‘Broken Friendships and Vanished Loyalties’: Gender, Collective (In)Security and Anti-Fascism in Britain in the 1930s

Abstract

The study of women's adherence to fascist movements and regimes is now widely developed, and much has been done to rectify the reductive view that women who supported Britain's fascist movements suffered from false consciousness or, on the other hand, were merely the victims of fascist sexism and misogyny. But what about those women who resisted fascism, women who were both actively and temperamentally opposed to the British Union of Fascists and who dedicated even more energy to opposing fascism and Nazism abroad? We know that the names of many political women appeared on Heinrich Himmler's Black List for Invasion of Britain, yet there were no organisations that successfully united like-minded anti-fascist women. This article is particularly concerned with the various ways in which women organised against fascism but also how their investments in pacifism and particularly the League of Nation's panacea of collective security acted to reign in a more concerted anti-fascism. It examines how anti-fascism was and was not reconciled with pacifism, and more specifically how women – represented as the world's natural peace lovers – worked through these ideological and emotional dilemmas during the course of the 1930s.