How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Fascist opposition to gender studies, in particular, flows from its patriarchal ideology. National Socialism targeted women’s movements and feminism generally; for the Nazis, feminism was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy fertility among Aryan women. Charu Gupta aptly summarizes the Nazi attitude toward feminist movements: [Nazis] believed that the women’s movement was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to subvert the German family and thus destroy the German race. The movement, it claimed, was encouraging women to assert their economic independence and to neglect their proper task of producing children. It was spreading the feminine doctrines of pacifism, democracy and “materialism.” By encouraging contraception and abortion and so lowering the birth rate, it was attacking the very existence of the German people.4

Today this is cloaked in the guise of alpha males, an other toxic masculinity.