In the wake of World War I, Italy’s coalition government, faced with rampant inflation and factional infighting, left a leadership vacuum. That void would be filled by an ex-socialist journalist named Benito Mussolini and his fasci di combattimento (“fighting leagues”)—which, years later, would become far better known simply as the first fascists.
When Mussolini and his Blackshirts marched on Rome in 1922 and subsequently assumed control, the National Fascist Party and its manifesto initially endorsed a patchwork of progressive political platforms, including “the vote for women and equality of salary for all sexes.” Many Italian women at this time believed that a halcyon period of gender equality was now at hand.
During World War I, Italy had become very dependent on the women who propped up the economy during the war effort, but after the conflict, a perception emerged that they had stolen employment from men. The fascists also recognized that they had to co-opt the Catholic Church and manipulate traditional teachings on family in order to rule in a religious country—so the National Fascist Party pivoted, and the donna fascista, or “fascist woman,” would soon be defined in far less enlightened terms.
Proclaiming low birthrates to be the “problem of problems,” historian Perry Wilson writes in Women in Twentieth Century Italy that “motherhood was elevated into a national mission,” and the new administration enacted policies to tax bachelorhood and award benefits to large families.
The fascists’ motherhood agenda was specifically designed to have dominion over women’s bodies, including through bans on abortion and contraception—and thus, hostility to women’s rights became inextricably linked to fascist ideology.
Because of Italian military defeats and a feeling of lost masculinity, the fascists contrived a demographic crisis that tried to relegate women once again to a prison of patriarchy—and for a time, it worked. Italian women did not get the right to vote until 1945.
When motherhood is promoted in the context of a duty as it was in fascist Italy, it becomes a form of misogyny—and ideas now circulating across the Atlantic are reminiscent of such authoritarian regimes in the past.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion care, many Republican Party representatives are doubling down by opposing contraception, and the Alabama state Supreme Court has even declared that frozen embryos are now considered children.
Political posturing over the control of women’s bodies is front and center in the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election, which presents a stark contrast for voters: One candidate, former President Donald Trump, has been described by opponents and former advisors alike an aspiring dictator who routinely espouses sexist tropes, and the other is Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman who has championed women’s rights.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who has been designated to articulate the Republican Party’s views on family, has made several controversial statements that align more broadly with the misogynistic rhetoric of autocrats. Among them, Vance has called women Democratic leaders “childless cat ladies”; said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they favor work over having children; and in a podcast interview he gave in 2020, he didn’t argue when the host said that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to help raise children.
In a 2021 interview with the Federalist, Vance said we must “go to war against the anti-child ideology,” going on to disparage women journalists who have written about the choice to not have children; adding that a woman pursuing a career rather than children is “a sad, lonely, pathetic person.” He said in a 2021 fundraising email that the childless “don’t have a direct stake in this country” and argued that those people shouldn’t be “making our most important decisions.”
Such regressive moralizing is not limited to men in politics. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders also recently jumped on the bandwagon, demeaning Harris because she does not have “biological children.”
While the extreme views espoused by Vance are gaining newfound prominence among conservative political platforms in the United States, they are long-standing policy fixtures of authoritarian societies.
Driven in part by declining birthrates deemed “catastrophic,” echoes of the Italian National Fascist Party’s pro-natalist drive of 100 years ago can also be heard in contemporary Russia. Its population is becoming smaller, older, and more fragile. President Vladimir Putin, a tyrant who has long cultivated a cult of the masculine, is borrowing a page from Mussolini’s playbook by decreeing that it is Russian women’s patriotic duty to aid the motherland by embracing procreation at the expense of other life choices.
Some of the programs intended to encourage Russians to have more children were initiated prior to 2022, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has now created even greater pro-natalist urgency. Estimates vary widely, but reports indicate that up to 728,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, injured, or captured as of mid-2024, and up to 1 million Russians have fled their country since the invasion began.
Despite the war drawing men from vital jobs last year, Putin has encouraged Russian women to forgo education and careers, and he has suggested that they should be having families of seven to eight children like their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done. The deputy prime minister for social policy said in March that the “correct” age for motherhood begins at age 18.
Putin’s militarized orthodoxy proclaiming the importance of childbirth is framed as a matter of state security as well as the antidote to Western liberalism. Much like the Italian fascists did, and inspired too by Joseph Stalin’s policies, Russian women with many children are receiving perks. Putin has even reinstituted the defunct Soviet “Heroine Mother” award for those who have 10 children or more.
Russia’s health minister is widely promoting the message by attacking what he called the “vicious practice” that women might consider work before motherhood. Putin (not exactly a model of family values himself), has declared 2024 the “Year of the Family”—while at the same time eroding women’s rights, such as with the decriminalization of some forms of domestic violence.
Thus far, Putin’s plan doesn’t appear to be working very well, as Russian women’s participation in the workforce remains steady while the country’s birthrate during the first half of 2024 was at its lowest since 1999.
Hungary, which is sliding closer toward full autocracy under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, is emulating Russia’s population growth strategies. Orban views birthrate issues through a populist and authoritarian lens. In a nationally televised speech in 2022, he articulated his own version of the “great replacement theory” espoused by white nationalists around the world, fearmongering about “the great European population program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants,” which he proclaimed to be a “suicidal policy in the Western world.”
As Orban’s Fidesz party has cemented its hold on power, the prime minister has continued to refer to what he calls “gender ideology” as a pernicious threat. In 2021, the Hungarian government also codified a constitutional amendment stating that Hungary will “protect the institution of marriage,” defined as a heterosexual family, “as the basis of the survival of the nation.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump has said that Orban is “probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK.” Both Trump and Orban share the goal of growing a populace that preserves a homogenous demographic, and a subset of the Republican Party in the United States sees Orban’s lawmaking as what Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis described as “another Hungarian-inspired social policy blueprint” to mimic.
Notwithstanding the issue’s politicization, global fertility rates are a serious matter and a priority for all. For the first time in more than 700 years, when the Black Death decimated populations across the world, more people will die than be born, resulting in “net mortality.”
What is precipitating this drop is not a bubonic plague; it’s the fact that women of child-bearing age are choosing to not have as many babies. The question is not how to force women to have children, but rather to ask—why don’t they want to?
Net mortality has long-term ramifications for elder care, the labor market, as well as technological innovation. However, the various pro-natalist incentives proposed by Orban, Putin, and others are unlikely to make much of a dent, and they can actually produce a multitude of negative consequences for society.
Japan, reacting to a birthrate of only 1.57 three decades ago, initiated numerous programs to increase fertility in the country. However, today, its rate is even lower—at 1.2 children—demonstrating that this societal issue runs deeper than government impetus can reach.
Last year, Karina Piser reported in Foreign Policy that “for many young Japanese, having children is simply too expensive.” Piser went on to argue that former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “womenomics” proposal to spur birthrates “hasn’t solved women’s economic problems” and that “the country’s cultural conservatism often undermines its natalist policy goals.”
For prosperous nations, the answer to the problem of a declining population would seem obvious: immigration. Yet it is illiberal leaders who are pushing hardest, counterintuitively, to restrict migration. For nations with declining fertility rates , encouraging women to have more children to help ensure future economic growth and to take care of aging populations is a reasonable strategy, but these inducements must also come with societal protections for families and children once they are born.
Financial stimulus does have merit, but it is more effective if designed to give people financial freedom and not just as a lure to produce offspring. As is the case in Scandinavia—which still has a relatively low birthrate—parents receive a great deal of family support, including employment leave as well as affordable child care, family friendly workplaces, and housing—all major obstacles for many prospective parents.
Many U.S. Republicans want every conceived child to be born, but have a track record of failing to support policies that would help those children and their families once they arrive.
History shows us that anti-democratic leaders often give rise to an erosion of women’s rights, and this pattern is reemerging in the fight for abortion care in the United States.
Anne Wingenter, a professor of history and women studies at Loyola University, argued in an interview with WBUR that “reproductive rights are an important sign for democratic backsliding.” There are stark historical analogues in both Germany and Italy, Wingenter added, noting that “fascists passed laws criminalizing abortion” and that in Italy, there was “an attempt to promote traditional patriarchal values, motherhood, especially prolific motherhood.”
The restrictive reproductive measures and rigid family norms that Vance and others in his party endorse should be in the forefront of voters’ minds when they cast their ballots.
Women’s hard-fought gains over the past century or so—including those regarding suffrage, equal educational opportunities, broader career choices, representation in the economy and government, and health care—are all being challenged once again by political movements around the world. In 2021, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks wrote in Foreign Affairs that this trend was “demonstrating that misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing ills.”
Women’s equality is a vital component of any well-functioning democracy, and women’s rights are good not just for women, but for everyone. Brave women resistance fighters helped lead to Mussolini’s ultimate demise at the end of World War II, and it is going to be up to their 21st-century counterparts across the sea to continue the fight for women’s rights today.
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