also an extreme backlash against the wave of emancipatory ideas that inspired European women after the First World War. Women had worked in engineering and munitions plants, made sacrifices for the war effort, won the suffrage and were exploring a degree of sexual freedom.89
The fascists framed this progress as a threat to society. The Nazi’s argued that, “Emancipation from women’s emancipation is the first demand of a generation of women who want to save the German people and race”.90 In Britain, Mosley was more pragmatic. In 1940, when he needed to reach out to women, he claimed, “We are pledged to complete sex equality. The German attitude towards women has always been different from the British, and my movement has been largely built up by the fanaticism of women”.91 The BUF did not represent a simple anti-feminist backlash—it also tried to appropriate feminist themes while appealing to the men and women who thought women’s place was in the home.92
Women were never granted any real power within the fascist regimes. However, upper and middle-class women carved out public roles for themselves—lecturing and patronising working and peasant women, leaving their own homes to preach domesticity to other women. The policies of dictatorship impacted most severely working-class and peasant women and the Jewish women who were deported to concentration camps.93
Women were not just collaborators or victims. They also shaped the anti-fascist resistance. German revolutionary Clara Zetkin was one of the first to analyse the unique nature of fascism, and she was a committed anti-fascist organiser.94 In Britain, the socialist Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the first to expose the nature of Mussolini’s regime in Italy and to throw herself into anti-fascist organising. She was the driving force behind a campaign to free the wife of a murdered Italian politician from house arrest. Thousands of women joined socialist organisations and more mobilised against Mosely in Britain and against the fascists in Italy and Germany.
As early as June 1923, Clara Zetkin understood that it was important to challenge Mussolini’s promises to women, as part of her wider analysis of fascism. She argued that fascist pledges to care about ordinary women were fake, writing:
Mussolini promised women the right to vote and to be elected. Recently an international bourgeois conference for women’s suffrage met in Rome, Mussolini graciously honoured the women by his presence and explained to them with a sweet smile that women would obtain the right to vote—but only for the municipal councils.
Political rights would thus still be denied them. Moreover, not all women would gain rights in municipal elections; only those who could give evidence of a certain level of education, plus women with “war medals”, and women whose husbands possessed a sufficiently large bag of money to pay a certain level of taxes. That’s how he keeps his promise with regard to equal rights for women.95
The far right is excavating and refashioning the old tropes that were used by the fascists of the past. This should give anti-fascists ammunition in their fight against them. Whatever the levels of immigration, whatever the ethnicity or religion of those involved, the far right would manufacture a threat to women’s safety, which it can mobilise around. Their stance has nothing to do with migrants or with Islam. It has everything to do with how fascists mobilise and how they coopt ideas about women’s rights.
This means the Marxist approach to women’s oppression is indispensable. Feminists who think women have a shared experience of oppression and a shared interest in challenging sexism cannot account for the role of women in fascist movements. The fascist and Nazi women of the past were drawn mainly from the upper and middle classes. They wanted to crush the left and workers’ and peasants’ organisations that they saw as a threat to social stability. Some feminists believed the fascists parties could be a vehicle for their campaign for (some) women’s rights. All women are oppressed, but some seek their liberation at the expense of other oppressed groups.
All manifestations of oppression must be opposed because they are wrong, and because they divide and weaken the working class. However, the working class has a collective interest in challenging the far right and in contesting the despair that feeds it. Today, we must crush the fascists, break away the sympathisers from the real fascists and challenge all racism and violence against women and misogyny. There are thousands of women ready to join that fight through organisations such as Women Against the Far Right and as part of the wider anti-racist, anti-fascist movement.
Ramsis Kilani is a revolutionary socialist in Germany and a member of the Sozialismus von unten (Socialism from Below) group.
Notes
1 Thanks to Joseph Choonara, Jacqui Freeman and Sheila McGregor for their comments and suggestions.
2 McNeal, 2025.
3 Norden, 2025.
4 Shearing, 2025.
5 Amnesty International, 2025.
6 Bates, 2025; Shearing, 2025.
7 Pietilainen, 2024
8 Morris, 2025.
9 Froidevaux-Metterie, 2024.
10 Shearing, 2025.
11 Gentleman, 2025.
12 Gentleman, 2025.
13 Gentleman, 2025.
14 Mikhailova, 2025.
15 Tapsfield, 2025.
16 Gentleman, 2025.
17 Orr, 2019.
18 Gluckstein, 2012, p89.
19 Passmore, 2003, p1, p5.
20 Passmore, 2003.
21 Gottleib, 2000, p31.
22 Orr, 2024.
23 Wilson, 2003, p13.
24 Gottlieb, 2000, p62.
25 Gottlieb, 2004, p14.
26 Gottlieb, 2000, p66.
27 Heinsohn, 2003, p35.
28 Boak, 2013, p252.
29 Wilson, 2003, p11.
30 Wilson, 2003, p14.
31 Wilson 2003, p16.
32 Wilson, 2003, p17.
33 Wilson, 2003, p18.
34 Gottlieb, 2000, p82.
35 Durham, 1983, p217.
36 Gottlieb, 2000, p97.
37 Quoted in Gottlieb, 2000, p161.
38 Durham, 1983, p221.
39 Gottlieb, 2000, p30.
40 Gottlieb, 2000, p137.
41 Gottlieb, 2000, p176.
42 Gottlieb, 2000, p178.
43 Tingsten, 1975, p59. Reichstag refers to the German parliament.
44 Koonz, 1987, p87.
45 Boak, 2013, p194.
46 Boak, 2013, p233.
47 Koonz, 1987, p78.
48 Heinsohn, 2003, p53.
49 Koonz, 1987, p46.
50 Boak, 2013, p207.
51 Koonz, 1987, p561.
52 Cortellessa, 2025.
53 Mischa Anouk, 2025
54 Pearson, 2025.
55 Pearson, 2025.
56 Pearson, 2025.
57 Poirer, 2017.
58 See Boulangé, 2004.
59 Reinders, 1968, p2.
60 Reinders, 1968, p4.
61 Wilkins, 2024.
62 Wilkins, 2024.
63 Grierson, 2025.
64 Shearing, 2025, p68.
65 Robinson, 2025.
66 Shearing, 2025,
67 Shearer, 2025, p7.
68 Froidevaux-Metterie, 2024.
69 Froidevaux-Metterie, 2024.
70 Wiggins, 2025.
71 Parsons, 2025.
72 Puar, 2007.
73 Shearing, 2025, p35,
74 Chakelian, 2025.
75 See Shearing, 2025, p16.
76 Gorgan, 2021; Musk, 2025;
77 Beddington, 2025.
78 Orr, 2024.
79 Shearing, 2025, p35.
80 de Grazia, 1992, p41.
81 Wilson, 2003, p21.
82 Viale, 2017.
83 Wills, 2022.
84 Hope and Mullen, 2024, pp38-9.
85 Thompson, 1971, p57.
86 Thompson, 1971, p66.
87 Fisher, 2025.
88 Kaiser, 2025
89 de Grazia, 1992, p3.
90 Koonz, 1987, p209.
91 Gottlieb, 2000, p134.
92 Boak, 2013, p234.
93 de Grazia, 1992, p13.
94 Zetkin, 2017.
95 Zetkin, 2017.
References