From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home
Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/21/fascism-women-homemaker-trad-wife
In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.
To her audience – approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women’s magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz – Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called “the cradle and the ladle”, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.
“There was a whole array of women’s magazines that glorified housewives” in Nazi Germany, says Koonz, a professor emerita of history at Duke University. “It would be the equivalent of social media today.” Frauen Warte contained nothing too political – just broadly appealing lifestyle content about keeping a clean and well-provisioned home while raising a healthy family, with occasional debates about how much makeup one should wear. A barefaced look was preferred – much like the “clean girl” trend of today. “In a censored society everyone needs debates about harmless topics,” says Koonz.
Koonz is well-acquainted with the ways political strongmen rely on women’s labor at the family level to implement state ideology. Her 1986 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, describes how the ordinary women of Nazi Germany “operated at its very center”, incubating ideals of white supremacy, female subordination and sacrifice at home.
Fascism and the family
Thinkers including 20th-century German theorist Theodor Adorno and contemporary American political philosopher George Lakoff theorized about the paternalist personality of authoritarians, with Lakoff noting that in modern history, far-right authoritarian regimes institutionalize male authority through a family-like hierarchy: women are subservient to men and both obey the nation’s metaphorical “strict father”. In the home, paternal authority and maternal subservience prime children for a wider social order, teaching them to see women’s submission as stability, and to accept fear and conformity as the price of belonging.
“There’s been a reluctance to name this moment as fascism,” says cultural historian Tiffany Florvil, yet extreme authoritarian dynamics can be clearly seen in the American right today. (Indeed, Trump supporters can’t seem to stop calling him “Daddy”.)
The government’s unprecedented deportations of immigrants; use of Ice to unjustly detain people in detention centers fraught with human rights abuses; intimidation of judges, law firms and universities; and assaults on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy are prompting historians who specialize in fascism to leave the country.
And significant backlash against gender equality is under way. The idea that women’s bodies are state resources for sustaining population appears to be re-emerging; the Trump administration is encouraging traditional roles by rolling back workplace equity, restricting reproductive rights and policing gender identity.
A woman’s “most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation”, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, told an audience of women in 1933. Racially selective population growth was core to the agenda of such nationalist, fascist regimes as Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. The only path to honor for most women was birthing children, formalized through financial rewards and medals for prolific mothers.
Claudia Koonz, historian
Similarly, the Trump administration touts pronatalist rewards, such as a $1,000 government-funded investment account for new babies, and has discussed others, including a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with six children. While vice-president JD Vance cried: “I want more babies in the United States of America” at an anti-abortion rally in early 2025, Republicans in Congress plotted eliminating federal tax credits for daycare and other supports that enable women’s workforce participation – an effort to control women’s social roles.
The administration’s policies suggest its goal is not only population growth but specifically more white births. By rolling back reproductive rights more drastically than at any point in the last 50 years, the Trump administration has set the stage for worsening maternal mortality – especially for Black women, who die in childbirth at nearly three-and-a-half times the rate of white women. It has also demonstrated hostility to people of color, tearing immigrant families apart, curtailing immigration and ordering an end to birthright citizenship.
Fascist pronatalist policy depends on the veneer of white, Christian “family values” – a strategy that echoes Scholtz-Klink’s work as Nazi Germany’s proto-influencer, promoting a sweet, soft life of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“children, kitchen, church”). When interviewed, Scholtz-Klink insisted to Koonz that she and her female colleagues had nothing to do with concentration camps, genocide or political doctrine – that they barely even knew about those things. Instead, Scholtz-Klink made domestic and reproductive duty feel prestigious, rather than peremptory, helping “the Nazi party make ordinary women feel valued in a way that other women in more liberal parties didn’t”, Koonz says.
Motherhood can be deeply fulfilling, and few would argue that family life is unimportant. Yet authoritarian movements have long politicized it, reframing it as women’s sole purpose and a substitute for autonomy and rights. National instability only amplifies the message that a woman’s rightful place is home with her children. “If there’s chaos,” Koonz says, “then the women who are keeping the home front stable have even more responsibility: ‘There’s chaos out there, but my family is going to have traditional values.’”
How women spread the domestic fantasy
As authoritarian regimes rise, they often rely on a women’s movement to keep society stable and operational on a household level, framing regressive policies in more approachable and alluring terms. This is especially true for fascist regimes, which rely on mass participation to advance their extreme nationalist agendas. Today, that role is being taken up by the digital “womanosphere”, also called the femosphere.
A counterpart to the “manosphere”, an influential online sphere redolent with misogyny, the womanosphere is an informal web of online creators who rally around normative femininity. Its idea of womanhood is informed by anti-queerness, white supremacy, fundamentalist Christianity and traditional maternalism. It also maps on to the extreme, discriminatory agenda of Project 2025, which aims to roll back historical victories of the women’s movement such as workplace equality, education and healthcare.
These values are platformed by conservative millennial and gen Z content creators including Alex Clark, host of the Maha wellness podcast Culture Apothecary; “professional yapper” Brett Cooper; YouTuber Isabel Brown; conservative provocateur Candace Owens; anti-transgender activist and podcast host Riley Gaines; Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey; and publications such as the “conservative Cosmo”, Evie magazine. Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative student group, held a yearly women’s summit where marriage, procreation and homemaking were key topics.
Womanosphere content ranges from the overtly political to what might, at first glance, look like ordinary lifestyle aesthetics. These nostalgic visions of beauty – wholesome, aspirational representations of gardening, cooking, wellness and motherhood, embodied by “trad” homemaking influencers such as Hannah Neeleman and Sarah Therese – have broad appeal. While not all “cottagecore” creators are conservative proselytizers, this type of content is noted for its role in an “alt-right” pipeline, where liberatory innovations such as birth control are framed as “toxic”, and the ideal status is married, barefoot and pregnant.
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Womanosphere content elevates the joys of the home and motherhood while sidelining women’s mounting social and political disenfranchisement, ultimately reinforcing fascist values such as gender hierarchy and duty to the nation. To Koonz, it all feels like more of the same thing: “children, kitchen and church” for the digital age.
In the womanosphere, the home is a woman’s place: good, normal women want to stay there. This digital movement reflects what feminist media scholar Dr Jilly Boyce Kay calls “reactionary feminism”, an anti-progressive backlash that argues “commitment, affection, and protection” are women’s “evolutionarily-determined ‘interests’”, with little room for nuance.
The womanosphere trades in individualistic strategies for rebelling against the perceived liberal status quo, reinforcing age-old gender hierarchies. Namely, if a woman is financially dependent on a husband, she is free from the burden of paid employment and can devote herself fully to domestic life, rather than splitting her time between job and home. The crushing pressure on women to both work and do most of the housework – as well as the public health crisis of parental burnout – make these arguments seductive.
But womanosphere content tends to gloss over complex material realities; for instance, the conditions that made single-breadwinner households more viable in the 1950s no longer exist. Attacks on reproductive rights actually curtail the futures women are able to choose, and without financial independence, women can be unable to leave situations of domestic violence.
Sophie Lewis, feminist theorist
Women like Scholtz-Klink grasped the historically rare opportunity to distinguish themselves in authoritarian regimes by becoming mouthpieces; today, no official sanction is required (though political groups do fund content creators through often opaque campaigns). The attention economy offers its own incentives, and the contrarianism of women fighting gender parity can make for algorithmic gold. The hypocrisy is evident: womanosphere creators often espouse the wisdom of removing oneself from “the sphere of market-mediated labor while, in fact, monetizing their content”, says Sophie Lewis, feminist theorist and author of the recent book Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation.
Womanosphere influencers often post nonchalantly misogynistic content. Recently, influencer Alex Clark, who has boasted about her “sneaky” tactic of spreading ideology through wellness content, platformed a guest who claimed that when women “step into the masculine” – by expressing anger, assertiveness or authority – it “actually literally kills [them]”, citing rising rates of breast cancer as proof. For the sake of their own health, the clip suggests, women should remain docile and calm.
But patriarchal politics hurt women, even those who participate: far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told the Daily Mail this August that there are “women in our party that are really sick and tired of the way [Republican] men treat Republican women”. Republican women realize they cannot get abortions when they need them. Cooper, the womanosphere creator, admitted to the New York Times that rightwing peers have called her “crazy” for working while pregnant. Lauren Southern, a Canadian influencer who rose to fame posting content critical of feminism and immigration, recently released a memoir confessing she was emotionally tortured in her traditionalist marriage. “The most miserable people I’ve met have been stuck in this weird, larpy trad dynamic,” Southern said in an interview this May.
When the state fails, women step in
Fascism may betray women, but it still relies on their support.
“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses,” says historian Diana Garvin.
Mussolini’s fascist Italy engineered an image of modernization, economic growth and agricultural plenty from the 1920s to the 40s. But after Mussolini alienated trade partners, Italy’s reliance on domestic products contributed to food shortages so severe Italians did not have enough wheat to make pasta. In her 2022 book Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work, Garvin writes that the state’s propagandist narrative of domestic bliss concealed systemic reliance on women’s unpaid labor in the home; mothers were expected to absorb food shortages through their own ingenuity and hard work.
Italian lifestyle magazines such as La Cucina Italiana worked to launder the food scarcity resulting from Mussolini’s poor governance into a source of individual pride, sharing pictures of little girls who grew prize vegetables and offering recipes using leftover rice. The government wanted women to cover for its failures, and “be happy about it”, says Garvin.
Similar efforts may be required in the US as Donald Trump guts what remains of a paltry social safety net. The administration has cut funding to healthcare and the Environmental Protection Agency; dismantled the Department of Education, reducing the accessibility and equity of education for children; and downgraded systems intended to keep the food supply safe, including staff cuts at the Food and Drug Administration.
Under the pretense of a return to rugged individualism, the Trump administration is abdicating responsibility for American needs. In July, the US Department of Homeland Security posted kitsch art of a frontier couple cradling a baby on social media, with the caption “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” The message: Americans should be proud of their resilience, as they are being left on their own.
Womanosphere influencers prime women to romanticize duty and encourage them to dismiss feminist political engagement as woke nonsense. They help direct the national conversation away from how the government could invest in communities through benefits such as better housing stability, paid family leave, Medicare for all and universal, affordable childcare. Democrats’ failure to adequately support and value women has enabled the right to capitalize on widespread dissatisfaction, convincing women to expect less from a nation that could give them more.
Without adequate and accessible medical care, food and education, mothers can end up becoming de facto home teachers, farmers and medics. Trad influencers gloss this unjust workload as a homage to homesteading (and leverage it to market unsubstantiated remedies) instead of calling it what it is: picking up the state’s slack. Cuts to education seem less threatening when you are convinced your role is to homeschool your children; a less safe, more expensive food supply seems less problematic when you believe everyone should be growing their own produce and making everything from scratch; defunding the Center for Disease Control does not seem so bad when you have been conditioned to distrust vaccines and believe you can cure a child’s measles with “herbal remedies or old food medicine”.
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Mussolini’s government also “really wanted to get women out of middle-class jobs so that they could open up those spaces for men, because there had been real employment problems”, says Garvin. The nation used the cultural trope of the “donna-crisi” or “crisis woman” – a negative stereotype of an urban and independent woman, similar to the contemporary American right’s “victim of feminism” or JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” – to slander working women. Yet while propaganda promoted the image of middle and upper-class women sheltered from work, the reality was more calculated, says Garvin: fascist Italy wanted lower-class women in the workforce, where they could be paid less than men.
In July, the Trump administration imposed new work requirements for Medicaid, a state-federal program providing healthcare to more than 77 million low-income people, 80% of them women with a median age of 40. Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins has suggested these citizens can work in US farms to maintain their coverage, replacing deported immigrant workers. For all their promises of domestic bliss, classical European fascist regimes sent housewives into factories and fields when labor was needed. Consistently, it is women who are ultimately expected to shoulder the burdens of the nation’s failure.
Women who become obedient domestic caretakers may be willfully, even happily, bearing the mantle. They may believe they see a fundamental truth in assuming dependence as the price of security, trusting that patriarchy will protect them so long as they keep its house spotless and bake its bread with a smile. Yet many do not reckon with the influence of hypocritical propaganda on their choices – or with the consequences of accommodating a tyranny that could turn on them.
In place of freedom, equality, power and choice, the Trump regime offers women flattery and a duplicitously simplistic worldview that denies their agency. While women are crucial to the Maga project, some of its supporters have begun to realize that traditional life is not just a halcyon fantasy of the past, but a harbinger of a forlorn future. Life on the patriarchal homestead may not turn out as rosy as advertised.
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