Theories of fascism: A critique from the perspective of women’s and gender history

Abstract

Nearly 40 years after second-wave feminism first challenged academe, theorists of fascism have yet to engage seriously with women’s or gender history. This neglect is not entirely their fault: neither women’s nor gender historians have systematized the implications of their work for understanding fascism as a category of analysis, perhaps seeing fascism studies as a domain of positivist model building, dependent upon the universalization of the male subject. From the other side, fascism theorists’ neglect of women’s and gender history stems, in a few cases, from a wider unfamiliarity with historical research on fascism.