NATIONS IN FLUX.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 76, 30 March 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

NATIONS IN FLUX.

reflected in their women. FASCIST ITALY, COMMUNIST RUSSIA ANI> NAZI GERMANY. SHARP DIFFERENCES REVEALED. Sunday at St. Peter's, Rome. . . . The young mother stands beside the baptismal font, steadying her infant beforo the surpliced priest. The ritual is completed with the sprinkling of a few drops of holy water upon the red, puckered head. Laughingly the mother dries them away, stilling the baby's wail with a gentle rocking and a kiss.

A crowded street in Moscow. . . . A broad-shouldered, full-liipped girl, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her khaki trousers, her tan work shirt left open at the neck, swings along with head flung up, chest thrust forward. Robust energy is expressed in her long, powerful stride, almost liko that of a lumberman. A field in Germany. . . . Half a dozen bare-headed women are setting foot-long sticks into the ground, marking off a vegetable patch with its wavering rows of eal'th. From time to time they glanco back at the barrack sort of farmhouse topped with a swastika banner, the weary sag of their backs aid th® tired look in their faces suggesting the strain ot a life to which they aro unaccustomed.

Women have always been in the thick of things, but never more so than today. Italian Fascism, Russian Communism, German Xational Socialism fling their disparate -challenges to a confused Europe, using similar methods of propaganda to foster distinctive types of dictatorship and divergent aims in politics and economics. The human differences are reflected in the position and bearing of their women. Some Essential Differences. Both Black Shirt Italy and the Brown Shirt Reich are "manly" States, with woman's place in the home mothering a race of vigorous warriors. Boom-time industrialisation has proved disillusioning, labour-saving machines too efficient. A return to the soil has been called for, and with that call has come the exaltation of the rural division of labour among members of the family. But Soviet Russia has no problems of unemployment and over-production; the Bolslieviki recognise no distinctions between the sexes; expansion and construction have meant freedom for women, not relegation. The Italian Press delights in pointin" out the numerous geniuses who have sprung from large families and in printing pictures of full-bosomed mothers and proud fathers with their broods of infants.

German newspapers warn those contemplating marriage .against being swept off their feet by "a decadent love"; they urge the seeking of racial purity in mates, and reproduce photographs of approved womanly types. Russian journals stress the advantages to women of leaving their children in the creches and going to work; the pictures run alongside the articles of women who have organised collective farms, or who have "stopped a break in the plant" by pitchin" in alongside of their husbands, or who have won the Order of Lenin for heroic feats of labour. While Fascist and Nazi women are expected to bask in the glories of their husbands, to serve as inspirations and war-like muses, Soviet women carve out their own social and economic niches. Wandering through narrow streets of Rome, one sees women and little girls taking their half-filled water bottles and jars of flowers to place beneath the images of their saints. Perhaps it is an emotional people's love of the theatrical —or is it the poor's need of faith? In an over-populated country, lacking in most natural resources, poverty is ever nresent. Despite Mussolini's plans for a "corporate unity" of production, hard toil and meager rewards remain the Italian family's lot, and the appeal of religion has not lessened. Fascism has merely given a new expression to established customs and recognised relationships. I Doctrine of Equality. In the Soviet Union women are taught to look on religion not as a source of mental comfort and security, but as a rrrim reminder of oppression and slavery. All the social evils of the Czarist oidei have been lumped together as a capitalist exploitation of mass superstition, and communism has been portrayed es the cure-all. The yashmak has been linked with social injustice, the sale or brides with speculation in commodities; Stalin has warned women "to guard the collective farm system as the apple ol their eye," for only there "will they have the opportunity of becoming equal with men." ~ . ~ Under the Czars no portion ot the population was so completely suppressed, so thoroughly degraded, as were the women. Proverbs like "A chicken is not a bird and a woman is not a human being," and laws forbidding wives from hiring out unless their husbands consented, reflected an Asiatic subjection. Under the Bolsheviki all social harriers, restraints and inhibitions have been swept away and the Russian woman is free to give and to receive love, to be married or divorced at will, to bear children or not.

There is no "head" of the family; man and wife are equal. Either can bo made to pay alimony or to provide in case of sickness or disability, and both aie responsible to the State for the care ox their children. No custom-decreed division of labour keeps women at the oven "while men are busy at machines. The pace of Socialist construction requires every available pair of hands; the fear of war demands that women be trained to fill the gaps of those who may be sent to the front. Creches for infants and public-feeding establishments for workers have freed mothers and wives from the drudgery of housework, and ever-increasing multitudes are responding to the roar of the dynamo. From 1930 to 1933 the number of women employed in the major industrial enterprises doubled, soaring close to the 2,000,000 mark. More than 500,000 women are members of the Communist party, almost 70,000 are shock workers, and more than 350,000 are in the Government service. This New Freedom. It is not that the Russia tovarisch is more amazon than feminine. 'J he young Komsomol I patched on the train, kissing and wiggling Jier baby brother's naked foot, seemed no different from the Italian mother at St. Peter's. While Mussolini still finds it necessary to propagandise for an increased birth rate, 10,000 babies are born every day in Soviet Russia, and in 1933 more than 12,000.000 infants were eared for in the creches and prc-school nurseries. Unlike the German youth, the Russian does not wait until he has "a solid posi-

tion" before marrying, and. every Soviet university has its creclie for the students' babies. Love of children and °/ a family are strong in Russia, only life is so intense and expansive that they represent but a fraction of the interests of the Soviet woman. The director of the Turkish Woman's Club in Baku, a slim, fairly attractive woman, about 30 years old, was rolling a cigarette when I entered. Her eyes sparkled when she heard that I was an American interested in her work. Wo went through the club and every feature in the struggle to develop a new Russian woman was duplicated in some one of the rooms, from the "illiteracy liquidation classroom" where a score of girls were reading aloud, to the textile j factory where more than 1200 women were employed in two seven-hour shifts. A crudely built theatre, a library with 10,000 volumes all in Turkish, a medical and physical culture room with firstaid cabinets and war preparedness posters, a crecho and a children's playroom all wore visited, but it was the music room that seemed best to reveal the club's spirit. Seven dusky girls, seated on stools before an instructor, were strumming away like mad on Turkish "tars." "They don't play very well, do they 1" the director remarked as we left. "But it's more important that they play at all. Before the revolution it was considered shameful.

"We had so little freedom then," she continued. "And now we have so much that we hardly know what to do with it. All we know is tlin-'t we want to change things completely from what they were before. And we have. We work everywhere, even in tlio oil refineries!" Three National Symbols. German women rallied to the Nazi standard. When Hitler came to power thousands cheerfully gave up their wearisome .l'olis to qualify for the marriage subsidies of household goods and furniture. In the tobacco plants married women were replaced by jobless husbands; at Erfurt girls gave up their posts to their fiances to facilitate marriage. So great was the altar rush — in the first six months the expected quota of 120.000. loans was exceeded by more than GO.OO0 —that individual allctments were reduced from 1000 to 300 marks. German films have become light and romantic. Prince Charming, come to take the hard-working girl from drudgery and poverty, and the rich caliph, who makes the love of a poor boy and girl possible, are ever-recurring themes. And these strike home, for Germany to-day is a land of wishful thinking. In Italy, Russia and Germany the women might bo viewed as symbols. Italy, poor and struggling, manages to find in the traditions of the past a source of comfort and stability. Rrssia, full-blooded, young and vigorous, strides along with belligerent confidence in the future. Germany, world-weary, seeks nothing but security, and so far in vain.—Manuel Lubell, in the "New York Times."