Fascist Ideas About Masculinity, Women, and the Family
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Fascist Ideas About Masculinity, Women, and the Family
Fascist movements treated gender and family life as central political concerns rather than private matters. Although individual regimes differed according to national traditions, religion, race, class, and historical circumstances, they commonly presented society as a hierarchy of unequal but supposedly complementary roles. Men were expected to embody strength, authority, discipline, sacrifice, heterosexual virility, and military readiness. Women were generally defined through motherhood, domestic labor, caregiving, sexual respectability, and responsibility for reproducing the nation.
The fascist family was imagined as a miniature version of the authoritarian state. The father represented leadership, protection, discipline, and economic authority, while the mother was expected to maintain the household, raise politically loyal children, preserve cultural traditions, and produce future citizens or soldiers. This structure offered fascist movements a familiar language through which political obedience, racial belonging, social hierarchy, and national unity could be presented as natural extensions of family life.
Fascist gender systems were not entirely consistent. Regimes that praised women’s domestic seclusion also required women to work, organize, campaign, provide welfare, participate in mass organizations, and support war or imperial expansion. Women could become activists, propagandists, professionals, collaborators, perpetrators, or resisters, but their public activity was usually described as an extension of supposedly feminine duties rather than a claim to political equality.
Gender as an Instrument of Fascist Power
Fascist movements used gender to classify citizens, distribute authority, and define who belonged to the national community. Masculinity and femininity were represented as fixed biological realities with distinct political purposes. These categories shaped education, employment, welfare, marriage, sexuality, reproduction, military service, and access to public authority.
The language of gender helped fascists make political inequality appear natural. Male leadership was justified as an expression of biological strength, while women’s subordination was portrayed as protection, complementarity, or respect for motherhood. By presenting the social order as an enlarged family, fascist movements could represent obedience to political leaders as similar to obedience to fathers and husbands.
Gender policy also identified supposed internal enemies. Feminists, independent women, queer people, unmarried adults, people with disabilities, and those who rejected conventional family roles could be portrayed as symbols of decadence, selfishness, demographic decline, or national weakness. Gender conformity therefore became a measure of political loyalty and social respectability.
The Fascist New Man
A recurring fascist ambition was the creation of a “New Man” who would replace the supposedly weak, materialistic, individualistic, and decadent man associated with liberal democracy. This ideal man was disciplined, physically fit, emotionally controlled, heterosexual, fertile, loyal to the nation, and prepared to use violence.
Military service, sport, uniforms, youth organizations, physical education, and political ritual were used to cultivate this masculine ideal. Fascist propaganda celebrated soldiers, workers, athletes, fathers, pioneers, and political martyrs as models of male citizenship. Aggression and domination were often presented as virtues when directed toward enemies of the nation.
The New Man was also expected to become a husband and father. Fatherhood linked military masculinity to domestic authority by presenting the male citizen as both defender of the nation and head of the household. In some movements, political organizations were imagined as male brotherhoods or war bands whose loyalty surpassed ordinary personal relationships.
These ideals could be difficult to maintain in practice. Economic hardship, unemployment, military defeat, disability, emotional vulnerability, and changing family structures contradicted the image of the self-sufficient male provider. Fascist masculinity therefore required constant performance, propaganda, discipline, and the exclusion of men who did not conform.
Women, Motherhood, and Domestic Service
Fascist ideology commonly portrayed motherhood as women’s highest form of national service. Women were expected to bear children, protect family health, manage domestic consumption, transmit religion and national culture, and prepare sons and daughters for their prescribed social roles.
Motherhood was frequently militarized. Propaganda described childbirth as women’s equivalent of combat and presented demographic growth as a battle for national survival. Mothers could receive medals, financial assistance, welfare benefits, public recognition, or preferential treatment when they produced large families considered racially or politically desirable.
Domestic labor was also politicized. Cooking, cleaning, sewing, budgeting, food conservation, childcare, nursing, and household management were presented as contributions to national productivity. During economic crises and wars, women were encouraged to sacrifice consumption, conserve resources, support soldiers, and transform the household into a disciplined unit of the national economy.
The glorification of motherhood did not benefit all women equally. Unmarried, childless, disabled, queer, politically dissident, racially persecuted, or supposedly “hereditarily unfit” women were often denied the respect and assistance granted to officially approved mothers. Fascist maternalism therefore combined symbolic praise for women with surveillance, discrimination, and reproductive control.
Women’s Political Mobilization and Subordination
Fascist movements did not simply exclude women from public life. They created women’s leagues, welfare organizations, professional groups, rural associations, youth divisions, publications, and educational programs. Women recruited members, organized charities, distributed propaganda, instructed girls, supported political campaigns, and sometimes participated directly in repression and violence.
This mobilization produced a fundamental contradiction. Fascist organizations needed women’s labor and enthusiasm while continuing to insist that genuine authority belonged to men. Female activism was therefore justified as maternal service, religious devotion, national sacrifice, or assistance to male leaders rather than as independent political citizenship.
Women could gain visibility, skills, social networks, employment, or limited influence through fascist organizations. Some female activists believed that participation offered them greater purpose or public recognition. Nevertheless, most fascist movements rejected feminism and preserved male control over senior leadership, law, the military, and the household.
The involvement of women also complicates interpretations that treat them only as passive victims. Women could simultaneously experience patriarchal restrictions and participate in propaganda, exclusion, persecution, colonial domination, or political violence. Their participation did not make fascism egalitarian, but it demonstrates that women could exercise agency within deeply unequal systems.
Marriage, Reproduction, and Population Policy
Fascist regimes treated marriage and reproduction as matters of state security. Governments intervened in courtship, marriage eligibility, divorce, contraception, abortion, sterilization, childbirth, adoption, family benefits, and inheritance. The objective was not simply to increase population but to shape what authorities considered a healthy, disciplined, and desirable national population.
Pronatalist campaigns encouraged early marriage and large families through loans, tax policies, subsidies, awards, propaganda, and restrictions on reproductive autonomy. In Fascist Italy, Mussolini’s “Battle for Births” attempted to connect population growth with military and imperial power. Women were encouraged to produce numerous children, while men were expected to marry, provide for families, and demonstrate virility.
Nazi Germany added a particularly systematic racial dimension. Marriage, childbirth, abortion, sterilization, and adoption were regulated according to racial and hereditary classifications. Programs such as Lebensborn promoted the reproduction of people classified as racially valuable, while Jewish people, disabled people, Roma, and other persecuted groups faced exclusion, forced sterilization, family separation, deportation, and murder.
The effectiveness of pronatalist policies was limited. Many families continued to make reproductive decisions according to income, housing, employment, health, and personal preference. Declining fertility and changing family structures often continued despite propaganda and legal restrictions, revealing the gap between fascist ambitions and everyday behavior.
Sexuality, Respectability, and Exclusion
Fascist gender ideology generally privileged reproductive heterosexuality. Sexual conduct was judged according to its supposed contribution to marriage, childbirth, racial health, military strength, and national morality. Authorities regulated prostitution, venereal disease, pornography, courtship, divorce, and behavior considered sexually nonconforming.
Male homosexuality was frequently portrayed as a threat to military discipline, masculine virility, population growth, and political brotherhood. Nazi Germany subjected thousands of men accused of homosexuality to imprisonment, forced labor, castration, medical abuse, and concentration-camp incarceration. Other authoritarian systems used criminal law, police surveillance, censorship, and social stigma to suppress queer life.
Lesbian women and transgender people were treated differently according to local laws and racial classifications, but they also faced surveillance, social exclusion, employment restrictions, and pressure to conform to reproductive marriage. Their experiences reveal the limits of fascist efforts to impose rigid biological and legal categories on diverse human identities.
Sexual regulation was also connected to race and empire. Fascist and imperial governments attempted to prevent relationships considered racially undesirable while sometimes tolerating or organizing sexual exploitation that served military objectives. The distinction between approved and forbidden sexuality reflected broader hierarchies of citizenship, race, gender, and colonial power.
Youth, Education, and the Reproduction of Ideology
Fascist movements viewed children as the future biological and political population of the nation. Schools, youth groups, sports programs, camps, textbooks, uniforms, and public ceremonies were designed to weaken alternative loyalties and cultivate obedience to the movement.
Boys were generally trained for leadership, military service, physical endurance, sacrifice, and political discipline. Girls received physical education but were usually directed toward domestic science, childcare, nursing, household management, and preparation for motherhood. Athletic women were praised when their health appeared to support reproduction but criticized when physical strength challenged conventional femininity.
Education extended beyond formal schooling. Magazines, cinema, radio, exhibitions, advice columns, household manuals, and consumer campaigns taught adults and children how proper men, women, husbands, wives, and families were expected to behave. Fascist ideology therefore entered everyday life through entertainment, fashion, food, health, romance, and domestic routine.
Youth education also exposed tensions within fascist gender systems. Girls and young women gained organizational experience, physical mobility, and public visibility while being told that their ultimate purpose remained marriage and motherhood. Boys were encouraged to demonstrate hardness and courage even when actual life required emotional flexibility, cooperation, and care.
National Variations
Italian Fascism emphasized virility, demographic expansion, imperial motherhood, household productivity, and the creation of a disciplined New Man. Women were mobilized through party organizations, maternity programs, rural associations, education, welfare work, food campaigns, and colonial projects. Yet industrialization and economic necessity prevented the regime from fully removing women from paid employment.
Nazi Germany connected patriarchal family policy to racial selection, hereditary health, antisemitism, eugenics, territorial expansion, and genocide. Approved German mothers were rewarded, while people classified as racial, sexual, political, or hereditary threats were denied family rights and subjected to persecution.
The Spanish Falange combined fascist mobilization with Catholic morality. Its Women’s Section trained women in domestic science, childcare, religion, and national service while allowing selected female leaders to organize large institutions. Francoist masculinity transformed soldiers into authoritarian fathers, providers, and household heads.
Romania’s Iron Guard combined militant masculinity with Orthodox religious mysticism, martyrdom, political brotherhood, and national rebirth. Legionary women could be represented as activists, warriors, martyrs, wives, or mothers, but domestic sacrifice remained the dominant ideal.
British fascist movements recruited women as organizers, speakers, propagandists, and electoral activists while presenting the heterosexual racial family as the foundation of national survival. Postwar British fascism continued to portray white women as racial reproducers and white men as defenders and patriarchs.
French far-right movements and the Vichy regime linked national decline to a supposed crisis of masculinity. They promoted paternal authority, physical regeneration, prolific families, maternal welfare, moral sexuality, and the restoration of hierarchical household relations.
Portugal’s Estado Novo grounded gender policy in Catholic marriage, male legal authority, women’s domestic service, imperial motherhood, and youth militarization. Greece’s Metaxas regime similarly combined women’s public mobilization with demographic policy, maternal duty, religion, and male-led national renewal.
Croatia’s Ustasha movement joined paramilitary masculinity, revolutionary violence, youth indoctrination, racial nationalism, and sharply divided future roles for boys and girls. Hungary’s Arrow Cross mobilized female supporters and perpetrators while retaining the model of a male political brotherhood.
Brazilian Integralism emphasized Christian morality, eugenics, motherhood, hygiene, education, and women’s responsibility for raising the movement’s future “new men.” Wartime Japanese nationalism connected population policy, imperial expansion, medical science, domesticity, and women’s reproductive bodies while representing men as soldiers, protectors, and disciplined agents of empire.
These cases demonstrate that fascist gender politics did not follow one identical blueprint. Each movement adapted patriarchal ideas to local religious traditions, racial ideologies, economic conditions, colonial ambitions, and political institutions. Their shared tendency was to subordinate individual freedom and equality to a hierarchical vision of national community.
Religion, Race, and Empire
Religious institutions and traditions frequently reinforced fascist family ideals. Catholic concepts of marriage, sexual morality, motherhood, and male household authority influenced Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Portugal, France, Croatia, and other movements. Romanian fascism fused Orthodox Christianity with sacrifice, martyrdom, and national rebirth.
Religion did not operate identically in every fascist system, nor did all religious believers support fascism. Religious language nevertheless gave patriarchal policies moral authority by presenting heterosexual marriage, motherhood, obedience, and gender hierarchy as sacred or natural obligations.
Race and empire shaped which families were valued. Fascist governments encouraged reproduction among groups considered nationally desirable while restricting or destroying the family lives of people defined as racial enemies. Colonial projects relied on gendered images of male conquerors and protectors, female settlers and civilizers, and colonized populations portrayed as inferior or threatening.
Women sometimes gained mobility and authority through imperial projects, but these opportunities depended on racial privilege and service to colonial rule. Gender emancipation for selected women could therefore coexist with the domination of colonized people and the preservation of male authority.
Contradictions Between Ideology and Everyday Life
Fascist regimes promised to restore supposedly traditional gender roles while simultaneously transforming family life through state intervention, mass politics, industrialization, welfare programs, militarization, and war. Their “traditional” family was therefore often a modern political construction rather than the preservation of an unchanged past.
Economic necessity repeatedly undermined the domestic ideal. Regimes needed female factory workers, agricultural laborers, nurses, teachers, clerks, welfare organizers, and wartime employees. Women were urged to remain devoted mothers while also increasing production and supporting national mobilization.
Official masculinity was equally unstable. Men were expected to be warriors, workers, providers, husbands, fathers, political militants, and emotionally disciplined leaders. Unemployment, defeat, injury, poverty, and family conflict made these expectations impossible for many men to fulfill.
Women and families also resisted or adapted state policy through private decisions about marriage, fertility, employment, sexuality, consumption, and migration. The inability of fascist governments to control intimate life completely demonstrates both the reach and the limits of authoritarian power.
Contemporary Legacies
Contemporary far-right and authoritarian movements often revive elements of fascist gender politics without reproducing every institution of historical fascism. They may portray feminism, reproductive autonomy, LGBTQ rights, gender studies, immigration, and changing family structures as threats to social stability or national survival.
Images of protective fathers, nurturing mothers, disciplined children, male brotherhood, and the traditional household remain powerful propaganda tools. Online manosphere communities and radical-right groups frequently combine resentment toward feminism with warrior identity, demographic anxiety, racial nationalism, and demands for renewed patriarchal authority.
Women remain active in these movements as voters, candidates, organizers, media personalities, and ideological entrepreneurs. Their participation can make authoritarian politics appear protective of women or compatible with female empowerment even when the movement seeks to restrict reproductive freedom, gender equality, sexual pluralism, and equal citizenship.
Historical comparisons should be made carefully. Not every conservative defense of family life is fascist, and contemporary political movements differ greatly in ideology, organization, and power. The history of fascism nevertheless demonstrates how appeals to masculinity, motherhood, children, and family protection can be used to legitimize hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and attacks on democratic equality.
Conclusion
Fascist ideas about masculinity, women, and the family were fundamental to the construction of authoritarian power. Fascism celebrated a militarized and dominant male citizen while defining women primarily through motherhood, domestic labor, sexual respectability, and service to the nation. The hierarchical family became both a symbol of the desired political order and an institution through which ideology could be reproduced.
These gender systems offered recognition and limited opportunities to people who accepted their assigned roles, but they denied equality and autonomy. They divided women into approved and disapproved mothers, men into strong and supposedly degenerate citizens, and families into those considered valuable and those targeted for exclusion or destruction.
Women were neither uniformly passive nor genuinely equal within fascist movements. They could become influential organizers, propagandists, welfare workers, collaborators, perpetrators, and resisters, yet their participation usually occurred within institutions that preserved male leadership and rejected feminist citizenship.
The broader history shows that fascist gender politics was both ideological and practical. It shaped law, education, welfare, medicine, reproduction, sexuality, work, youth organizations, popular culture, empire, and everyday domestic life. By politicizing the intimate sphere, fascist movements attempted to make the family a mechanism for producing obedient citizens and maintaining national, racial, and patriarchal hierarchy.
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Comparative and Transnational Frameworks
“Comrades beyond Borders”: The Women of the Spanish Falange, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany
Explores how Spanish Falangist women exchanged organizational methods, propaganda, educational ideas, and models of femininity with women’s organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Technologies of Gender in the Workings of Fascisms
| Andrea Germer | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Introduces gender as a political technology through which fascist movements shaped bodies, organizations, families, sexuality, reproduction, citizenship, and national belonging.
Sexualities and Dictatorships of the Twentieth Century
| Cristina Scheibe Wolff | Cambridge University Press | 2024
Compares Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and Latin American dictatorships, emphasizing how authoritarian power depended on virility, heterosexuality, patriarchy, and repression of gender and sexual difference.
Parallel Stories: The Rise of the Far-Right Women’s Movements in Europe
| Andrea Pető | HAL Open Science | 2020
Connects historical and contemporary far-right women’s activism, showing how claims of female empowerment can operate within movements opposing feminism and equal citizenship.
The Fascist New–Old Order
| Reto Hofmann | Journal of Global History | 2017
Compares fascist projects in Italy, Germany, and Japan, showing how promises of revolutionary national renewal frequently reinforced older hierarchies of gender, authority, and family life.
Fascism, Women, and Gender
| Kevin Passmore | Oxford Academic | 2014
Examines fascist beliefs that women’s primary social functions were domestic and reproductive, producing future citizens, soldiers, and mothers for the nation or race.
State Interventions, 1914–1945
| Dagmar Herzog | Cambridge University Press | 2011
Surveys government intervention in sexuality, marriage, reproduction, prostitution, homosexuality, and family life during the era of European fascism and total war.
Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945
| Kevin Passmore | Manchester University Press | 2003
Compares women’s participation and fascist gender policy across several European movements, showing how domesticity, motherhood, activism, nationalism, and political subordination could coexist.
Fascism, Gender, and Culture
| Ara H. Merjian | Annali d’Italianistica | 2001
Explores how fascist political culture naturalized rigid distinctions between masculinity and femininity while embedding those distinctions in art, rhetoric, social policy, and everyday life.
Formations, Locations and Reproductions of Fascist Subjectivities
| Liz Constable | Differences | 1997
Investigates how fascist ideology produced gendered political identities by celebrating women who accepted domestic, reproductive, and subordinate roles within the national community.
The New Fascist Man
| George L. Mosse | Oxford Academic | 1996
Explores how fascist movements elevated disciplined, physically powerful, morally resolute, heterosexual, and militarized masculinity into a national political ideal.
Contemporary Far-Right and Authoritarian Gender Politics
Revisiting Gender and Development in a Time of Fascisms
| Kalpana Wilson | Third World Quarterly | 2025
Connects contemporary fascist politics with older structures of patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, racial hierarchy, and control over women’s reproductive and economic lives.
From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: Why Strongmen Rely on Women at Home
| The Guardian | The Guardian | 2025
Compares Nazi maternalism with modern traditional-wife politics, arguing that authoritarian movements use women’s domestic labor to reproduce political ideology inside the family.
Family Politics in Contemporary Fascist Propaganda
| Gustav Westberg | Journal of Right-Wing Studies | 2025
Examines how the Nordic Resistance Movement combines Nazi racial language with familiar images of heterosexual marriage, protective fathers, nurturing mothers, and supposedly natural differences between women and men.
Gender Ideology and Patriarchal Authoritarianism
| Lexi Adsit and Mickey Eliason | Cambridge University Press | 2025
Connects authoritarian politics with attacks on feminism, reproductive autonomy, LGBTQ people, gender studies, and family arrangements that depart from patriarchal heterosexual norms.
Populist Political Masculinities, Gender Equality, and Norm Contestation
| Ulrike Ziemer | International Feminist Journal of Politics | 2024
Shows how far-right and populist political actors use patriarchal and heterosexual ideals of masculinity to challenge policies concerning women’s equality, domestic violence, and LGBTQ rights.
Patriarchal Pacts in the Neo-Archaic Manosphere: Warband Brotherhoods as Fascist Masculinity
| Jack Z. Bratich | Journal of Gender Studies | 2024
Connects contemporary manosphere communities with fascist traditions of male brotherhood, warrior identity, patriarchal authority, reproductive control, and hostility toward feminism.
Fascism Without Men: On the Gender Politics of the Radical Right
| Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen | Fordham University Press | 2023
Questions the assumption that fascist gender politics can be reduced to restoring conventional male dominance, examining how radical-right movements reorganize masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and gender exclusion.
The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies
| Nitasha Kaul | International Studies Review | 2021
Argues that misogyny is not merely a personal trait of authoritarian leaders but an important political practice connecting nationalism, hierarchy, violence, and attacks on democratic institutions.
Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Gendered Nationalism
| Christine Agius and colleagues | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2020
Analyzes how nationalist movements respond to perceived social instability by promoting aggressive masculinity, male dominance, heterosexuality, and idealized traditional families.
A Restoration of Classic Patriarchy?
| Ulf Mellström | NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies | 2017
Examines how conservative and neo-fascist movements seek to restore patriarchal authority by attacking feminism, gender equality, sexual pluralism, and liberal democratic values.
Italian Fascism: Masculinity, Women, Work, and the Family
Home Economics in the Years of Fascism: Maria Gasca Diez and the Italian Way
| Ivan Paris | The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought | 2026
Examines how scientific household management was adapted to Fascist doctrine, portraying the efficient housewife as responsible for family productivity, national consumption, and domestic order.
Bella Ciao and Women: A War for the Meaning of Motherhood in Italy
| Felipe Almeida | Journal of Economic Issues | 2025
Compares Fascist efforts to define motherhood as obedience and reproduction with antifascist understandings of maternal care, solidarity, resistance, and social provision.
Fascism, Gender, and Displays of Art: The Exhibition of Italian Women Artists in Finland and Estonia in 1937
| Hanna-Leena Paloposki | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Examines how Fascist cultural diplomacy displayed female creativity while framing women artists through nationalism, respectable femininity, and service to Italian prestige.
“Propaganda for Our Italy”: Ruth Williams Ricci, Gendered Mobility, and Fascist Italy’s African Empire
| Brian J. Griffith | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Examines how an American-born woman promoted Fascist colonialism through travel, journalism, racial privilege, and a public identity that combined modern mobility with loyalty to patriarchal empire.
“Believe, Obey, Cook!” Educating Girls and Women for War in Fascist Italy
| Marta Brunelli | Journal of Romance Studies | 2024
Shows how domestic education transformed cooking, household economy, food conservation, childcare, and personal sacrifice into patriotic duties for Fascist women.
Creating the “New Fascist Man”: Giorgio Alberto Chiurco and the Anthropological Revolution of the Italian Regime
| Michelangelo Borri | Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies | 2023
Analyzes attempts to create a racially conscious, disciplined, physically healthy, violent, and politically obedient Fascist male through medicine, eugenics, education, and political activism.
Dreaming of Distant Lands: How Fascism Built Colonial Women, 1937–1941
| Antonella Cagnolati | Historia y Memoria de la Educación | 2023
Examines magazines and educational propaganda that prepared Italian women to become colonial wives, mothers, teachers, and agents of racial and cultural domination in East Africa.
Mussolini between Hero Worship and Demystification
| Stephen Gundle | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2022
Analyzes the construction of Mussolini’s personality cult through stories depicting him as physically vigorous, sexually potent, paternal, disciplined, and personally connected to ordinary Italians.
“Tomorrow Belongs to Us”: Pathways to Activism in Italian Far-Right Youth Communities
| Agnieszka Pasieka | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2022
Describes how contemporary far-right communities combine militant male fraternity with hierarchical relationships in which female activists, girlfriends, and wives often remain subordinate.
Against the Dangers of Gender Equality: The Holy See on Public Female Gymnastics in Germany and Italy
| Dries Vanysacker | The International Journal of the History of Sport | 2022
Examines Catholic and Fascist anxieties that public athletics could masculinize women, weaken modesty, encourage equality, and undermine women’s expected duties within marriage and motherhood.
Female Family Heads in Fascist Italy: A Study of the 1931 Population Census
| Alessio Fornasin and Marco Breschi | The History of the Family | 2022
Studies households led by women and demonstrates how actual Italian family structures frequently departed from the regime’s ideal of a male-headed household.
Mussolini’s Motherhood Factories
| Livia Gershon | JSTOR Daily | 2022
Describes how Fascist maternity institutions applied industrial organization, medical supervision, breastfeeding schedules, eugenics, and state authority to childbirth and infant care.
La Donna Fascista – Narodowa Służebnica, Żona i Matka
| Anna Wotlińska | Sprawy Międzynarodowe | 2022
Analyzes Fascist codes of conduct that defined women as servants of the nation, obedient wives, prolific mothers, and guardians of families subordinated to the state.
Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work
| Diana Garvin | University of Toronto Press | 2022
Explores how Fascism entered women’s daily lives through kitchens, agricultural labor, factory food production, nutrition campaigns, household management, and expectations of maternal sacrifice.
Women and Uniforms in Fascist Italy
| Perry Willson | Women’s History Review | 2022
Explores disputes over female uniforms, which offered women public visibility and collective identity while threatening the regime’s belief that uniforms, authority, and political militancy were masculine.
Optimizing and Normalizing the Population through Hormone Therapies in Italian Science, c. 1926–1950
| Chiara Beccalossi | British Journal for the History of Science | 2020
Investigates how Fascist-era endocrinology attempted to medically produce supposedly normal masculine and feminine bodies through hormones, eugenics, and biotypological classification.
The Regulation of Public Morality and Eugenics
| Lucia Pozzi | Modern Italy | 2020
Shows how Catholic sexual morality, Fascist demographic policy, patriarchal values, and Italian eugenics cooperated in regulating marriage, sexuality, reproduction, and family behavior.
Educating the “New Man” in Italian Schools during the Fascist Era
| Simonetta Polenghi | Historia Scholastica | 2020
Studies textbooks that taught boys military discipline and collective obedience while presenting Catholic morality, rural family life, patriotic motherhood, and devotion to Mussolini as natural social values.
Group Portrait: The Ispettrici Nazionali of the Italian Fascist Party, 1937–1943
| Perry Willson | The Historical Journal | 2018
Examines the highest-ranking women in the Fascist Party and their role in mobilizing millions of women without challenging the regime’s exclusively male political leadership.
Reproduction
| Perry R. Willson | Palgrave Macmillan | 2017
Explains how Fascist law transformed maternity into a public duty and classified abortion, sterilization, and birth control as offenses against the health and integrity of the race.
Disappearing Acts: Disability, Gender, and the Memory of Fascism in Italian Film
| Sarah Patricia Hill | Modern Italy | 2017
Examines how queer and disabled bodies disrupted Fascist ideals of healthy masculinity, reproductive femininity, compulsory heterosexuality, and physical national strength.
The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology
| Jorge Dagnino | Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies | 2016
Examines the Fascist ambition to create a disciplined, militant, self-sacrificing, and virile “New Man” capable of overcoming liberal individualism and transforming Italian civilization.
The Model of Masculinity: Youth, Gender, and Education in Fascist Italy, 1922–1939
| Jennifer L. Nehrt | James Madison University | 2015
Investigates how Fascist schools and youth organizations trained boys for disciplined military manhood while preparing girls for motherhood, domestic work, and service to male citizens.
The Crisis-Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy
| Natasha V. Chang | University of Toronto Press | 2015
Investigates Fascist hostility toward the thin, cosmopolitan, sexually independent, and supposedly childless modern woman who contradicted the regime’s preferred maternal body.
Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy
| Diana Garvin | Critical Inquiry | 2015
Shows how Fascist maternity clinics portrayed childbirth and breastfeeding as scientifically managed forms of production serving demographic growth, racial health, and state power.
Italian Fascism and the Political Mobilisation of Working-Class Women, 1937–1943
| Perry Willson | Contemporary European History | 2013
Studies a mass organization for female factory workers, domestic servants, and home workers that combined welfare and education with surveillance, propaganda, and political discipline.
“Virile, Yet Feminine”: Sport, Gender, and Representation in Fascist Italy
| Andrea Dlugos | Historical Perspectives | 2012
Explores the contradictory demand that female athletes demonstrate national strength and physical health without challenging male superiority or appearing excessively masculine.
A Fascist Woman?
| Maura E. Hametz | Fordham University Press | 2012
Uses a Fascist-era court case to examine women’s political identities, family loyalties, sexual reputations, patriotism, and the difficulty of reconciling female agency with Fascist gender norms.
Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in Italy, 1925–1938
| Lauren E. Forcucci | Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe | 2010
Reviews Mussolini’s attempt to increase population through taxation, marriage incentives, propaganda, restrictions on contraception and abortion, and glorification of prolific mothers.
Births and Fertility in Interwar Italy
| A. Caporali and colleagues | Population Review | 2010
Evaluates demographic trends during the Fascist period and shows that many Italian women did not conform to the regime’s model of early marriage and prolific motherhood.
Empire, Gender and the “Home Front” in Fascist Italy
| Perry Willson | Women’s History Review | 2007
Examines how imperial expansion transformed cooking, consumption, charity, motherhood, and domestic thrift into political contributions that women could make to Italy’s colonial project.
Mussolini’s Boys—and Girls: Gender and Sport in Fascist Italy
| Gigliola Gori | History Australia | 2006
Examines how sport helped construct the Fascist New Man while creating a carefully controlled athletic femininity associated with health, reproduction, discipline, and national prestige.
The Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and Virility in Fascist Italy
| Sandro Bellassai | Journal of Modern Italian Studies | 2005
Connects fascist antimodernism with anxiety about women’s emancipation, urbanization, intellectual life, and the supposed weakening of traditional male authority.
Unmaking the Fascist Man: Masculinity, Film, and the Transition from Dictatorship
| Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Journal of Modern Italian Studies | 2005
Uses postwar Italian film to explore the difficulties faced by men raised to equate masculinity with aggression, military action, emotional hardness, and domination.
Pioneering Female Modernity: Fascist Women in Colonial Africa
| Cristina Lombardi-Diop | Palgrave Macmillan | 2005
Analyzes writings by Italian women in Africa that combined limited female mobility and modernity with racial privilege, colonial authority, domestic service, and Fascist imperial ideology.
Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women and Strong Mothers
| Gigliola Gori | Routledge | 2004
Examines how physical education encouraged women to become healthy and productive mothers while preserving submission, modesty, heterosexuality, and male authority.
Private Life and Public Morals: Fascism and the “Problem” of Homosexuality
| Lorenzo Benadusi | Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions | 2004
Explores how Fascist ideals of virility and moral respectability encouraged surveillance of male sexuality and the political use of accusations of homosexuality against rivals and dissidents.
Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali
| Perry Willson | Routledge | 2002
Examines the Fascist organization for rural housewives, which promoted agricultural productivity, domestic economy, motherhood, obedience, and loyalty to the regime among peasant women.
Fascism, Commodification, and Female Subjectivity in Mario Camerini’s Grandi Magazzini
| Jacqueline Reich | Italian Culture | 1998
Examines representations of working women, romance, consumer culture, and female autonomy within a popular film produced under the Italian Fascist regime.
Flowers for the Doctor: Pro-Natalism and Abortion in Fascist Milan
| Perry R. Willson | Modern Italy | 1996
Uses an illegal-abortion investigation to demonstrate the limits of Mussolini’s pronatalist campaign and the gap between official policy and women’s reproductive decisions.
Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy
| Barbara Spackman | University of Minnesota Press | 1996
Analyzes fascism’s rhetoric of virility, in which prolific motherhood and dominant masculinity were presented as natural biological foundations of the national order.
Women in Fascist Italy: Changing Family Roles in the Transition from an Agricultural to an Industrial Society
| Paul Corner | European History Quarterly | 1993
Compares Fascist restrictions on female employment with economic and demographic changes that made it impossible to confine every woman to domestic and reproductive labor.
How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945
| Victoria de Grazia | University of California Press | 1992
Explains how Mussolini’s dictatorship sought to nationalize women by regulating motherhood, employment, leisure, sexuality, consumption, and participation in mass organizations.
Women under Italian Fascism
| Alexander J. De Grand | The Historical Journal | 1976
Studies the complicated relationship between fascist propaganda and women’s actual lives, including employment restrictions, family-planning policy, welfare programs, and the regime’s demographic ambitions.
Nazi Germany: Masculinity, Motherhood, Sexuality, and Racial Family Policy
Lebensborn Program
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2026
Explains how the SS used maternity homes, racial examinations, adoption networks, and financial assistance to increase the number of children classified as racially valuable.
Kinder und Küche: Women, Marriage, and Children in Nazi Germany
| Lara Bucholski and Christopher Murphy | SSRN | 2025
Reviews Nazi changes to civil and family law affecting marriage, divorce, motherhood, women’s employment, children, reproduction, and the state’s authority over intimate relationships.
Women in the Third Reich
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2024
Explains Nazi marriage loans, family subsidies, abortion restrictions, racial selection, motherhood medals, and policies encouraging approved German women to bear numerous children.
Ideology and the Application of Law in SS Courts: A Case Study of Legal Practice in the Third Reich
Shows how SS law regulated marriage, homosexuality, sexual conduct, racial mixing, reproduction, and the expectation that SS men establish large racially approved families.
Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany
| Florian Zabransky | Holocaust and Genocide Studies | 2024
Reviews research on how Nazi persecution attacked Jewish men’s identities as providers, workers, husbands, fathers, soldiers, and respected members of German society.
Family Policies for Segregated Nations
| Radka Šustrová | Oxford Academic | 2024
Examines competing German and Czech family policies in the Nazi-controlled Protectorate, including marriage, childbirth, maternal welfare, midwifery, demographic planning, and racially selective reproduction.
Hitler Youth
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2024
Explains how Nazi youth organizations trained boys for military service and leadership while preparing girls for physical fitness, household work, racial motherhood, and service to future families.
Indoctrinating Youth
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2024
Describes how schools, textbooks, camps, athletics, and youth organizations taught boys warfare and sacrifice while directing girls toward domesticity, racial hygiene, and motherhood.
Trans Liminality and the Nazi State
| Zavier Nunn | Past & Present | 2023
Uses the life of a transgender woman to show how gender nonconformity complicated Nazi efforts to classify individuals through rigid biological, legal, marital, and social categories.
Nazi Society, 1933–1939
| Alan E. Steinweis | Cambridge University Press | 2023
Surveys Nazi expectations concerning masculinity, femininity, work, domestic life, homosexuality, marriage, family formation, and the tensions between gender ideology and economic necessity.
Gay Men under the Nazi Regime
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2021
Describes the Nazi persecution of men accused of homosexuality, whose relationships were portrayed as threats to military masculinity, population growth, and the reproductive racial community.
Lesbians under the Nazi Regime
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | 2021
Explains how Nazi authorities viewed women through their presumed reproductive potential and treated lesbianism differently from male homosexuality while still suppressing independent queer life.
Gender, Recruitment and Medicine at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, 1939–1942
| Elissa Mailänder | German History | 2021
Examines how Nazi medical institutions used supposedly feminine qualities of caregiving and intuition to recruit female doctors into an SS system of racial persecution and violence.
Gertrud Scholtz-Klink and the Contradictions of Women in Nazi Germany
| Katherine Quaranta | Gettysburg College | 2021
Uses the career of the Reich Women’s Leader to explore the contradiction between women’s political mobilization and an ideology that proclaimed motherhood and domestic service their highest calling.
Father of the Bride, or the Biologization of Social Animosity in Nazi Germany, 1937–1941
| Amir Teicher | German History | 2020
Reconstructs a dispute over a proposed marriage to show how family prejudice and social conflict were transformed into claims about heredity, mental illness, racial health, and biological fitness.
What We Can Learn about Nazi Psychology from the Wives of Hitler’s Top Officials
Examines how the wives of senior Nazi leaders supported the regime through household management, prolific motherhood, social networking, ideological loyalty, and normalization of violence.
Walther von Hollander as an Advice Columnist on Marriage and the Family in the Third Reich
| Lu Seegers | Cambridge University Press | 2019
Examines popular advice about courtship, marital conflict, divorce, soldiers’ wives, gender relations, and the subordination of individual happiness to the national community.
Introduction: Masculinity and the Third Reich
| Thomas Kühne | Central European History | 2018
Introduces research on Nazi masculinity, including male dominance, military comradeship, homosexuality, emotional behavior, violence, marriage, and the performance of gender by both men and women.
Protean Masculinity, Hegemonic Masculinity: Soldiers in the Third Reich
| Thomas Kühne | Central European History | 2018
Shows how Nazi soldiers adapted their masculine behavior to different situations while continuing to treat toughness, strength, stoicism, and military comradeship as masculine ideals.
Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany
| Edward B. Westermann | Central European History | 2018
Explores how drinking rituals strengthened male solidarity within the SA, SS, and police and helped connect performative masculinity with sexual violence, brutality, and mass murder.
Whining and Winning: Male Narratives of Love, Marriage, and Divorce in the Shadow of the Third Reich
| Elissa Mailänder | Central European History | 2018
Uses men’s accounts of intimate relationships to investigate emotional vulnerability, male privilege, marital conflict, divorce, and the persistence of patriarchal expectations under Nazism.
Homosexuality and Comradeship: Destabilizing the Hegemonic Masculine Ideal in Nazi Germany
| Jason Crouthamel | Central European History | 2018
Investigates how gay men understood military comradeship and masculine identity under a regime that equated acceptable manhood with heterosexuality, procreation, discipline, and warfare.
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
| Amy Carney | University of Toronto Press | 2018
Examines the SS effort to create a hereditary racial elite by regulating courtship, marriage approval, wives’ ancestry, childbirth, fatherhood, and family size.
Mothers for Germany: A Look at the Ideal Woman in Nazi Propaganda
| Amy Truong | Iowa State University | 2016
Examines propaganda that portrayed marriage and motherhood as patriotic service while marginalizing unmarried, childless, professionally ambitious, Jewish, disabled, and supposedly hereditary-unfit women.
The Diverse Roles of Women in Nazi Germany
| Courtney Nelson | East Tennessee State University | 2014
Examines women as mothers, workers, party members, professionals, resisters, perpetrators, and supporters rather than treating German women solely as passive victims of Nazi patriarchy.
The Perfect Nazi Bride
| Eric Kester | The New Yorker | 2013
Describes SS bride schools that combined cooking, cleaning, childcare, racial science, physical training, and ideological instruction for women preparing to marry members of the Nazi elite.
Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema
| Antje Ascheid | Temple University Press | 2003
Studies female film stars whose glamorous public identities had to be reconciled with Nazi ideals of respectable wives, sacrificing mothers, racial loyalty, and service to the national community.
Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Militarized Masculinity in the Third Reich
| Annette F. Timm | Journal of the History of Sexuality | 2002
Examines how Nazi authorities attempted to channel male sexuality into militarized and racially approved forms while regulating prostitution, disease, reproduction, and soldiers’ sexual conduct.
Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?
| Elizabeth D. Heineman | Journal of the History of Sexuality | 2002
Reviews debates over sexuality in Nazi history, including heterosexuality, homosexuality, reproduction, racial policy, marriage, prostitution, and the difficulty of separating private life from dictatorship.
What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany
| Elizabeth D. Heineman | University of California Press | 1999
Compares the experiences of married, unmarried, widowed, and divorced women to show how Nazi social policy assigned rights, respectability, employment, and welfare according to marital status.
In Private: The Daily Lives of Jewish Women and Families, 1933–1938
| Marion A. Kaplan | Oxford Academic | 1998
Examines how persecution transformed household responsibilities, marriage, employment, caregiving, emigration decisions, and gender relations within German Jewish families.
Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945
Provides a detailed account of Nazi policy concerning marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, sterilization, family welfare, illegitimacy, racial classification, and the treatment of supposedly unfit families.
Women in Germany, 1925–1940: Family, Welfare and Work
| Tim Mason | Cambridge University Press | 1995
Examines the relationship between Nazi propaganda and women’s actual experiences of employment, welfare, marriage, domestic labor, motherhood, and preparation for war.
Politics of Gender: Women in Nazi Germany
| Charu Gupta | Economic and Political Weekly | 1991
Examines Nazi family ideology, its glorification of motherhood, and the racial and political conditions determining which women were permitted to fulfill the regime’s maternal ideal.
Mothers in the Fatherland
| Frigga Haug | New Left Review | 1988
Reviews Claudia Koonz’s research on women, family life, political participation, resistance, and complicity in Nazi Germany, challenging assumptions about women’s historical innocence.
Mother with Three Children
| Liselotte Purper | German History in Documents and Images | 1939
Shows how Nazi family propaganda idealized early marriage, large families, male breadwinners, devoted mothers, and children raised to become future soldiers and racial citizens.
Reich Ministry of Labor Policy on the Rejection of Labor Conscription for Married Women
| Reich Ministry of Labor | German History in Documents and Images | 1939
Presents a Nazi directive protecting many married women from labor conscription because domestic work, childcare, and family responsibilities were considered their primary obligations.
Reich Women’s Leader Gertrud Scholtz-Klink
| German History in Documents and Images | German History in Documents and Images | 1938
Describes the leader of Nazi women’s organizations, which trained millions of women in household management, childcare, racial hygiene, motherhood, and obedience while excluding them from genuine political power.
Propaganda Poster by the Mother and Child Relief Agency
| German History in Documents and Images | German History in Documents and Images | 1935
Illustrates Nazi propaganda portraying motherhood as a militarized “birthrate battle” in which strong mothers and healthy children ensured the growth of the racial nation.
Hitler’s Speech to the National Socialist Women’s League
| Adolf Hitler | German History in Documents and Images | 1934
Presents Hitler’s claim that men belonged to the state and battlefield while women belonged to the home, with childbirth defined as women’s equivalent form of national combat.
Members of the League of German Girls Have Their Work Inspected
| German History in Documents and Images | German History in Documents and Images | Undated
Explains how girls were trained in cleaning, cooking, sewing, infant care, racial hygiene, physical fitness, and the duties expected of future German wives and mothers.
British Fascism: Women, Family, and Political Mobilization
Women in the British Union of Fascists
| History Workshop Online | History Workshop Online | 2025
Discusses why women joined an organization centered on the Fascist “New Man” and how female members combined political activism with expectations of domesticity and male leadership.
Making a Fascist Family: Spearhead and the Attempt to Build a Nationalist Community Through Magazine Print Culture
| Daniel Jones | Family & Community History | 2024
Examines how Britain’s postwar fascist magazine Spearhead promoted an imagined racial family based on militant masculinity, heterosexual marriage, motherhood, youth formation, and communal loyalty.
Feminine Fascism and Feeding Fascism
| Lucas Ramos | EuropeNow | 2023
Reviews scholarship showing how female political activism, domestic labor, food production, consumer culture, and commercial companies supported fascist biopolitics and mass mobilization.
“Breeders for Race and Nation”: Gender, Sexuality and Fecundity in Post-War British Fascist Discourse
| Steve Burnett and Chris Richardson | Race & Class | 2021
Shows how British fascists portrayed white women as racial reproducers and white men as defenders, providers, patriarchs, and guardians of national survival.
Women and British Fascism Revisited: Gender, the Far Right, and Resistance
| Julie V. Gottlieb | Journal of Women’s History | 2004
Reassesses women’s participation in British fascist movements and resistance, demonstrating that female activists could be organizers, propagandists, ideological innovators, and perceived security threats.
Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement
| Julie V. Gottlieb | I.B. Tauris | 2000
Examines women’s leadership, propaganda work, recruitment, political participation, feminism, domestic ideology, and relationships with male authority in British fascist organizations.
Francoist Spain and the Spanish Falange
Transnational Learning and the Weight of the National Sphere: Women of the Spanish Falange in Interwar Fascism
| Toni Morant i Ariño | Análise Social | 2024
Shows how Spanish Falangist women participated in international fascist networks while adapting foreign organizational and gender models to Spanish nationalism and Catholic culture.
“The Falange Changed Our Way of Being Completely”: Women and Gender Identity in Spanish Fascism
| Ángela Cenarro | European History Quarterly | 2023
Examines how female Falangists constructed a collective political identity that cannot be understood solely through categories such as victim, perpetrator, subordinate, or emancipated woman.
Las Religiones del Falangismo Femenino
| Begoña Barrera López | Bulletin of Spanish Studies | 2021
Examines how the Falange’s Women’s Section combined Catholic devotion with a political religion centered on sacrifice, loyalty, fallen martyrs, national service, and female obedience.
“Hormiguitas Graciosas y Amables”: Falange, Femininity, and the Body in Revista Y
| Begoña Barrera López | Hispanic Research Journal | 2021
Analyzes stories that placed women’s bodies at the service of the state while negotiating tensions between domestic motherhood, political activity, sacrifice, romance, and public service.
Unearthing Gendered Repression: Violence against Women during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s Dictatorship
| Laura Muñoz-Encinar | World Archaeology | 2020
Uses mass-grave evidence to examine gender-specific humiliation and violence against women accused of rejecting domesticity, religious morality, political passivity, and female submission.
Exploring Female Identity in Francoist Spain
| Victoria Reeser | University of Pennsylvania | 2019
Investigates how the Falange’s Women’s Section, Catholic morality, education, labor rules, and state propaganda constructed the ideal Francoist woman as submissive wife, mother, and household manager.
La Falange Es un Modo de Ser (Mujer): Discursos e Identidades de Género en las Publicaciones de la Sección Femenina, 1938–1945
| Ángela Cenarro | Historia y Política | 2017
Examines Falangist women’s magazines and the tensions between domestic motherhood, political activism, wartime service, Catholic morality, and women’s desire for recognition in the new regime.
El Descanso del Guerrero: La Transformación de la Masculinidad Excombatiente Franquista, 1939–1965
| Ángel Alcalde | Historia y Política | 2017
Traces how Francoist veterans were transformed from wartime warriors into husbands, fathers, workers, and heads of households while retaining political and domestic authority.
The Rewards of Female Fascism in Franco’s New State
| Julia Biggane | Bulletin of Spanish Studies | 2013
Studies decorations awarded to Falangist women and the regime’s attempt to recognize their political and wartime service without allowing them to appear unfeminine or independent.
“Para Influir en la Vida del Estado Futuro”: Discurso y Práctica Falangista sobre el Papel de la Mujer y la Feminidad, 1933–1945
| Toni Morant i Ariño | Historia y Política | 2012
Examines how female Falangists negotiated an ideology that demanded domestic obedience while also requiring women to organize, educate, and politically mobilize the female population.
“Never of Feminism”: Pilar Primo de Rivera and the Spanish Right
| Jessica Davidson | World History Connected | 2010
Explores how the leader of the Falange’s Women’s Section promoted women’s education and limited legal reforms while rejecting feminism and affirming women’s duties to husbands, children, and nation.
The Women’s Section of the Spanish Falange, 1934–1959
| Kathleen J. L. Richmond | University of Southampton | 1999
Traces how the Sección Femenina mobilized women while teaching domestic science, childcare, Catholic morality, obedience to husbands, and service to Franco’s authoritarian state.
Romanian Fascism and the Iron Guard
Gender and Violence in the Romanian Fascist Movement
| Anca Diana Axinia | Georgetown University | 2026
Examines Romanian Legionary women who were portrayed alternately as mothers, wives, warriors, martyrs, and sisters-in-arms within a movement dominated by violent male authority.
The New Man and Legionary Woman in Romania’s Christofascist Iron Guard, 1927–1940
| Josh Block | University of California, Irvine | 2025
Compares the Iron Guard’s disciplined, violent, spiritually reborn New Man with its model of the Legionary woman as domestic guardian, religious supporter, and defender of national culture.
Family Concepts: Gender, Politics, and Personal Relationships in the Romanian Legionary Movement
| Anca Diana Axinia | Brill | 2025
Examines biological families, political brotherhood, marriage, parenthood, courtship, and emotional relationships within Romania’s Iron Guard and its imagined national community.
Women and Politics in the Romanian Legionary Movement
| Anca Diana Axinia | European University Institute | 2024
Investigates women’s recruitment, political work, religious devotion, family relationships, propaganda, and participation in violence within the Romanian fascist movement.
Fascist Femininities: Models of Womanhood in the Romanian National Legionary State
| Mihai Stelian Rusu | Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea | 2020
Identifies competing models of Romanian fascist womanhood, including domestic motherhood, militant female heroism, and a fashionable “Legionary” femininity, while emphasizing the dominance of domestic ideals.
Domesticating Viragos: The Politics of Womanhood in the Romanian Legionary Movement
| Mihai Stelian Rusu | Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies | 2016
Shows how Romania’s Iron Guard struggled to reconcile politically militant women with its preferred model of obedient wives, sacrificial mothers, and domestic guardians of the nation.
Women, Gender, and Fascism in Interwar Romania
| Maria Bucur | Palgrave Macmillan | 2003
Explores Romanian fascist ideas about masculinity, maternity, nationalism, eugenics, religious sacrifice, domesticity, and women’s participation in extremist politics.
France and Vichy: Virility, Fatherhood, and the Authoritarian Family
Gender and Politics in Interwar and Vichy France
| Caroline Campbell | Contemporary European History | 2018
Reviews research on masculinity, femininity, misogyny, sexuality, political violence, motherhood, and family policy among the French far right and under the Vichy regime.
Political Belief in France, 1927–1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français
| Caroline Campbell | Louisiana State University Press | 2015
Demonstrates how women transformed a veterans’ paramilitary league into a mass social movement while continuing to frame their activism through motherhood, service, sacrifice, and male authority.
Gender, Fascism and the Right Wing in France between the Wars
| Magali Della Sudda | HAL Open Science | 2012
Examines women’s participation in interwar French right-wing and fascist leagues and the gendered relationship between political militancy, religion, nationalism, and domestic duty.
The Defeat of French Manhood and the Vichy Imagination
| Joan Tumblety | Oxford University Press | 2012
Explains how Vichy blamed France’s military collapse on weakened masculinity and promoted sport, discipline, physical regeneration, and patriarchal authority as remedies for national decline.
Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France
| Joan Tumblety | Oxford University Press | 2012
Examines campaigns to rebuild French masculinity through muscular development, physical education, racial hygiene, military preparedness, and rejection of supposedly decadent modern lifestyles.
Mass Culture and Mass Politics, 1934–1940
| Joan Tumblety | Oxford University Press | 2012
Studies how the French radical right used sports organizations, athletic spectacles, and images of disciplined male bodies to mobilize supporters and promise national regeneration.
Keystone of the Patriarchal Family? Indissoluble Marriage and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Italy and France
| Mark Seymour | Journal of Modern Italian Studies | 2005
Explores the older patriarchal marriage traditions inherited by fascist movements, including husbands’ legal privileges and the belief that divorce threatened masculine authority.
“Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism”: Women’s Social Action in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français
| Kevin Passmore | The Journal of Modern History | 1999
Shows how right-wing women entered working-class communities through welfare work while presenting domestic care, maternal duty, religion, and anticommunism as foundations of national politics.
Fascism, Fatherhood, and the Family in Interwar France
| Cheryl A. Koos | Journal of Family History | 1999
Examines Antoine Rédier’s Légion, which placed paternal authority, prolific families, male leadership, and the restoration of household hierarchy at the center of French fascist ideology.
Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France
| Miranda Pollard | University of Chicago Press | 1998
Analyzes how Vichy used images of dutiful mothers, hardworking fathers, moral sexuality, and patriarchal families to explain defeat and legitimate authoritarian reconstruction.
Portugal: Estado Novo Gender and Family Policy
Beyond the Uniform: The Militarisation of Portuguese Youth in the Estado Novo
| Josué Duarte and Silvana Mota-Ribeiro | Vista | 2025
Examines uniforms and military symbolism in the Mocidade Portuguesa, which trained boys for disciplined national service while reinforcing differentiated roles for boys and girls.
Women’s Transnational Activism against Portugal’s Colonial Wars
| Giulia Strippoli | International Review of Social History | 2022
Studies women who challenged the Estado Novo’s colonial wars and male-dominated nationalist politics, creating alternatives to the regime’s model of obedient wives and imperial mothers.
The Role of Women in Portuguese Fascism and in Today’s Portugal
| Portugal.com | Portugal.com | 2022
Summarizes Estado Novo laws and customs that placed husbands above wives and restricted women’s employment, travel, political participation, sexuality, and financial independence.
Non-Normative Sexualities in the Period of the Portuguese Dictatorship
| Raquel Afonso | RELIES | 2019
Examines the criminalization and social condemnation of homosexuality and lesbianism under a dictatorship built around Catholic marriage, reproductive heterosexuality, and patriarchal family morality.
The Labour of Our Women
| Biblioteca de Arte Gulbenkian | Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation | Undated
Presents Estado Novo propaganda that celebrated women as devoted wives, exemplary housekeepers, self-sacrificing workers, and moral pillars of the Portuguese family.
Greece: Metaxist Femininity and Youth Formation
Contradictory or Organic Aspects of Fascism? The Role of Women in the Propaganda of the Metaxas Regime
| Rosa Vasilaki and George Souvlis | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Examines how Metaxist propaganda combined women’s public mobilization with the claim that maternity, domestic responsibility, obedience, and service to male-led national renewal were their natural duties.
Instrumentalizing Gender: From Interwar Fascism to the Alt Right in Greece
| Rosa Vasilaki and George Souvlis | Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe | 2023
Compares Metaxist and contemporary far-right gender discourse, including appeals to fatherland, religion, family, masculine protection, reproductive duty, and opposition to feminism.
Women and Femininity under the Metaxas Regime in Greece
| Rosa Vasilaki | Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies | 2022
Studies the female division of the National Youth Organisation and the regime’s attempt to construct a woman who was physically active and politically mobilized but ultimately maternal and subordinate.
Metaxas, Women, and the Nation
| Metaxas Project | Metaxas Project | 2019
Describes the regime’s demographic campaigns, hostility toward feminism, glorification of motherhood, and treatment of the family as the fundamental cell of the Greek nation.
The EON: The Greek Fascist Youth of Metaxas
| Metaxas Project | Metaxas Project | 2006
Explains how the EON taught boys nationalism, military discipline, and leadership while instructing girls that their primary purpose was to create and maintain families.
Croatia: Ustasha Men, Women, and Youth
“Why We Have Become Revolutionaries and Murderers”: The Fascistization of the Ustaša Movement
| Constantin Iordachi | Terrorism and Political Violence | 2023
Examines how revolutionary violence, martyrdom, vengeance, paramilitary brotherhood, and aggressive masculine identity contributed to the radicalization of the Croatian Ustasha.
Croatia and the Rise of Fascism: The Youth Movement and the Ustasha during World War II
| Goran Miljan | I.B. Tauris | 2018
Studies the Ustasha youth organization’s effort to form a racially conscious “new Croat” through military training, ideological education, gender separation, discipline, and loyalty to the state.
The Ustasha Youth Organization, Ideology and Practice, 1941–1945
| Goran Miljan | Central European University | 2016
Examines how Croatian children and adolescents were organized according to age and gender and trained for future roles as soldiers, mothers, household managers, and racial citizens.
Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae
| Rory Yeomans | The Slavonic and East European Review | 2005
Analyzes the Ustasha ideal of the violent warrior man and the politically committed woman whose activism remained tied to sacrifice, motherhood, chastity, and national reproduction.
Hungary: Arrow Cross Masculinity and Female Participation
Mediated Männerbund: A Story of Collaboration and Compliance in Hungary during the Second World War
| Andrea Pető | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Uses the concept of the male political brotherhood to examine gendered collaboration, authority, loyalty, violence, and the marginalization of women within Hungarian fascism.
The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War
| Andrea Pető | Palgrave Macmillan | 2020
Reconstructs the lives of female Arrow Cross members and explains how assumptions that fascism was exclusively masculine helped conceal women’s participation in persecution and violence.
Gendered Exclusions and Inclusions in Hungary’s Right-Radical Arrow Cross Party
| Andrea Pető | Hungarian Studies Review | 2014
Uses three female party members to show how Arrow Cross organizations mobilized women while excluding them from equal authority and defining acceptable womanhood through nationalism and anti-feminism.
Brazil: Women in the Integralist Movement
Integralism and Eugenics: The Role of Women in Brazilian Fascism’s National Regeneration Project
| Gabriela Santi Ramos Pacheco | História, Ciências, Saúde–Manguinhos | 2025
Shows how Brazilian Integralism presented motherhood as women’s primary function and encouraged female members to promote hygiene, nursing, eugenic education, and the formation of future “integral men.”
The True Builders of Tomorrow’s Brazil: The Role of Integralist Women in Anauê! Magazine, 1935–1937
| Humanidades em Revista | Humanidades em Revista | 2025
Examines magazine representations of female Integralists as educators, moral guardians, wives, mothers, and builders of a disciplined Christian and nationalist future.
Gender and Political Affects: Women’s Participation in the Brazilian Integralist Action
| Revista Mosaico | Revista Mosaico | 2024
Analyzes how Integralism defined the respectable “good woman” through religious morality, emotional loyalty, domestic respectability, political service, and devotion to family and nation.
An Analysis of Women’s Contribution to the Integralist Movement through A Offensiva
| Revista de História da UEG | Revista de História da UEG | 2022
Studies newspaper material designed to educate and train women in Integralist ideology and prepare them for gender-specific work within the movement.
The Female Profile in Brazilian Integralism through Anauê! Magazine
| Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul | UFFS Digital Repository | 2017
Examines the Integralist ideal of a “new woman” devoted to God, nation, family, domestic morality, political ritual, and the upbringing of the movement’s proposed “new man.”
Japan: Reproduction, Eugenics, and Imperial Gender
“Women’s Eugenics” and Takeuchi Shigeyo: Disease Prevention Strategies in 1930s Japan
| Meguro Akane | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Examines a female physician who promoted exercise and women’s health while participating in eugenic marriage, venereal-disease prevention, and the production of supposedly superior offspring.
Hormones, Gender, and Fascism: Development and Marketing of Hormone Products in Wartime Japan
| Jasmin Rückert | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Investigates how medical and commercial hormone technologies reinforced binary ideas about masculine and feminine bodies during Japanese wartime mobilization.
A Visual Grammar of Fascism: Gender, Race, and Biopower in Japanese Overseas Propaganda
| Andrea Germer | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Analyzes propaganda that presented Japanese men as imperial protectors and women as mothers, civilizers, caregivers, and symbols of racialized colonial order.
Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan
| Sujin Lee | Stanford University Press | 2023
Explores how Japanese population policy transformed women’s reproductive bodies into national resources for military expansion, imperial settlement, public health, and demographic planning.
Origins and Transformations of Conservative Gender Regimes in Germany and Japan
| Karen A. Shire and colleagues | Social Politics | 2020
Compares systems in which women’s domestic and reproductive work was treated as public service while political, professional, and educational opportunities remained restricted.
The Culture of Japanese Fascism
| Alan Tansman | Duke University Press | 2009
Examines cultural representations of sacrifice, imperial loyalty, violence, beauty, domesticity, and masculine spiritual discipline in wartime Japan.
Austria: Gender and Fascism
Of Swastika Sisters and Chocolate Girls: Gender and Fascism in Southern Austria during the Short Twentieth Century
| Dagmar Wernitznig | Gendering Fascism | 2025
Studies women’s participation in Austrian Nazism and the gendered memories through which female supporters, perpetrators, and collaborators were later minimized or trivialized.
