Women, Gender Fascism in Europe, 1919-45

What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate them? This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades, and has led to lively debates in the academy. During the 1980s, scholars produced many studies of women, gender, and fascism in twentieth-century Europe. This volume makes a major new contribution to those studies and casts fresh light on questions such as women's responsibility for the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe, the relationship between the women's movement and the extreme right, and the relationships between conceptions of national identity (especially racial conceptions) and gender. Bringing emerging scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe alongside that of more established Western European historiography on the topic, the essays cover Serbia, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Poland in addition to Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, and conclude with a European-wide perspective. As a whole, the volume provides a compelling comparative examination of this important topic.