Page 122 - Fascism: The Bloody Ideology Of Darwinsim

122 FASCISM: THE BLOODY IDEOLOGY OF DARWINISM

Through various measures,
restrictions on women in the
workplace were also imposed in
education. For instance, a decree of
Jan. 30, 1927 forbade women in
high school from taking classes in
literature and philosophy. A decree
passed in 1928 resorted to legal
measures to oppose women's
Fascism is mired by a hatred of woman,
whom it regards as inferior. education, and women were
prevented from becoming
directors of middle schools. Female students were required to pay double the
fees in schools and universities.
A decree which Mussolini put before Parliament on Nov. 28, 1933
declared, "State bodies are empowered to impose conditions excluding women
in advertisements for exams to take on new employees.. They must impose
limits against a rise in the number of female workers in public offices…" 60
According to a decree instituted by force of law on Sept. 1, 1938, women could
only make up 10 percent of the workforce in public offices.
In Nazi Germany the status of women as "second class citizens" was
even more pronounced. The German Education Ministry decided that women
should make up no more than 10 percent of high school graduates. In 1934,
only 1,500 out of every 10,000 female high school graduates were allowed to
proceed to higher education. In 1929, there were 39 National Socialist
education bodies. Only two of these were for women. Laws were passed
banning women from taking Latin classes in middle school: before having
even finished high school, they were prevented from going on to university. 61
These decrees did not just represent a social ideology or merely
imposed regulations to foster a division of labor, they were actually the
implementation of the biological dogma of Nazism. Maria A. Macciocchi,
author of Eléments pour une Analyse du Fascisme comments that in the eyes of
the Nazis, women were a kind of animal. 62 According to such a philosophy,
women were a primitive race, at a lower level in biological terms. 63

The Darwinist Roots of the Hostility to Women

The root of this prejudice among fascists towards women was, as in so
many other matters, Darwinism. Fascists did not merely appropriate the idea