From Nazi Germany to Trump's America: why strongmen rely on women at home
Source-https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/21/fascism-women-homemaker-trad-wife
subtitle-Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies
snip-"There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives” in Nazi Germany, says Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University. “It would be the equivalent of social media today.” Frauen Warte contained nothing too political – just broadly appealing lifestyle content about keeping a clean and well-provisioned home while raising a healthy family, with occasional debates about how much makeup one should wear. A barefaced look was preferred – much like the “clean girl” trend of today. “In a censored society everyone needs debates about harmless topics,” says Koonz.
Koonz is well-acquainted with the ways political strongmen rely on women’s labor at the family level to implement state ideology. Her 1986 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, describes how the ordinary women of Nazi Germany “operated at its very center”, incubating ideals of white supremacy, female subordination and sacrifice at home.
snip-"And significant backlash against gender equality is under way. The idea that women’s bodies are state resources for sustaining population appears to be re-emerging; the Trump administration is encouraging traditional roles by rolling back workplace equity, restricting reproductive rights and policing gender identity.
A woman’s “most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation”, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, told an audience of women in 1933. Racially selective population growth was core to the agenda of such nationalist, fascist regimes as Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. The only path to honor for most women was birthing children, formalized through financial rewards and medals for prolific mothers."
more there.
I will also cross post in GD& the Op-Ed forum.