The Women Have Spoken, Loud And Clear

A people’s movement is building up in favour of the country’s female wrestlers who have been on the road protesting against sexual exploitation since early this year.

Before taking to the street, the women had complained to concerned authorities and waited for the police to take action against the accused. After months passed by and justice continued to elude then, the sports women were forced to go public with their grievances.

For long there was a stony silence as if the wronged women did not exist. That injustice done to them did not exist. In words unspoken, society seemed to say that these women should not have left the home and hearth to play sports, and compete with men for medals in the first place.

After all, most people in society still prefer to see women remain in that corner of the home called the kitchen. Patriarchy continues to look upon women as home-makers and as best, mother figures of the household.

The opinion that still prevails is that women are inferior and weaker than men and they should not be encouraged to play a prominent role in public life as politicians, sports women or police women.

Despite the progress made by Indian women in recent times, the most respectable job cut out for women by patriarchy is to produce children, and to keep the clan they belong to pure and alive. In India today there seems to be an attempt to demote women like Germany had done on the eve of World War II.

The Nazi Party had placed women in the kitchen and in the home. Germany in the late 1930s had discouraged women from participating in political movements and in higher education. The Nazi ideal of a woman was that of a magnificent mother confined to a private sphere in the home.

Attractive rewards were introduced by the dictatorial regime of Adolf Hitler, head of Germany’s Nazi Party for women who best fit the role of a docile mother-figure in society. There was the Cross of Honour presented by the Nazis to encourage women to give birth to healthy Aryan children as their contribution to a German society of muscular men.

While the girl child was groomed to grow up into an ideal mother for the good of German society. It was the mother who had carried the racist ideologies of the regime to the future generation.

Hitler had publicly coaxed women to conceive, and in honour of his mother gave away a gold medal to women who had seven children. There was a silver medal for mothers with six children, and mothers of five children received a bronze medal.

The Nazi had wanted a racially pure population to add to Germany’s military strength and to provide a mass of settlers to colonise territory conquered in eastern Europe. Hitler had an aggressive population policy encouraging racially pure women to bear as many children as possible. Laws were framed to prohibit marriage between what was identified as the pure, and impure race!

Hitler had valued women for their biological power as generators of the race. In public speeches, Hitler had appealed to the divine destiny of German women and their sacred duty to the German nation.

He had reinforced his views of womanhood, pointing out that the world of the woman is a smaller world. Her world is her husband, her family, her children, her home.

Hitler liked the idea of women being in the home and spending an entire lifetime fulfilling the primary goal of conceiving offspring, and later raising them to comply and conform to the standards and ideals of the Nazi regime.

Divorce was made easy for couples with four children after which the man was allowed to marry again and produce more children. While couples with many children received cash awards, single men and couples with no children were taxed heavily. Punishments for abortion were severe in the Nazi regime.

The Nazis wanted to protect their women from the reality of racial politics and therefore wanted them confined to the home. However, inside the home, women were expected to indulge in the bigotry propagated by the Nazis. They were expected to preach to the family the special qualities of the German race and the absolute necessity of getting rid of rivals.

Women had joined the Band of German Maidens and made their way into the East where they helped their men to end the life of fellow citizens. Recent research suggests that not all women were victims of the patriarchal powers of the Nazis but many benefited personally as collaborators of the sexist political regime in power.

Recent findings have also shown that women were active, influential participants in moulding the applications and direction of the Nazis central policies.

In ‘Mothers in the Fatherland’ author Claudia Koonz writes that many women had actively contributed to the Nazi regime on an individual and collective level. Koonz reports that women were guilty of having supported the misogynistic ideas of Hitler.

The most important role was to run a comfortable home for men who would return to relax in a happy family atmosphere after having done terrible things outside the home.

The second Sunday in May was declared a national Mother’s Day holiday in 1934. One newspaper printed the speech given at such a ceremony on such a day: “Our mothers will always be our guiding stars. Just as a man risks his life in battle, so too does the mother bravely and faithfully offer her life for the nation when she fulfils her sacred duty…

“The mother is ready to give children to the Führer (leader) in the numbers our people need for survival. To offer herself for the sake of the nation so that the nation might have eternity, that is the life purpose of the German mother, and that is why we must return to the eternal laws of blood and race.”

Around 1933, the erratic political and ideological tantrums of the times had made women give up jobs as civil servants, and at universities. However, in later years Hitler reviewed his perception of women in the job market to suit the political agenda of the Nazi regime.

Women were called to serve as guards in the Nazi camps and as nurses. Many women were employed as secretaries in the Nazi machinery of destruction when a significant number of women became active participants in the Holocaust as plunderers, organisers of the deportations and the mass shootings.

Some went so far as to commit murder. After the war, the majority remained silent about the crimes that they had committed and witnessed.

Hopefully this is not the path that is being followed in India today.

Cover Photograph File