Confronting the Fascist Menace: The Politics of British Women’s Activism at Home and Abroad, 1918-1945

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  • Huckestein, Erika M
    • College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
Abstract
  • The rise of fascism was a defining feature of politics and international relations across Europe in the interwar period. Two of the most prominent fascist governments were established in Italy by Benito Mussolini in 1922 and in Germany by Adolf Hitler in 1933. By the early 1930s, British feminists viewed fascism as the single largest menace to women’s rights. In the years before and during the Second World War, British women’s organizations used the threat posed by fascism to legitimize their engagement in political discourses and to emphasize the importance of protecting the democratic rights that women had fought for decades to obtain. This dissertation argues that British feminists were significant members of the broad anti-fascist movement in Europe. Women’s organizations combined direct activism, for instance attempts to rescue individual victims of fascist governments, with indirect anti-fascist activism, such as involvement in campaigns to end sex discrimination in employment policies and nationality law, in order to combat the rise of fascism at home and abroad. This dissertation uses anti-fascism, often treated as a separate topic of study, as a lens through which to understand the nature of British women’s activism before and during the Second World War. Many of the campaigns contained within the women’s movement in this period were rearticulated under the threat of fascism. Fascists depicted visions of the future that activists in the women’s movement responded to directly. Feminists fought for the political, economic, legal, and social rights that would be stripped from women if the future world order imagined by fascists came to fruition. By reconciling the histories of British feminism and anti-fascism, this dissertation sheds new light on how these two movements were mutually constitutive of one another.
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Advisor
  • Reid, Donald
  • Pennybacker, Susan D
  • Mayhall, Laura
  • Turk, Katherine
  • Burrill, Emily
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2019
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