Thursday, July 14, 2016

Source Analysis: Women in Interwar Radical Politics

On the surface, the ideologies of the Soviet and Nazi regimes were diametrically opposed. On the one hand, the Soviets were on the far left and sought (at least in theory) to create a society in which everyone was equal; on the other hand, the Nazis were on the far right and sought to impose an order on society in which Aryans were on top and Jews were on the bottom. These differences were also reflected in their policies on women. The Soviets publicly stated that their goal was the full equality of women under the law, with equal participation and contribution to the state in exchange for equal benefits and protections. The Nazis, as radical traditionalists, wanted to roll back the progress in women's rights of recent decades and return women to Heim und Herd (home and hearth). However, as the horseshoe theory of politics posits, as political ideologies tend more toward the extremes, they tend to resemble each other more. If we consider writings and speeches from both societies and compare the actual policies, we can see the truth of this theory. 
Approaching the writings chronologically, the speech by Clara Zetkin from November 1922 comes first, and it poses certain problems because, while Zetkin was German, the speech was given in Soviet Russia and its topic is Soviet communism. That said, Zetkin's speech is intended to explain to her audience the role of the International Women's Secretariat within the Communist International (Comintern), i.e., both to integrate women who are already communists into the structure of the Comintern and to persuade working- and middle-class women to become communists. On the former point, Zetkin's speech offers a sort of "state of the union," with some parties within the Comintern (e.g., Bulgaria) doing better than others (the United Kingdom). On the latter point, Zetkin references the "pitiless inroads present day conditions make into the lives of millions of women, causing many of them to awaken from their torpor."1 On the whole, Zetkin's speech is a call to action to communist women to mobilize women inside and outside the party to transform the conditions for women worldwide.
The second selection, from the writings of Aleksandra Kollontai -- one of only a very small number of women to have held a position in the government of the Soviet Union -- addresses the topic of transformation of male-female romantic and sexual relationships in the wake of communist revolution. Broadly speaking, Kollontai argues that the free love engendered the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Civil War, which she characterizes as "wingless Eros," might have been appropriate for the time, but "winged Eros" must soon displace this free love, which poses a challenge because its "love is woven of delicate strands of every kind of emotion,"2 i.e., it is based on interpersonal commitment rather than momentary pleasure. To accommodate this paradigm shift, Kollontai argues that the traditional bourgeois notion of married love must be replaced with "love-comradeship," based on equality, mutual recognition by each partner of the rights of the other, and "comradely sensitivity," all packaged within a communist collective that demands a greater tie to itself than either partner to the other.3 Such love, according to Kollontai, would be more equal and more rational.
Unfortunately for both Zetkin and Kollontai, the reality of women's position in the Soviet Union was inferior to that envisioned by both women. As already noted, Kollontai was part of a very small minority of women with real political power, and Zetkin enjoyed political power, but in Germany and not Russia. Moreover, as noted by Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, economic realities kept women in a subordinate position in the post-Civil War USSR because, under the New Economic Policy, women "were generally the first to feel the pinch of job cutbacks."4 In the seventy years of its existence, no woman ever held supreme political power in the Soviet Union, in comparison to several other countries that afforded significantly less lip service to the equality of women (e.g., India, Pakistan, Israel, the United Kingdom, and others). As a consequence, the Soviet experiment in communism, while making big promises, ultimately delivered comparatively quite little in real results, notwithstanding the legal equality of women.
Turning to the case of National Socialist Germany, the 1934 speech by Adolf Hitler to the National Socialist Women's League makes a clear case for radical traditionalism. In a society in which, since World War I, women had received a variety of legal rights, including suffrage, the Nazis made it clear that it was time to return to an earlier time where a woman's place was in the home. Hitler states, "We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man, in his main sphere. We consider it natural if these two worlds remain distinct."5 As was his wont, Hitler characterizes women's emancipation as a "Jewish" creation that must be reversed.6 In addition, Hitler ties the traditional role of women to natalist policies, implying that women being ensconced in the home results in stronger family ties, which in turn result in "the willingness of the woman to risk her life to preserve this important cell and to multiply it."7
In her speech from two years later, Getrud Scholtz-Klink, leader of the same organization addressed by Hitler, characterizes this role for women in a more revolutionary sense than the Führer. Like Hitler, she denounces the proto-feminism of the preceding generation and its emphasis away from family and particularly from childbirth and motherhood. She goes a step further, however, in stating, "It is therefore our task to awaken once again the sense of the divine, to make the calling to motherhood the way through which the German woman will see her calling to be mother of the nation. She will then not live her life selfishly, but rather in service to her people."8 Interestingly, despite the very different final role that Scholtz-Klink sees for women, her exhortation to the greater good is not unlike that of Kollontai thirteen years earlier. Importantly, also like Kollontai, Scholtz-Klink sees the role of women as being equally important to that of men.
Given the clear point of view expressed by Hitler and the emphasis placed in Nazi German society on the Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, it is unsurprising that the place of women largely returned to a more traditional context in the National Socialist period. At least legally, the law tended to reflect this principle, particularly the natalist anti-abortion laws and the positive incentives offered for couples to have large families. Nevertheless, as in the Soviet Union, economic realities undermined the full implementation of this goal. Again, as pointed out by Gilbert and Large, only four years in Nazi rule in Germany, some of these pro-birth policies were reversed to provide incentives to women to go back to work, given the urgent need for workers in the context of German rearmament.9 Even when slave laborers were brought to Germany during the war, a percentage of these laborers were women, even if they were largely domestic workers for upper-class Germans and party elites.10
1 Clara Zetkin, "Organising Among Women," Marxists' Internet Archive, accessed July 4, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1922/ci/women.htm, para. 13.


2 Aleksandra Kollontai, "Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth, Love as a Socio-Psychological Factor," in From Symbolism to Socialist Realism: A Reader, ed. Irene Masing-Delic (Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 162.


3 Ibid, 171.


4 Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era, 6th edition (New York: Norton, 2009), 209.


5 Adolf Hitler, "Hitler’s Speech to the National Socialist Women’s League (September 8, 1934)," Germany History in Documents and Images, accessed July 4, 2016, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1557, para. 4


6 Ibid, para. 1.


7 Ibid, para. 4.


8 Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, "To Be German Is to Be Strong," German Propaganda Archive, accessed July 4, 2016, http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/scholtz-klink2.htm, para. 12


9 Gilbert and Large, 266.


10 Ibid.


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