NAZIS’ ATTITUDE TO WOMEN

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22444, 4 July 1938, Page 15

NAZIS’ ATTITUDE TO WOMEN

ADDRESS TO LEFT BOOK CLUB

Perhaps the greatest Condemnation o£ the Nazi attitude to women was that the wise and liberal women, social women workers, and educational administrators had disappeared from the scene, and that the others who had come to the top had been previously unknown and were merely the mouthpieces of the Nazi Party. This view wa put forward by Miss M. Simpson in an address to the Left Book Club on the “Position of Women in Nazi Germany.” Miss Simpson said that there was no place in Germany to-day for the purely women’s point of view of bygone days. It was being generally recognised that they had to take their part in the movement for social reconstruction. It had not been difficult t> the Nazi Party to fit the soldier pattern on to the German people. The Nazis believed that the highest duty of a woman was to become the mother of soldiers.

Couples politically “reliable” and with other qualifications were enti'led to loans levied from bachelors and spinsters to assist the repopulation drive. The German Government had been ’ forced to ease up on the movomeni to oust women from industry. A certain number had to remain —approximately 8,000,000 —because of the needs for cheap labour in industry and to prepare for the emergency of

mobilisation. II the Nazis’ solicitude for the mother and child was genuine, something would be done to raise wages. Miss Simpson concluded.