Misogyny and the promotion of oppressive, rigid gender norms have always been key characteristics of the far-right and fascism. This was clearly evident under Nazi rule in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, where women’s roles were strictly defined in the context of the smashing of all democratic rights and working-class self-organisation.
Mark Collett, the founder of the fascistic Patriotic Alternative, posted a cartoon on Telegram. In it, white women queue at an abortion clinic, while women wearing hijabs queue at a maternity ward. Underneath this image he wrote the caption, “This is white genocide.”1
This one image encapsulates perfectly – and horrifically – the ways in which attacks on bodily autonomy and racism are irrevocably intertwined in far-right and fascist ideology. The sanctity of the ‘white nation’, depends not only on controlling borders, but also on controlling bodies and policing gender roles.
In an era in which attacks on abortion rights for some is paired with barriers to parenthood for others; in which claims of ‘protecting women’ are cynically employed by the same actors who would roll back every feminist victory of the last century; in which mass deportations seem to go hand in hand with attacks on trans rights; it’s vital to unpick exactly why fascist ideology seems bound up with an anti-gender agenda.
Fascist Germany – a case study
Fascism, at its core, is a political movement aimed at smashing all working-class dissent and self-organisation, as well as eliminating all hard-won democratic rights in order to protect national capitalist interests. In the interwar period, capitalism was in crisis. The economic devastation of the First World War, combined with an angry and increasingly organised working-class and oppressed movement, itself enormously impacted by the Russian Revolution, meant that big business owners and their representatives in government were increasingly open to extreme measures to keep socialist and communist forces at bay.
In the wake of the defeat of revolutionary workers’ movements in Germany in this period, fascists were able to cynically employ socialist language designed to connect with the real hardships folks were experiencing, but rather than pointing the finger at big bosses, they weaponised racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communist sentiments to find scapegoats for the problems in society. Such sentiments had been widespread within German and European society, encouraged by the establishment. Notably, Jewish people became increasingly scapegoated for the failures of German capitalism – economic crises and defeat in war.
Hitler was able to employ a centuries-old prejudice against Jewish people for his own aims; on the one hand evoking the stereotype of the ‘Jewish banker,’ effectively allowing German capitalists, and capitalism as a whole, to evade blame; while simultaneously drawing on the spectre of the ‘Jewish Bolshevik,’ referring to the fact that because of their historical oppression, Jews made up a disproportionate part of the socialist and workers’ movements. At one point he even referred to the ‘slogan’ of ‘woman’s emancipation’ as being an invention of ‘Jewish intellectuals.’2 Being able to blur the lines between exploited and exploiter in the creation of a racialised national enemy suited the Nazi regime. Abram Leon, a Jewish Marxist and co-thinker of Leon Trotsky, who would go on to be murdered in Auschwitz, pointed this strategy out, writing: “Hitler states in Mein Kampf that it is indispensable to present the various enemies under a common aspect, otherwise there is a danger that the masses will start thinking too much about the differences which exist among those enemies.”3
In this way, the Nazis were able to implement fascism in Germany by utilising racism in a period of capitalist crisis to mobilise disenfranchised middle-class, bankrupt and unemployed folks against radical sections of workers, and in doing so, violently suppressing workers’ dissent, and protecting capitalist interests.
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
The concept of volksgemeinschaft – a German term that roughly translates to ‘folk community’ – was a core ideological tenet of the Nazi regime, which would have significant effects on women’s rights. In evoking a fantasy of national unity; a ‘classless’ fiction in which a racially homogeneous population of heteronormative family units functioned in perfect cohesion, the Third Reich hoped to protect and advance German capitalism by placing tight controls on the German population.
Traditional gender roles were always a mainstay of Nazi ideology. From the outset, women were seen as crucial to the project of the ‘volk’ and ‘state’ – with childbirth and motherhood positioned as a ‘life source’ to the nation; not only propagating the ‘Aryan’ race, but also German values. Kinder (children); Küche (kitchen); Kirche (church) were pushed as the central tenets of womanhood, and their roles in nurturing the volksgemeinschaft.
Many laws and state initiatives were implemented aimed at reinforcing traditional gender roles. Marriage loans were given to newly-wed couples on the condition that the wife did not work, with 25% of that loan getting expunged for every child they had. While German men could win awards for “valour” in war, ‘suitable’ women could earn the ‘Mother’s Cross’ for having large numbers of children.
Gender roles were consciously inculcated into German citizens from childhood. Young boys aged between ten and 18 were enlisted to join the Hitler Youth, being instructed in Nazi ideology, and placing a major focus on sports, physical ability, and military training. By contrast, the League of German Girls enforced the caregiving duties of women within the home. Women were expected to dress in the traditional German peasant fashions; plain dresses, plaits and flat shoes. Importantly, even as neither youth organisation replaced formal education, intellect and learning was definitively de-emphasised under Nazi Germany. Hitler did not want innovative future leaders; but rather, blindly obedient tools of the fascist state.
Looksmaxxing and Tradwives – Nazi gender roles reimagined
It’s hard not to see the parallels between the rigidity of the gender roles posed by the fascist Nazi regime, and those being popularised today by far-right influencers. Nazi women donning themselves in the garb of the German peasantry of a bygone era recalls the prairie dresses of the Trad Wife aesthetic. The hypermasculine focus on athleticism and militarism inculcated in Hitler Youth activities evokes the modern fixation with ‘mogging’ (derived from AMOG, ‘alpha male of the group).
Part of this reassertion of gender roles has to do with the need to exploit the reproductive labour of women. While the economic devastation of the interwar period necessitated some public funding, in reality, most of this social investment was aimed at either regenerating national economic activity and/or enforcing fascist ideology to maintain control. In reality, Nazis and all iterations of true fascists are against social investment, as this cuts across capitalist profiteering and their drive to militarisation. This was summed up by a leading Nazi of the 1930s, Hermann Goering, when he said: “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”
Returning women to the home to care for children and the elderly allowed the Nazis to divest from public services such as health care, childcare, and education, allowing them to put money into these sectors only insofar as it facilitated them to entrench fascist ideology. In order to enforce this, they could not only rely on economic incentives, they also had to try to instill a desire to emulate traditional gender roles, including amongst women. In her book Bodies Under Siege: How the Far Right Attack on Reproductive Rights went Global, journalist Siân Norris refers to the concepts of the ‘mythic past’ and ‘natural order,’ both of which are regularly employed by fascist thinkers. In creating a fictionalised image of a more peaceful, more secure, feudal German society, the Nazis were able to push back some of the liberties gained by the workers’ and feminist movements, linking the crises of interwar German capitalism with the ‘disruption’ to the natural order due to these gains. If you convince women that their suffering comes from feminist advances, you can more easily convince them to return to the private sphere of the home and exploit their labour in birthing, feeding, caring for, and ideologically producing a nation of loyal German workers.
A similar phenomena can be seen today in the ways in which some women, including some former feminists, have contributed to the re-popularisation of “Trad Wife” content. The second wave feminist movement made important strides, including pushing back on the idea that a woman having a career does not mean that you have to sacrifice parenthood and family. However, in the modern era of neoliberal capitalism, where social supports are few or non-existent, as Norris puts it, the feminist adage of “women can have it all,” has in practice meant, “women have to do it all.” The allure of a slower lifestyle more connected to nature is understandable in today’s fast paced, tech-driven world. However, the reality of succumbing to the complete control of a family patriarch and being treated as a baby-producing machine for the sake of a White, Christian nation is far from the relaxing, ‘back to basics’ lifestyle advertised on the tin. If under capitalism, workers are engaged in a coercive relationship with big business owners, in which they toil for only a fraction of their labour’s worth; women confined to their reproductive roles without external supports are trapped in an even more intensely coercive dynamic, exploited by the patriarch, for the service of both family and capitalism.
That men and boys in Nazi Germany were being trained as future soldiers and workers speaks to an exploitative relationship in which fostering a stereotypical macho role also serves the needs of the fascist state. Providing a pertinent example of how this plays out today, the X account of the US ‘Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering’ posted an image in February 2026 of a grinning soldier with the caption “Low cortisol. Lethalitymaxxing.”4 Manosphere influencers and their tech billionaire co-thinkers make young men and boys feel that if they have enough muscle; if they value aggression and might; if they invest in enough crypto or get-rich-quick schemes; if they maintain enough control over their wives and children; then they can maintain a semblance of autonomy in today’s crisis ridden system. Instead, they are becoming foot soldiers and cannon fodder for an increasingly fascistic system; exploited as consumers; exploited as workers; and being trained up as soldiers, all the while being sold the myth that feminists, queer folk, and immigrants are the source of their unhappiness.
In both cases, the women and men being drawn to fascist ideas are having their anger misdirected. A socialist, planned economy, which takes the key levers of the economy into public and democratic ownership, and sees production as a means to maintain the collective good, rather than making profits for the billionaires, has the power to cut across the hustle culture, the loneliness, and the economic insecurity that is at the heart of the reasons why some people are being drawn into far right ideas.
Bodies under siege – from 1933 to 2026
Again, we find an eerie echo in these Nazi attacks on bodily autonomy and queer expression in today’s world. From Poland, to China, to Hungary, to the United States, to Argentina and Italy, attacks on abortion – or the threat of them – have been a dominant feature of the 2020s, one which has coincided with roll backs on gender recognition policies, access to gender-affirming care, and trans participation in sports. There has also been continued evidence of forced sterilisation policies for pregnant people for whom reproduction has been deemed ‘undesirable’ by the state. As recently as 2020, immigrant women in detention centres in Georgia, USA, have had hysterectomies performed on them without their full consent.13
The bodily autonomy of women and LGBTQIA+ folk was also a target of Nazi policy aimed at ‘preserving’ the ‘Aryan’ family, and by extension, the nation. Under the Weimar Republic, while abortion remained illegal, women in grassroots movements put abortion access on the political agenda of the left, with the Social Democratic and Communist Parties putting some modest reforms easing the criminalisation of abortion in place.5 This period also saw a flourishing of activism on sex education, birth control and LGBTQIA+ rights. In 1929, Magnus Hirschfeld developed the Institute for Sexology. The Berlin clinic was among the first to take LGBTQIA+ identities seriously.6 The fact that such initiatives were being taken a few short years before the Third Reich demonstrated the threat such liberatory ideas around gender and sexuality would have continued to pose to Nazi rule, and why they were such focal points in early Nazi policy. By May 1933, mere months after Nazi ascension, Hitler closed down the Institute for Sexology, all marriage and counselling centres, and destroyed all related research and educational materials.7
Hitler went further, consciously pushing pronatalist policies in his efforts to reinforce women’s role in society as mothers and caregivers; protectors of the volk. Hitler’s official position was that contraceptives were “a violation of nature, a degradation of womanhood, motherhood, and love.”8 Abortion, it goes without saying, was penalised for German women. In September 1933, the Berlin Council of Physicians stated that the practice of abortion, “shall be exterminated with a strong hand… the Council warns all practitioners who may seek to save their practice in abortion, by alleging that they only take cases in which abortion has already been attempted, that proceedings will be taken against every evil-doer who dares to injure our sacred, healthy race.”9
Of course, the restrictions on abortion and contraception for ‘Aryan’ women, were met with the polar opposite approach to so-called ‘undesirable births.’ In July 1933, the cabinet passed a law called “Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Future Generations” for the purpose of preventing “lives unworthy of life.” Among the ‘hereditary illnesses’ that qualified someone for forced sterilisation was developmental delays, schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington’s Disease, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, and severe alcoholism. Whether someone could be diagnosed with any of these so-called illnesses by the Nazi regime was decided in medical courts. In 1934, 94% of the petitions heard at hereditary health courts resulted in sterilisations.10 In 1938, the Nazis announced through the press that, “Germans could not have abortions, but Jews could, since this could only benefit the German people.”11 In the Nuremberg trials, Nazis were questioned over the forced abortions given to Eastern European labourers, which was described as being a ‘crime against humanity.’12
Breed, Baby, Breed!
Other than the aforementioned points on exploiting the unpaid reproductive labour of women, and promoting racism, why would fascists be so concerned with attacks on bodily autonomy? Birthrates are an oft-cited dog whistle of classical economists and fascists alike in periods of capitalist crisis. The chief reason capitalists care about declining birth rates is because economic growth, driven by a sizable working class consuming at high levels, while also being adequately exploited by bosses, relies on population growth. It is also a problem in terms of public investment; if younger generations cannot care for the old, then the state might actually have to invest in elderly care. Undoubtedly, this was a concern for Hitler and his Nazi goons as German birthrates were down in the interwar period, hitting a historic low fertility rate of 1.65 in 1933.14
Under a socialist planned economy, where economic growth through capitalist competition is not an indicator of success, or a measure which would have cost of living implications for ordinary people, birth rate would not be such a concern. In fact, it is likely that a section of people today who are choosing not to have children, might actually want to in a world in which socialised and free childcare and healthcare, public housing, and reduced work hours are stitched into the fabric of society. Birth rates tend to increase, even under capitalism, in periods of economic stability where quality of life indicators also go up, such as in the post-WWII ‘baby boomer’ era. The fact that fascist policies do not take measures to improve the quality of life as a means of increasing the birth rate, and instead restrict access to abortion, contraception, and sexual health information, demonstrates that their true concerns have nothing to do with ‘family’ and ‘life,’ but rather, profits, and ‘growth.’ True bodily autonomy also includes the choice to have children, which capitalism as an impoverishing, brutal system denies in a multitude of ways.
Immigration is also a way in which capitalism has historically dealt with the threat of economic slowdown. And yet, in countries in which the fascist threat has seemed most extreme in recent years, immigrants are under attack. This speaks to the precarity of the situation for those in power at the moment. Former Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, infamously stated in 2021 that the Democrats were, “trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world.”15 While this is a ludicrous claim, rooted in the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, there was some basis to the fear that an increasingly diverse electorate would tend to vote left, particularly at that time, in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter revolt. In the recent period, workers from North Africa, some of whom would have had experience in the 2011 revolt in the region popularly known as the ‘Arab Spring,’ played a key role in the dock workers strikes in Genoa in solidarity with Palestine.16
Immigration threatens the fascist construction of the volksgemeinschaft by potentially illustrating to so-called ‘native’ workers the value of solidarity in illuminating that they have a common enemy in their exploiters. This is a troubling prospect to capitalism in normal times, and one which is intolerable in a period of extreme crisis from which fascism emerges, where all potential dissent must be crushed. All of this is to say, there is a material need from the point of view of fascism that reproduction must be controlled: capitalist growth must be protected, meaning that the potential solidarity and class divisions exposed by immigration cannot be tolerated.
Solidarity is the enemy of Fascism
From labour exploitation, to rising birth rates to racist immigration policies – controlling the bodies and lives of women and queer people posed many material benefits to the Nazis. However, perhaps the greatest risk posed by gender equality was the potential for any form of liberation to raise the sights of the working class and the oppressed and embolden them to take on the regime.
In February, on his America First livestream, fascist activist Nick Fuentes unintentionally revealed just this, saying, “Women get sent to the gulags first obviously… they’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people… Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd… So they go to the gulags first.” Women and queer rights are under attack not only because of the need to enforce the gender binary in order to exploit and divide, but also because in protesting for their own rights and well-being, the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements have emboldened others to do the same. Fascism, as an extreme version of capitalism which must crush any semblance of a fight back in order to protect capitalist interests, cannot tolerate this.
All you fascists are bound to lose
The crises of capitalism today are such that world developments that seemed disparate and unrelated are revealed to be intimately connected. Even to the average person who doesn’t closely follow politics, it is obvious to one degree or another that bombs that fall on schools in Iran flow from the same system that sees families choosing between heating and eating in the US.
While this interconnected web of despair has been able to be exploited by nefarious far-right actors, it also contains the basis for solidarity, as more people begin to see the links between their own oppression and liberation and that of others. As the trans socialist activist Leslie Feinberg once said so aptly, “My right to be me is tied with a thousand threads with your right to be you.”
Socialist change and liberation is the opposite of fascist fear-mongering and control in every way. Where fascists sow hatred and division, socialists foment solidarity and a collective struggle for liberation. Where fascists rely on control and suppression, socialists fight for a society free from exploitation and oppression, where humans are free to express their authentic selves. Where fascism privatises the economy, suppressing workers’ activism, slashing public services, siding with big business and landlordism for the sake of capitalist profiteering, socialists fight for nationalising key sectors of the economy, and bringing them into public democratic control for the sake of the public good. This kind of world is not only worth fighting for, it is the only antidote to fascism, which is a safety valve of the current capitalist system. Let us set forth to achieve it.
Notes:
1 Sian Norris,(2023) Bodies Under Siege, “The Extremists: The Anti-Abortion Far Right,”, Verso Books, p 34
2 John Simkin, “Women in Nazi Germany”, https://spartacus-educational.com/
3 Abram Leon, The Jewish Question, “The decay of capitalism and the tragedy of the Jews in the 20th century”, www.marxists.org
4 Department of War CTO, (6 Feb 2026) “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”, X.com
5 Minou Arjomand, 14 Jan 2022, ‘In Weimar Germany, Women Fought for Abortion Justice’, Jacobin, https://jacobin.com/2022/01/abortion-choice-welfare-socialism-rights-1920s
6 David, Henry P., et al, 1988 ‘Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany’, Population and Development Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 1988, pp. 86, https://doi.org/10.2307/1972501
7 ibid, p 89
8 ibid p 90
9 Hodann, M., 1934, ‘Germany’, International Group for the Investigation of Contraception issue 5, pp 22-25.
10 David, Henry P., et al, p 91.
11 Jill Stephenson, 1975, Women in Nazi Society, Croom Helm, pp. 62-63.
12 Prosecutor at the Nuremberg RuSHA (Race and Resettlement Office) trial, March 1948, NWCT, microfilm 894, roll 31, pp. 13-14.
13 USA: Reports of Forced Sterilisation of Women in ICE Detention Deeply Alarming, 17 Sept 2020, Amnesty International, https://www.amnesty.ie/usa-reports-of-forced-sterilisation-of-women-in-ice-detention-deeply-alarming/
14 Saloni Dattani and Lucas Rodés-Guirao, 24 Feb 2025, ‘The baby boom in seven charts’, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/baby-boom-seven-charts
15 Chris Cameron, 9 Apr 2025, ‘The Anti-Defamation League calls for Tucker Carlson to be fired over ‘replacement theory’ remarks’, NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/us/tucker-carlson-adl-replacement-theory.html
16 Lucia Pradella, 5 Jan 2026, ‘Italy’s general strike for Palestine’, International Socialism, https://isj.org.uk/italy-strike-palestine/