Buch also contrasts the place of women in Italian fascism with those under German.

‘Hitlerism Turns the Clock Back for Women’ by Vera Buch from Class Struggle (C.L.S.). Vol. 5 No. January, 1935.

Fascism is not revolutionary in basic sense of the word since it makes no change in the property relationships, and its “revolution” consists only in a change of the form of government. In its demagogic program before seizing power, in which the shoddy of reformism is interwoven with the real Fascist stuff, it poses as a progressive force. However, the operation of the whole movement is in fact definitely reactionary. The Nazi agrarian policy, which greatly strengthens the juker class and creates semi-serf like conditions for the peasantry, the anti-labor movement, the subsistence-farm movement and the policy for the woman, are all evidence of the reactionary texture of Fascism.

“Back to the home” at one stroke turns the clock back one hundred years for Germany’s womankind of all classes. For the working class it is one of the strands in the choking net of contradictions in which Fascism strikes desperately but vainly to get above the crisis, in which national self-sufficiency fights the international market, militarism beats against an increasing political isolation and the fantastic theory of the pure German race strives to robotize a class best trained of all in Marxist thinking. So unstable is the capitalist regime, whether Fascist or democratic, so sudden and violent are the contradictions and fluctuations today, that overnight, for example, upon the outbreak of a war, the policy for women would have to be revised and the women now driven out of jobs would have to be placed back in them. Conversely, in the United States, where for some time owning to the crisis a campaign against women going to work has been carried on, it would not take many more changes to see inaugurated a Hitler policy here.

Fascism aims at complete state regulation and control of all forms of life within the nation, at the complete subordination and discipline of the individual who is supposed to live only for the state. “Du Bist nichts” (“You are nothing”) the signs in the forced labor camps, daily remind the workers, men and women, that the miseries of their life are not supposed to concern them. The role of the women has been officially laid out for them; they are to be the homemakers, the bearers and rearers of numerous children of pure, unadulterated German stock to be enrolled int eh ranks of der Fuehrer’s armies.

Unemployment is the chief force behind this policy. In their desperate efforts to make jobs, or, rather, to appear to make them, the Nazis have driven hundreds of thousands of workers out of the country through racial and political persecution. They have driven the Jews out of the professions, hundreds of thousands of “Marxists and trade-unionists” have been herded in concentration camps, many thousands more have been drafted for forced labor on public works or on subsistence farms. The youth (boys and girls from 16 to 25) have been packed off to labor service camps. Still nothing is enough to fill the bottomless hole of unemployment.

German women have been working outside the home for many years. As far back as 1907 there were already over nine million woman wage-earners. In many lighter factory occupations and in clerical lines (as in the U.S.) They outnumbered the men. It was fairly common, since the crisis, for the woman to be the only breadwinner of the family inasmuch as the man could not find a job, just as it is here today. The drive to oust the women from jobs began in the provinces in the fall of 1933, and rapidly spread in scope through a series of decrees. It worked out along the following lines: 1. Wives of men in the civil service also at work had to relinquish their jobs in favor of men. 2. Women in the civil service posts were to retire wherever possible. 3. A drive against “multiple” earnings meant that women wage-workers of all sorts were pressed to give up a job to a man, either to husband or fiance, or if he were already working, to some other man. 4. Women have been given the cold shoulder in professions where they were already practising. 5. Enrollment of young women students in the universities has been restricted to a small percentage of the applicants, thus automatically cutting off most of Germany’s female generation from the possibility of an intellectual life and of training for a profession. This situation reminds one of the position of Jewish students in Czarist Russia or of the position of women in all countries one hundred years ago, before capitalist development expressing itself in the feminist movement had forced open the gates of colleges and professional training schools.

Accompanying thy ousting of women from jobs and their exclusion from the professions has been an ideological campaign training the women to think of themselves as wives and mothers only, helpmates of men and rearers of children, out of place in the factory, office or schoolroom. Marriage and childbearing are given great encouragement, as in Italy. Government loans (in the shape of a voucher for the purchase of furniture) are made to engaged girls (and, of course, they must give up their jobs to their fiances); 25% of the loan is cancelled upon the birth of each child. All sorts of home building schemes are afloat. Mass marriages take place where a few dozen or hundreds of couples are paired off at once (one of the most striking demonstrations of the Fascist collectivist policy). Prizes for big families are offered. (The present adult generation being destined for speedy removal via the trenches in the next war, replacement must be assured.) Sports and Nazi sport organizations are encouraged for young women, with a view of training them for healthy motherhood.

The whole Fascist labor policy is involved here. Half of the population, including the working class women, are driven backward into isolation, helplessness and stupidity. The women are cut off from the working class at the point of production, where they could organize effectively together with the men workers, where they could struggle to overthrow the yoke of capitalism.

Machinery took women out of the home at a time when the home was a center of production, where there was at least a productive function for them. The flooding of the labor market with armies of helpless women and children, which accompanied the industrial revolution, tore down the labor standards of the craftsmen, lengthened hours to an inhuman point and lowered wages. Generations of struggle have not sufficed to assimilate these groups fully with the army of men workers, as the lower wages of women and youth testify. Work at the machine placed an almost unbearable burden upon the back of the wage-earning woman, who still had to do her housework and care for her children in the hours after work. At the same time, it brought woman into mass contact with the organized working class, forced her also to organize, to become class conscious, to throw her strength into the struggle to free humanity. The feminist movement, a movement of middle-class women, which struggled hard to get democratic rights for women, the right to vote, to speak in public, to obtain education, to enter the professions, etc., rested upon the backbone of the women laborers in the factories who were too burdened to obtain many benefits from he advancement of their sex. Hitlerism with one blow has wiped out all advances obtained through women’s participation in production, and her political and social gains of the last century. It is a reactionary policy which can mean only a great set-back for the entire working class. It is part of the labor policy of crushing, robotizing and regimenting workers.

Mussolini’s policy towards Italian women has been very similar but has not brought about such a striking change in the life of the country, since in Italy, an agrarian and Catholic country, the women had not advanced so far. They never had the network of organizations the German women of all classes had built up for themselves. There was nothing to compare with the German Marxist-trained working class, in which the women had their share, with their own newspapers and meetings, as well as taking part in the demonstrations and movements of the working class as a whole. The German working class women were first in organization and class consciousness. In the U.S., on the other hand, while the organization of working class women falls behind that of the republican Germany, there is a higher status of women in the home and a higher standing in society generally, thanks to the colonial history of America, the freedom from feudal heritage, the great demand for labor and other peculiar American conditions.

The Hitler policy towards women proves the frailty of the achievements of feminism under capitalism, and the impossibility for any oppressed group in society to free itself except through a fundamental change in the property relations, that is, through the proletarian revolution. Soviet Russia, notwithstanding the degeneration of the Stalin regime, has achieved enough to point the way to freedom for womankind. At one stroke the first Soviet constitution granted full political and legal equality to women. This is an act of progress which time can never tear down, regardless of what the fate of the Workers’ State may be. The fullest freedom to work, to be trained and to take part in all social and political activities is now the Russian woman’s. At the same time, some beginning has been made towards solving the working woman’s most strenuous problem-the care of the home and children. Factory nurseries and community kitchens point the way out here. (However, we must add that under Stalin there have been retrogressive steps taken in regard to women in Russia as well as in regard to the workers generally).

The Fascist policy towards women’s status is something to make the whole working class strive with might and main to prevent a blow against one of its most vital parts.

The Communist League of Struggle was formed in March, 1931 by C.P. veterans Albert Weisbord, Vera Buch, Sam Fisher and co-thinkers after briefly being members of the Communist League of America led by James P. Cannon. In addition to leaflets and pamphlets, the C.L.S. had a mostly monthly magazine, Class Struggle, and issued a shipyard workers shop paper,The Red Dreadnaught. Always a small organization, the C.L.S. did not grow in the 1930s and disbanded in 1937.