New Kids on the (Modern European History) Block: "Women, Gender and the Extreme Right in Europe 1919-1945," An International Conference held at Cardiff University, 4-6 July 2001

First, a brief sketch of the conference's scope: 3 days, 64 delegates, 4 double panel sessions and 7 plenary sessions on Italy and Germany, Serbia and Croatia and Britain, Romania and Hungary, Latvia and Poland, gender and race in Nazi Cinema, France and Spain, as well as concluding remarks by organizer Kevin Passmore. The conference was Passmore's brainchild. After floating the idea of a manuscript on women in European far-right movements in the interwar period past Manchester University Press, he received encouragement and funding to put together an edited collection on the subject which would draw on the expertise of recognized specialists in the various national histories, the conference being a pivotal stage in this process. With additional support from the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, the British Academy Elizabeth Barker Fund, the German History Society, and the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University, the project became a reality. Even from this very brief sketch, one can discern an overall conceptual framework based on national divisions reflecting a broadening out of the established, institutionalized approach to European history to include the countries in Central-, Eastern- and South-Eastern Europe (understood very basically and geographically) with the strongest extreme-right movements in the interwar period, countries which continue to sustain strong national traditions and identifications.
According to the call for papers, the conference was intended to explore three areas:

A particularly sensitive example of the former was a paper on the "Motivations of Women in the Spanish Falange," which presented a highly nuanced accounting of the appeal of such political movements to women. Based on personal interviews conducted between 1987-1991 with women who had served in the women's section of the organization, this presentation underscored the meaning and congruity that service in the Falange had brought these women, how in advanced years it had offered them a satisfying narrative around which to account for their lives. The appeal of this Spanish movement was made palpable and understandable - where else should these socially active, god-fearing women have turned? Where else could they have found such a meaningful choice? The conservatives had no program for reform, and the left were godless. Given the chaotic circumstances of the civil war and its aftermath, the appeal of a family-oriented party featuring a charismatic leader and his prominent, active sister, which encouraged bourgeois women to participate publicly and held the promise of stability along traditional gender and social lines during unstable times is not to be underestimated. What emerged in the lively discussion following this paper marked, at least for me, a crucial fault-line in what was at stake in the topic of the conference. The process of compassionately interviewing and giving voice to the subject-position these elderly women represented came in for heavy criticism. How could one refrain during such an interview from confronting the interviewees with the reprehensibility of their ideology? Some participants seemed to be out solely to condemn rightists, to show on the basis of historically proven facts how despicably these extremists and the women who had colluded with them had behaved, and how limited the spaces available to women during these regimes had been.

However, it became clear over the course of the conference that despite the considerable limitations, many quite exceptional women had managed to find cultural and political spaces for themselves from which they had been able to make the regimes work to their advantage, a notable example being the Nazi film-darling Kristina Söderbaum, who was the focus of the plenary session on Nazi cinema. In a welcome change from the ubiquitous Fräulein Riefenstahl, captivating papers on Jud Süss (1940), Die goldene Stadt (1942) and Opfergang (1944) detailed how the blonde Swedish beauty's screen presence was orchestrated in ambiguous and complex plays of femininity, race, nature, nurture, Kultur and modernity. The session itself was equally well-orchestrated and provoked a thoughtful comparison with gender roles in contemporaneous Hollywood cinema.

Papers on the paradoxal successes of women like Söderbaum and the modernist/fascist artist Stephanie Hollenstein from Vorarlberg prove how unquestionably deserving of greater attention the work of these women is. Particularly the case of Hollenstein is exemplary in demonstrating how slippery, difficult to categorize women, who disrupt and complicate the construction of neat, seamless narratives, have simply been ignored by, in this case, art historians. It is doubtless an important, praiseworthy accomplishment of the conference to encourage and enable such work, and to make evident both the terrible conditions under which many women had to survive in the build-up to WWII and during the war itself and the fact that despite their having been treated and represented in the most patriarchal of ways, they nevertheless accomplished much more than simply continuing to reproduce and make possible their masters, as is often assumed. The measure of recognition women gained in each country and even the small advances they made politically were documented in great detail (suffrage, parliamentary representation, etc.), as were the barriers they faced, particularly in the case of minorities. However, while the nether regions between authoritarianism and fascism were probed with all manner of gavels and spatulas, what did not emerge was any kind of theoretical framework within which to understand these developments outside of a basic feminist agenda focusing on issues of agency, empowerment and representation. Nothing more than a historical framework consisting of empirically provable factors such as the threat of bolshevism, economic instability, and modernist sensibilities and fashions to the institutionalized forces of authoritarian, religiously augmented conservativism was erected in order to understand women's paradoxal participation in misogynist extreme-right movements. No attempt was made, for example, in any of the panels I attended, in any of the informal discussions in which I participated, or in Passmore's concluding remarks to understand these women in terms of, for example, Gramscian hegemony, which explains the way power elites are able to maintain their positions of status by getting the less powerful, and potentially threatening, members of society to unquestioningly accept and police themselves on the basis of the regime's ideological terms.

So I now know that Mother's Day is celebrated in Italy on December 24 and in Spain on December 8, that female suffrage came to Latvia and Czechoslovakia in 1920 and to Bulgaria in local elections in 1937 and to the general parliament in 1938, and that in Hungary the issue of suffrage was enmeshed in anti-Semitic politicking. All conference delegates were made privy to as much of this specific but nonetheless comparatively oriented information as they could digest. I suppose that I should not be so blasée about the inclusion of Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary in the sphere of "European" history and that I should marvel at Passmore's accomplishment at so casually presenting such a geopolitical pastiche under the rubric of "modern European history" by declaring in the call for papers that: "the study of women, gender and the extreme right lies at the confluence of two major areas of scholarly interest, and this conference is intended as a contribution to both." Its major contribution was really in that it concentrated such attention on each of the two terms, gender and fascism, that its EU expansionist tendencies were somehow taken for granted. Not that the call for papers did not also preserve, however unintentionally, the nationalist pecking order in the new Europe: "Plenary speakers will present critical overviews on women, gender and the extreme right in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Latvia and Poland." The borders have thus been opened but not erased; it is no longer a case of smuggling but rather of pure transportation and translation, which all the more highlights the matter of distances, cultural and otherwise.

After this first movement towards recognition, one can only hope that, in follow-up conferences, more comparative, thematic and theoretical approaches will be possible. I would be very interested in other reactions to and reflections on the papers in Cardiff or other similarly oriented conferences. Please send them to: editors@spacesofidentity.net.