[Gesth-l] barbara einhorn budapesten

[petoand]

Gender and Dictatorship: Is the Outcome Predictable?

 

Prof. Barbara Einhorn

University of Sussex, UK

 

Monday, November 19, 2007

Karl Popper Room

11-12:40

 

 

Description of the Talk:

 

The temptation to equate fascism and communism is one to which many
historians succumb. However, such equations can be facile or misleading and
often suffer from retrospective value judgements that tend to produce
historical inaccuracies.  An analysis of the gender politics of mass
dictatorships is prone to the same hazards. The question posed in the title
of this paper about whether the outcome is predictable, can be answered by
the simple fact that it depends: first on the ideology, second on the
implementation of that ideology in the particular social, political,
historical and cultural context. 

 

This paper raises philosophical considerations about gender politics in mass
dictatorships within the specific historical contexts of Nazi Germany and
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe under state socialist regimes.
The difference in the ideologies is striking. In Nazi Germany, the
ideological frame was nationalist: individuals were required to subordinate
themselves to the exclusionary and expansionist national interest. For
women, their duty was summarised in the phrase Kinder Küche Kirche
(children, kitchen and church). Of course it depended which women. Not all
women were deemed worthy of reproducing the pure Aryan nation. For men,
their supreme duty was to fight and be prepared to die in the name of
Germany. State socialist ideology on the other hand set out with an
emancipatory objective: the full development of the individual was seen to
be achieved through their engagement in the collective interest. The rosy
dawn of a socially just egalitarian future was the objective in whose name
both men and women were to subsume their individual aspirations and needs.
Women were prescribed a dual role, as workers and mothers, whilst men could
confine themselves to a single one, as workers. Herein lay the seeds of a
troubled gender politics. This paper discusses many-layered differences and
similarities of gender politics in these two political systems. 

 

 


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