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The Home and the Homeland: Genderand the British Extreme RightMartin DurhamPublished online: 06 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Martin Durham (2003) The Home and the Homeland: Gender and the BritishExtreme Right, Contemporary British History, 17:1, 67-80, DOI: 10.1080/713999487

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The Home and the Homeland:Gender and the British Extreme Right

MARTIN DURHAM

Discussions of the British extreme right, both in its pre-war and post-warmanifestations, have tended to ignore the question of gender. A number of writers,however, have argued that, by definition, the extreme right should be seen as a highlypatriarchal force. Closer examination casts doubt on this supposition, and suggestsinstead that for a movement organised around ultra-nationalism and resistance to theracial ‘Other’, but not around anti-feminism, gender has proved to be a matter ofconsiderable debate.

In the aftermath of the First World War, extreme right organisations sprangup throughout Europe. The coming to power first of fascism in Italy, then ofnazism in Germany, inspired numerous imitators, and while Sir OswaldMosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) was the most important Britishfascist organisation, it was only one of several such groupings. The defeatof Hitler and Mussolini drove overt fascism to the margins of politics, butorganisations that denounced immigration in the name of race and nationwere increasingly visible from the 1960s onward, and during the followingdecade Britain’s National Front (NF) was among the most significant ofsuch movements. Its failure to achieve electoral breakthrough and its eclipseby Thatcherism, however, resulted in a series of splits which left a confusingarray of groupings of which the most important was the British NationalParty (BNP). While significantly weaker than equivalent movements on theContinent, the British extreme right nonetheless deserves study, and in onerespect such an examination can prove particularly illuminating. Thatrespect is gender.

Many studies of the extreme right ignore the subject of genderaltogether. But a number of writers, both in the inter-war period and morerecently, have sought to correct this neglect. Writing in the early 1930s, thefeminist Winifred Holtby argued that wherever society sought to curtailwomen’s opportunities, it did so ‘in the sacred names of marriage andmaternity. Exalting woman’s sex until it dominated her whole life, the Statethen used it as an excuse for political or economic disability.’ Fascism, she

Martin Durham, University of Wolverhampton

Contemporary British History, Vol.17, No.1 (Spring 2003), pp.67–80PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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declared, exemplified just such a manoeuvre.1 Writing shortly afterwards,another feminist, the novelist Virginia Woolf, described feminism’s fightagainst ‘the patriarchal state’ as ‘the advance guard’ of the fight againstfascism. Efforts to remove women from employment in Britain, shedeclared, represented in embryo what elsewhere was called Fascism orNational Socialism.2

While most of the writing on fascism in the 1930s has concentrated onits antagonism to the left, the danger it posed to democracy or, in its Germanvariant, its virulent anti-semitism, Holtby and Woolf were not the onlywriters who warned of the threat it posed to women. Communist andsocialist writers too were among those who drew attention to fascism’sgender politics, and the re-emergence of the extreme right more recently hasled to the revival and deepening of such a recognition.3 One of the mostimportant figures in the emergence of second-wave feminism, Kate Millett,has argued that the Nazi state was ‘probably the most deliberate attemptever made to revive and solidify extreme patriarchal conditions’. In part, shesuggested, Nazi policies were economic, concerned to remove women fromemployment and give jobs to men. In part they were demographic, anattempt to increase the German population. But at the heart of the regime’smale supremacism, she held, was the understanding that ‘a structure built onthe suppression of women’ was ‘the perfect vehicle of authoritarian,jingoist, and militarist sentiment’.4

If this view has been important in writings on classical fascism, it is alsoimportant in a number of writings on the modern extreme right. Thus forone anti-fascist writer, Kate Taylor, the British extreme right, like itsforebears elsewhere, reduces women ‘to biology, tradition and nature’.Committed to ‘the survival of the white race’, it is committed too to ‘anextremely rigid gender system that inevitably accompanies such notions’.5

Similarly, for Abby Ferber, writing on the modern American extreme right,white supremacists see both the racial order and the gender order as underattack, and believe that if one went awry so would the other.6

Both classical fascism and its post-war successor, such writers haveargued, defend a hierarchical relationship between the sexes, giving pre-eminence to men and seeing women as mothers rather than as workers orpolitical actors. As we will see, this is exactly what many on the Britishextreme right have argued. But as we will also see, and is too rarelyacknowledged, such views are not universally held within the extreme right.On the contrary, an overtly patriarchal understanding of gender is thesubject of bitter dispute among those who claim to stand for race and nation.

In the late 1930s, an article with the title ‘The Problem of the WomanWorker: National Socialism Will Solve It’ appeared in the BUF paper, theBlackshirt, attacking both industrialism and feminism for taking women

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away from the home and undermining the family. National Socialism, it wasargued, would enable woman to ‘exercise her natural vocation of wifehoodand motherhood’ and would make it possible for ‘gainful occupation andthe support of the family’ to be left to ‘her man’.7 Articles elsewhere in theBUF press took a similar approach. Thus in early 1933, for instance, onearticle declared that ‘woman’s birthright is to be a wife and mother, not abreadwinner. There are many deep complications arising from this tendencyof woman to ignore her destiny, and they will descend upon the state in anavalanche before long.’8 Nor was it only men who believed that thegendered division of labour had to be defended against attack. One BUFwoman, Jenny Linton, declared that fascism sought to ‘create a happy andagreeable relationship between men and women’, and return to the timewhen men ‘assumed a chivalrous care over “the weaker sex”’. Another,Dinah Parkinson, held that to ‘say a woman is equal…to a man is asridiculous as to declare that bread is equal…to water’. Both had their roles,and rather than trying to go out to work, women should be ‘true women, notthe pitiful copies of masculinity so prevalent today’.9

But if this is what BUF writers often argued in the movement’s press, ifwe turn to a pamphlet by one of the organisation’s leading figures,Alexander Raven Thomson, we find a very different emphasis. Feminists,Thomson claimed, were wrong to believe the anti-fascist claim that the BUFwould force women into the home and saw them ‘purely as breeders of“cannon fodder”’. Instead they would be entitled to enter any occupationwhich they were physically capable of undertaking, would receive the samepay as men and would be equal in both employment and politics.10 Anotherpamphlet, by one of its leading women, Anne Brock Griggs, written to setout the movement’s policy towards women, decried the economic pressuresthat pushed married women into work. But at the same time it denouncedthe then current practice of sacking women upon marriage and insisted thata BUF government would ensure that there would be no discriminationagainst women in the labour market. ‘Under Fascism’, she proclaimed,‘women will be free to follow the career which their talents and the nationalneed indicate’.11

None of this is to deny the enthusiasm with which many British fascistslooked forward to a land in which, in Mosley’s phrase, men were men andwomen women. Thus for A.K. Chesterton, the editor of one of the BUF’spapers – and the future founder of the National Front – fascism representedthe re-emergence of ‘the masculine spirit…vigorously contending for worldmasterdom’. Democratic politicians, he declared, preferred ‘the motherprinciple that allows them to crawl back into the womb of make-believe’.But in Italy and Germany ‘the people’ had rejected this regression, andBritain too could look forward to finding a new destiny ‘freed from all

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spiritual confounding of the sexes’.12 Just as Chesterton aligned his genderpolitics with those of Italy and Germany, James Drennan, the author of anearly BUF book on Mosley and British fascism, noted that the Germanwriter Oswald Spengler had decried a society in which women no longersaw themselves primarily as mothers. Where fascism, he argued, identifiedwith the countryside, ‘manhood and true womanliness’, democracy waslinked with the ‘unnatural’ city, ‘the womanish man’ and the sterility of the‘intelligent woman’.13 While often at pains to emphasise the movement’sBritish roots, BUF writers echoed not only nazism’s enthusiasm for therural, but its concern for both the quantity and the ‘quality’ of the race. In1936, for instance, Mosley declared that contraception was used by ‘therelatively well-off’ rather than by ‘the very poor. The result is exactly thereverse of the national interest.’ The patriotism fascism would awaken andthe economic security it would bring would, he believed, ‘lead to largerfamilies among those who at present practice restriction’. As for ‘the unfit’,they would be offered ‘the alternatives of segregation…or voluntarysterilisation’.14 Yet rather than calling for women to be confined to the home,an approach which one woman fascist activist derided as ‘a back to thekitchen stunt’, Mosley’s movement declared that in the Greater Britain ofthe future women both in the home and, where they were in large numbers,in industry, would be represented by women.15

In the quarter century that elapsed between the dissolution of the BUFand the creation of the NF, women became more prominent in theworkplace, the basis was laid for the liberalisation of the law concerningboth abortion and homosexuality and a second wave of feminism began toemerge. At first sight, the NF’s response to these developments was exactlyas we might expect. It denounced the 1967 Abortion Act in both the October1974 and the 1979 elections, and while in the first of the contests itcondemned what it described as ‘the growing frenzy of…“familyplanning”’, calling instead for a ‘vigorous birthrate’, in 1979 it went furtherby not only denouncing what they saw as the discouraging of large familiesbut arguing that what was at stake was not only the quantity of Britons, buttheir quality.16 Both pro-natalist and eugenicist, the NF published materialwhich drew on developments in science, particularly the rise ofsociobiology, to portray men as naturally dominant and women passive.17 Itwas an approach that appeared even more forcefully when the most centralfigure in the NF in the 1970s, John Tyndall, broke away at the beginning ofthe following decade to set up what was to become the BNP. Once againsociobiology was seen as underpinning a patriarchal view of gender and theparty’s 1992 election manifesto was to declare that rather than pursuecareers most women would prefer to be mothers and home-makers and thatthis should be encouraged as their ‘highest vocation’.18 For those who

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rejected Tyndall’s leadership and remained in the NF, belief in what wascharacterised as ‘the beauty of femininity’ was also highly visible. In onearticle, for instance, the Industrial Revolution was described as underminingthe family as an economic unit and bringing about the creation of a new(and regrettable) category, the working mother. Future society, it wasdeclared, would see the end of abortion, the outlawing of the publicexpression of homosexuality and the granting of ‘tax incentives to raiselarge, healthy families’.19

Yet, as with the BUF before it, the post-war extreme right did not speakwith one voice. Abortion, rather than being unanimously opposed, had longbeen a bitter source of conflict within the NF and some of the groups thathad emerged from it. Following a decision to call for the repeal of theAbortion Act in the party’s election address in the October 1974 election,the NF’s Annual General Meeting had heard ‘some very passionateexchanges’ on the issue before deciding that while it opposed abortion ondemand, it was not against abortion as such. The AGM’s decision was seenby one of the party’s leading figures, Martin Webster, as representing arejection of the belief that the NF should have a policy on questions ofprivate morality, and it was not until the NF’s 1979 AGM that such a viewwas explicitly rebuffed. This was reported on in the NF press; what was notrevealed was that Andrew Fountaine, Tyndall’s main critic on the NF’sNational Directorate, had attempted to remove any reference to abortionfrom the organisation’s policy, and when he and his supporters left the NFsoon after, the short-lived grouping they set up adopted, not without dissent,a policy of leaving the issue to individual conscience.20 Later in the 1980s,when for a time there were two organisations both calling themselves theNational Front, each opposed abortion but also experienced open dispute onthe matter, with some arguing that it was a woman’s right to choose.(Indeed, in one of the groupings, the subject was explicitly opened up todebate with the comment that ‘the subject of abortion has traditionally beena very controversial one in Nationalist circles’.)21

There were arguments about feminism too. In the 1930s, BUF writershad claimed that fascism was not antagonistic to feminism. In part, as wehave seen, this involved the claim that fascism accepted women’s rights.But it also involved a more remarkable claim still. Thus, for one fascist,Norah Elam, herself a former suffragette, the struggle for votes for womenhad been motivated by the understanding that ‘in a world peopled by menand women and under a political system controlling the destinies of bothsexes, the country which shut out from its counsels the influence, viewpointand talents of more than half its people’ was depriving itself of theopportunity to find the best form of government. Such a government woulddeal with the problems that affected both men and women – housing,

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insecurity of employment, the nation’s relationship with other countries. ‘Inthis conception of practical citizenship’, she claimed, ‘the women’s struggleresembles closely the new philosophy of Fascism. Indeed, Fascism is thelogical, if much grander, conception of the momentous issues raised by themilitant women of a generation ago.’22

Claims of sympathy for feminism were also to appear in the post-warmovement. In the mid-1980s, one leading NF activist, John Field, attackedthe assumption that women’s rights were no concern of ‘Nationalists’.Women faced real problems of discrimination, sexual harassment andunequal pay, he declared, and it was the duty of NF activists to take up theirstruggle. Field’s article did not, of course, seek to champion all women.Instead, it was white women that it was concerned with, and Field was atpains to distinguish the struggle for women’s equality from what hedescribed as ‘Jewish control’ of the existing women’s movement.23 Thisracial encoding of women’s rights had appeared in a different form six yearsearlier when John Tyndall’s magazine, Spearhead, reprinted an article fromFrance in which the writer lamented that she had been unable to persuadefeminists that an influx of Muslims into France would lead to the‘deterioration of the feminine condition’ and the eventual imposition ofalien and ‘anti-feminine’ values on women of ‘Aryan stock’.24

While the BNP leader was willing to use purportedly feminist argumentsfor a racist end, it was far more common for him to present a picture ofgender with very different implications. In the early 1980s, for instance, onearticle denounced ‘the demasculinisation of the Western male’, a processwhich had seen not only a rise in the number both of ‘sexual inverts’ andheterosexual but woefully ‘flabby…indecisive…fearful males’, but alsoentailed the existence of a still large number of males who continued tothink like men but were unable to express their masculinity. ‘The husbandwhose wife has a career outside the home…feels less a man because of it’,and just as he was no longer the breadwinner he was no longer woman’sprotector either. ‘When a father had some authority over his daughter, and ahusband over his wife, another male approached either at his peril.’ Now,however, his whole role as a man had been undermined, ‘and he knows it.So do his women.’25

This was typical of much that appeared in Spearhead. Yet such viewswere not uncontested, even within such an overtly patriarchal publication.In the early 1990s, to take a particularly noteworthy example, the magazinereprinted an extract from a book by one of the most important post-warextreme right writers, Francis Parker Yockey. In it, Yockey characterisedliberalism as ‘an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity intofemininity’ and noted that Nietzsche had described the eighteenth centuryas ‘the century of feminism’. Feminism, Yockey went on, was nothing but

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‘a matter of feminising men’, turning them into creatures who cared onlyabout income and social status rather than ‘the cruelty of accomplishment,sternness, heroism, sacrifice’. History was masculine, and by ‘tamperingwith sexual polarity’, liberalism could create a man-woman and a woman-man, but could never escape the demands of Destiny.26

The article was accompanied by an extended piece by Tyndall, concurringwith Yockey’s strictures, and the following year he returned to the theme, thistime agreeing with the views of the Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexanderthat where in its period of ascendance in the nineteenth century Britain hadbeen exemplified by such masculine values as boldness, courage andoriginality, in decline it was dominated by the feminine values of compassionand concern for physical safety.27 In the face of these and other suchcomments, in early 1995 the journal published a letter suggesting that thepublication of articles ‘directly insulting to women’ gave the impression thatthe BNP sought not to recruit women but to exclude them. Indeed, having hadno effect on the magazine’s policy in this area, the writer returned to thesubject three years later, this time in response to the appearance of an articledecrying a society in which men had become less masculine and girls werebeing ‘raised to be…self-indulgent careerists’.28 In attacking derogatory viewstowards women, the writer, Joan White, a former NF parliamentary candidate,was not alone. Men in the NF brainwashed women members into thinkingthat running the organisation was something only a man could do, a leadingwoman activist in one wing of the movement complained at the end of the1980s, while earlier in the decade another prominent woman militant hadengaged in a heated exchange with a leading male activist over what shedescribed as his ‘sneering’ attitude to the achievements of the women’ssuffrage movement.29

An overtly patriarchal stance, then, was not unchallenged within themodern extreme right. In seeking to understand both the roots of malesupremacism and the resistance to it, one possible factor to consider is anumber of ideological links that stretch from the movement of the 1930s tothat of later years. That A.K. Chesterton should have been in both the BUFand the NF might suggest precisely such a continuity. Just as he hadidentified democracy with ‘the mother principle’ in the 1930s, so at the firstNF Annual General Meeting in 1967 he had denounced ‘the politicalpansies of Parliament, Church, Press and B.B.C.’ in the name of ‘truemanhood and true womanhood’.30 Spengler’s cogitations on the decline ofthe birth-rate and the need to restore the centrality of motherhood have alsobeen cited within the post-war extreme right, just as they had been drawn onin Drennan’s account of pre-war fascism.31

There are other links too. During the pre-war period, the denunciation ofwhat he saw as the degeneracy of ‘modernity’ by the Nietzschean author

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Anthony Ludovici had included a vigorous attack on feminism as athreat to ‘the natural relations of the sexes’. The ‘regeneration of man’,he declared, would enable woman to experience once more the masteryof her mate and ‘the serenity of a dependent existence’. Involved in thepre-war extreme right, he was to continue both his writing and hispopularity in such circles after the war.32 The novelist Wyndham Lewis,who in the 1930s had published in the BUF press, was another opponent offeminism. At the beginning of the 1980s his pre-war views on bothhomosexuals and feminists were to be extensively cited in an issue ofTyndall’s magazine. The revolt of both, it was claimed, had beenmanipulated by the forces of social revolution. Indeed, he argued, ‘Largescale male perversion’ could be seen as the New Man that had emerged inresponse to the New Woman, both of them serving the interests of thosewho sought to undermine the dominance of the white male and reduce himto ‘the status of…coolie’.33

It would be difficult to imagine a more misogynist approach than thattaken by such writers. Yet one pre-war writer was to exceed even theirclaims. Arnold Leese, the leader of a rival grouping to the BUF, theImperial Fascist League, was to live until 1956 and was an importantinfluence on some of the key figures who were later to rise to prominencein the NF. Virulently anti-semitic (he had accused the BUF of being a toolof the Jews), the intensity of his racism was matched by that of his anti-feminism. ‘We never make any bones’, his paper declared shortly after theextension of votes to women under 30, ‘that we are sick of being ruled bya majority of women’s votes…The country has never gone downhill so fastas since we had a female majority of the electorate’. Discussing thewomen’s suffrage movement in a subsequent issue, Leese reiterated hisview that the enfranchisement of women had resulted in the neglect of thearmed forces, the decay of the Empire and economic crisis. It was, he held,the ‘Judaisation of Gentile political thought’ that had been central towomen’s suffrage, and while it was impossible to prove who had financedit, it was ‘hardly possible that the Jew could have had no considerable handin pushing forward so convenient an agency of destruction’.34

Yet none of this should lead us to assume that the modern extreme right’sviews on gender are derived from arguments made in the pre-war period.While Leese was to be a significant influence on the post-war extreme right,his views on gender were not amongst his contributions to its ideology.Male supremacists within post-war organisations have only rarely citedSpengler or Lewis in support of their views. In one case, a directrelationship between pre-war and post-war arguments about gender can beestablished. Thus in an early issue of the paper of the organisationestablished by Mosley in the late 1940s, the Union Movement, an article

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declared that ‘no male propagandist’ would dare assert that women’s placewas in the home. Such a claim would ‘antagonise the female section of hisaudience’, and conjure up the image of the German Hausfrau, ‘bound inslavery by the triple fetters of…Church, kitchen and children’. It was indeedthe case, the writer continued, that the Union Movement believed that mostwomen, if given a choice, would prefer marriage, home and family. But, heemphasised, it also supported equal pay and the right of women to ‘followtheir chosen calling’, whether it be in the home or a trade or profession.35

But Mosley’s new-found belief that Europe, not Britain, was wherefuture loyalties should lie, ensured that many on the extreme right did notflock to his banner, and the Union Movement’s attitudes towards neithergender nor the nation was to influence many of those who called for a fightfor race and nation. Nor have critics of male supremacism within the post-war extreme right cited pre-war Mosleyite writings in their favour. Instead,the tendency is to avoid pre-war references altogether (not least becausemodern organisations often wish to deny any connections with classicalfascism) and while this should not deter us from drawing attention toelements of ideological continuity between the 1930s and the post-warperiod, there appears little reason to see them as crucial to arguments aboutgender on the modern extreme right. Instead, we will need to look to otherfactors.

In understanding the persistence of anti-feminism, we can continue tolearn from earlier writers on fascism. The heretical German Marxist,Wilhelm Reich, for instance, argued that nazism appealed to men whosought to wield power within the home that they were unable to exercisewithin the marketplace. Women too, he suggested, could be drawn to amovement that appealed to authoritarianism and fears of moral collapse.During the short-lived rise of the NF in the 1970s, the anti-fascist writerVeronica Ware argued that while the party emphasised the role of woman ashomemaker, its particular appeal to women centred on fears of attack inwhich blacks were portrayed as the source of danger. One woman NFcandidate, she noted, had even issued a leaflet aimed at white womendeclaring that ‘the biggest problem facing you’ was ‘Black violence’.Another pamphlet of the period, this time by a libertarian socialist grouping,Big Flame, argued that while the NF’s glorification of woman as motherwas likely to be particularly important in its appeal to women, its appeal tomen had to be understood against the background of deskilling andunemployment. Deprived of their traditional status, men were being drawnto a movement that promised a return to a past where once again they couldfeel themselves at the centre not only of the nation but of the home.36 Butwhile much of the work that has examined fascism and gender remains ofgreat value in understanding why the extreme right can appeal to those who

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see gender certainties and gender boundaries as under attack, it has been farless helpful in understanding why the extreme right does not always anduniformly hold such views. Here, two factors need to be considered. One,which applies to both the BUF and the NF, was electoral calculation. Eventhe Nazi Party, though this is little known, found it necessary as it cameclose to power to insist in its election propaganda that it did not intend todrive women from the workplace.37 We should not be surprised then that theBUF or, to a lesser degree, the NF would find it politic to deny that it sawwomen as inferior. But such claims were not only aimed at those who mightvote for the extreme right. It was also, as we have seen in our reference toNF Annual General Meetings, a matter of those who might join suchorganisations. This is not simply a matter of whether or not a grouping hasa significant number of women members. For the BUF, it has beenestimated, probably between a quarter and a third of its membership werewomen; for the NF of the 1970s, let alone the BNP more recently, malepredominance appears considerably higher.38 But even within the BUF,many members, both men and women, were likely to have held highlypatriarchal views of gender. Yet this is not true of all on the British extremeright and, as recent work on Germany, Scandinavia and the USA hasdemonstrated, the phenomenon of an extreme right divided on gender is nota development unique to Britain.39

As our discussion has suggested, the dominant extreme rightorganisation in Britain in recent years has been markedly resistant to suchdissent. John Tyndall’s recent replacement as BNP Chairman by a formerleading figure in the NF of the 1980s, Nick Griffin, has resulted in importantshifts in the party’s policy and appeal, and we should not expect that itsformer leader’s attitude to gender will continue to define the organisation.Even under the old leadership, there had been calls for the BNP to givegreater attention to winning over women.40 The NF of the 1980s had beenpreponderantly but not wholly opposed to abortion and had shown somesympathy to a more important role for women in the movement. (Indeed,the author of an article calling for an increased role for women in thestruggle for a ‘White future’ had been Nick Griffin’s wife, Jackie Griffin.)41

Yet how far the BNP will move away from the previous position ongender remains unclear. In 1996, discussing the rise of ‘nationalism’ inEurope and elsewhere, Nick Griffin argued that one factor of ‘enormoussignificance’ has been ‘the steady rise in the number of women playingactive and prominent roles in the movement’. In Italy, he noted, the rejectionof ‘the fascist tradition’ by the ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale had beendenounced by one of its MPs, Alessandra Mussolini, while in France,Brigitte Bardot had declared her support for the Front National’s oppositionto Islamic immigration. The prominent role of such women, he argued,

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would both ‘attract men’ and ‘reassure women’, but they would also domore. As the struggles in Algeria, Vietnam and Palestine had demonstrated,the support of women was crucial for the success of revolutionarymovements. If ‘the growing racial nationalist backlash’ was seen merely asan expression of ‘angry white males’, it would fail to win the unhinderedsupport not only of women but of many men. But if women came to see thatpolitical activity was not a ‘threat to the family “nest”’, but the only way tosecure its survival, then they would both join the movement and support‘their menfolk’ in their commitment to it.42

More recently, speaking to a sympathetic audience in the USA, Griffinhas characterised the BNP as ‘mostly a men’s club’ but hoped womenwould join in greater numbers once they saw it as the only force that couldensure a future for their children.43 Such an argument takes a profoundlyambiguous view of the role of women within the extreme right. They couldplay a leading role but could also be seen as auxiliaries, extending theirmaternal, and wifely, role in defence of the endangered ‘nest’. How suchambiguity might be resolved remains unclear. At its most striking, anargument that had appeared within the extreme right in both Germany andthe USA, that Judaeo-Christianity sees women as inferior while the pre-Christian beliefs of Northern Europeans recognised their equality, appearedin the early 1990s in the magazine by which Griffin and his associatesworked their passage from the ruins of the NF into the once despised BNP.44

But Griffin has also in recent years written on the crisis of the traditionalmale role, arguing that while globalisation has wiped out female jobs as wellas male ones, the loss of a breadwinner role has had a particularly damagingeffect on men. Even more important, he went on, was the effect that thedestruction of vast numbers of manual and non-manual jobs was having onthe ways in which men banded together. ‘Men are genetically programmedto need the companionship of an all-male group which provides for theirfamilies and defends the tribe, and is bound together by initiation rites,shared problems and common victories.’ Feminists, he declared, mightclaim that the heterosexual white male was obsolete, ‘but innateterritoriality and will-to-power will sooner or later lead the White Man toreassert himself.’45

In one revealing image, Griffin has declared that ‘“faint heart ne’er wonfair maiden”, and there is no fairer maiden than the survival of our fairmaidens, which, at the end of the day, is what our struggle is all about.’46 Asmuch that has been written on fascism and gender has emphasised, this linkbetween the battle for the race and the control of women’s bodies is crucial.Both are seen as territory in danger of loss to an alien foe. The immigrant(or the immigrant’s descendant) is seen as an invader who seeks to wrest thehomeland from its rightful owners and erect a different ethnic hegemony in

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their place. The birth rate of the enemy group is seen as dangerously high,that of the embattled white race perilously low, and the answer is all tooclear. The former, or, more exactly, the women of the former group, mustproduce more children so that in the battle for numbers, the white race canrestore its former fortunes. In this depiction of a brutally conflictual future,women are not only invoked as mothers, but they are also seen as objects ofdesire, coveted by the alien male and in danger of being lost to the males oftheir own race. Thus, for Chesterton in the 1950s, white men could only feeldisgust at inter-racial relationships, while for Spearhead in the 1990s thesight of a white woman with a non-white man is ‘a visible sign of our defeatand dispossession… Our most treasured property has been seized.’47 ForGriffin, as for others on the extreme right, a monopoly of access to thewomen of the race is crucial. Yet what such a belief implies aboutrelationships within the race is a far more complex question.

How the two arguments are connected is a matter of both internal andexternal pressures. Throughout fascism in general and the British extremeright in particular, we frequently encounter not only white supremacismbut male supremacism. But both for instrumental reasons and because ofdisagreement among its activists, even such an organisation as the BNP isunlikely to avoid displaying at least some of the hesitations andambiguities that we have seen in other extreme right formations. If,despite such developments, we continue to adopt the a priori assumptionthat the extreme right is necessarily patriarchal we will be unable tounderstand one of the most striking characteristics of such movements. Inmany accounts, the extreme right represents an enraged backlash againstthe advance of women’s equality. A closer examination, however, makesit clear that a movement which is united on race cannot and will not findagreement about gender.

NOTES

1. Paul Berry and Alan Bishop (eds.), Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of VeraBrittain and Winifred Holtby (London, Virago, 1985), pp.84–6.

2. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds.), Women, the Family and Freedom: The Debatein Documents, Vol.2, 1880–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp.386–9.

3. John Strachey, The Menace of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), pp.64–5; R. PalmeDutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), pp.218–22; LabourWoman, June, December 1934, September 1935.

4. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), pp.159, 163, 167–8.5. Kate Taylor, ‘Breeders for the White Race’, Searchlight, January 2000.6. Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling. Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p.95.7. Blackshirt, 23 January 1937.8. Blackshirt, 19 August 1933.

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9. Blackshirt, 2 November 1934; Action, 19 March 1938.10. A. Raven Thomson, The Corporate State (London: BUF Publications, n.d., 1934), pp.43–4.11. Anne Brock Griggs, Women and Fascism (London: BUF Publications, n.d., c1935), pp.2–3. 12. Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: BUF, 1932), p.41; Action, 9 July 1936.13. James Drennan, B.U.F. Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: BUF, 1934), pp.176,

190–91, 194.14. Oswald Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (London: BUF Publications,

1936), n.p., Question 76.15. Action, 26 March 1938; A. Raven Thomson, The Coming Corporate State (London: Greater

Britain Publications, n.d., c1938), pp.26, 28.16. National Front, For a New Britain: The Manifesto of the National Front (Croydon: National

Front, 1974), p.12; National Front, It’s Our Country – Let’s Win It Back! (London: NationalFront, 1979), p.57.

17. Spearhead, March 1979, January 1978.18. Spearhead, November 1985; British National Party, Fight Back! The Election Manifesto of

the British National Party (Welling: Albion Press, 1992), p.12.19. National Front News, June (1) 1988; Nationalism Today, 43, n.d. (1988); 44, n.d. (1989).20. ‘Vote CHURMS’, leaflet, West Bromwich, 1974; Spearhead, February, March 1975,

February 1979; National Front National Directorate minutes 28 January, 24 February 1979;Excalibur, November 1980, January 1981.

21. National Front News, November (2), December (1) 1987, February (1), April (1), June (1)1988, 106, nd. (1988), Vanguard, July, September, October 1988.

22. Fascist Quarterly, July 1935.23. Nationalism Today, November 1984.24. Spearhead, July 1979.25. Spearhead, February 1983.26. Spearhead, September 1993.27. Spearhead, September 1993, August 1994.28. Spearhead, April 1995, June, February 1998.29. Vanguard, November–December 1989, October 1987.30. Spearhead, November–December 1967.31. Spearhead, May 1974, October 1976, August 1978.32. Dan Stone, ‘The Extremes of Englishness: The “Exceptional” Ideology of Anthony Mario

Ludovici’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 4/2 (1999), pp.191–218; Anthony M. Ludovici,Lysistrata or Woman’s Future and Future Woman, 2nd edn. (London: Kegan Paul Trench,Trubner & Co., 1927), pp.100–101, 111; Spearhead, November 1995.

33. D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–1981(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p.78; Spearhead, May 1980.

34. Fascist, December 1931, January 1936.35. Union, 2 October 1948.36. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp.65,

87; Veronica Ware, Women and the National Front (Birmingham: A.F. & R. Publications,n.d., 1978), pp.12–15; Big Flame, Sexuality and Fascism (1978, reprinted London: 121Bookshop, 1991), pp.13–14, 20.

37. Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.26.

38. R. Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), caption to photographopposite p.142.

39. Joyce Marie Mushaben, ‘The Rise of Femi-Nazis? Female Participation in Right-ExtremistMovements in Unified Germany, German Politics, 5/2 (1996), pp.240–61; Katrine Fangen,‘Separate or Equal? The Emergence of an All-Female Group in Norway’s RightistUnderground’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 9/3 (1997), pp.122–64; Kathleen M. Blee,‘Engendering Conspiracy: Women in Rightist Theories and Movements’, in Eric Ward (ed.),Conspiracies: Real Grievances, Paranoia, and Mass Movements (Seattle: Peanut ButterPublishing, 1996), pp.91–112.

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40. Spearhead, April 1985, March 1995.41. Nationalism Today, September 1985.42. Spearhead, December 1996.43. www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/index233.htm.44. Rune, 6, n.d. c1993; Nancy Vedder-Shults, ‘Motherhood for the Fatherland: The Portrayal

of Women in Nazi Propaganda’, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1982, pp.175–81;WAR, September 1994.

45. Spearhead, April 1996.46. Spearhead, July 1997.47. Candour, 5 September 1958; Spearhead, April 1992.

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