Dissenting Voices: Catholic Women in Opposition to Fascism

Abstract

Catholic women in Central Europe have emerged in the years since the second world war as moderate feminists. They now claim for themselves the right to choose a familial career, to regulate the size of their families, and insist on equal opportunity and pay at work. Since the historical literature dealing with Catholic women during the inter-war period portrays them as anti-feminists, the question arises as to the origins of these neo-feminists.' Some German observers have suggested that Central European Catholic women, like most of their compatriots, simply made a clean sweep of things after dallying with fascism, turned their backs abruptly on their countries' fascist or authoritarian pasts, and set off in a totally new direction toward liberal democracy and women's emancipation.2 We argue here that, to the contrary, two organizations of Catholic women, the Katholischer Deutscher Frauenbund (Catholic German Women's League: KDF) in Germany and the Katholische Frauenorganisation (Catholic Women's Association: KFO) in Austria had already chosen this path in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians of German women have documented the failure of liberal women's groups during the inter-war period, but little attention has been paid to the embryonic feminism that was developing among Central European Catholic women. Those who have recently criticized the 'German Sonderweg thesis' rightly point out that using nazism as the hinge of Germany's history smooths out the complexity of that society.3 This has certainly been the fate of the women of the KDF and KFO, who were quite distinct from their coreligionists. Thus, although most Catholic women rallied around German and Austrian authoritarian regimes because of their championing of traditional values and their stance on birth control, abortion, pornography and homosexuality, the members of the KDF and KFO saw clearly that conservative regimes would restrict them to domestic roles which they had already outgrown. This