Mass Dictatorships and Gender Politics: Is the Outcome Predictable?

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Venue
Faber Building
Room
FG08

About this event

Professor Barbara Einhorn

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.

In this seminar Professor Einhorn will consider the gender politics of 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 thought 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. Professor Einhorn will discuss both many-layered differences and some troubling similarities in the gender politics of these ostensibly totally opposed political systems.

Bio

Barbara Einhorn is a professor of Gender Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Sussex.  She is the associate editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and a member of the editorial board of International Feminist Journal of Politics and Asian Journal of Women’s Studies.  Her research interests include: Citizenship, civil society, and gender politics with special reference to mass dictatorships, and to democratisation in Central and Eastern Europe; Identity, ‘home’ and belonging in narratives of exile and return; and Gender, nation and identity.  Some of her recent publications include: ‘Questioning the Secular: Religion, Gender, Politics’, Special Issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies , 15 (3) (2008) Editor; Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: From Dream to Awakening (Palgrave Macmillan 2006); ‘Insiders and Outsiders: Within and Beyond the Gendered Nation’, in: Kathy Davis, Mary Evans and Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (Sage 2006); ‘Citizenship in an Enlarging Europe: Contested Strategies’, Czech Sociological Review , 41(6) (2005); and ‘Gender and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe’ (with Charlotte Sever), International Feminist Journal of Politics , 5(2) (2003).

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk