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High --
Wo
High --
•
From Conservatives
to Extremists
Around the World

Edited by
Paola Bacchetta
and Margaret Power

Routledge
New York and London
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co. uk

Copyright © 2002 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Right-wing women: from conservatives to extremists around the world /
edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-92777-3 (hc.) - ISBN 0-415-92778-1 (pbk.)
1. Conservatism. 2. Right-wing extremists-History. 3. Women in public life-
History. 1. Bacchetta, P. (Paola) II. Power, Margaret.

JC573 .R55 2002

320.52'082-dc21
2002016571
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1
Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

pan I. Agencv/Subjectivity/Subject Positions

1. She Loved Mussolini: Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Fascism 19
Carole C. Gallucci
2. Female "Fanatics": Women's Sphere in the British Union of Fascists 29
Julie ~ Gottlieb
3. Hindu Nationalist Women Imagine Spatialities/Imagine Themselves:
Reflections on Gender-Supplemental-Agency 43
Paola Bacchetta
4. Framing Volksmoeders: The Politics
of Female Afrikaner Nationalists, 1904-c.1930 57
Marijke du Toit
5. Whose Virtue Is This? The Virtue Party and Women
in Islamist Politics in Turkey 71
Ayse Saktanber
6. "And We Ate Up the World": Memories of the Seccion Femenina 85
Victoria L. Enders

pan II. Right Activisms and RacializedlClassedIReligioned Others

7. The Gendered Organization of Hate: Women in the U.S. Ku Klux Klan 101
Kathleen M. Blee
8. Charity and Nationalism: The Greek Civil War
and the Entrance of Right-Wing Women into Politics 115
Tasoula Vervenioti
9. Far-Right Women in France: The Case of the National Front
Translated from the French by Paola Bacchetta 127
Claudie Lesselier
10. Women in the Non-Nazi Right during the Weimar Republic:
The German Nationalist People's Party (DNVP) 141
Raffael Scheck
11. Spartan Mothers: Fascist Women in Brazil in the 1930s 155
Sandra McGee Deutsch
12. The Feminine "Apostolate in Society)) versus the Secular State:
The Union Femenina Catolica Mexicana, 1929-1940 169
Kristina A. Boylan
13. Foreign Women in Spain for General Franco
during the Spanish Civil War 183
Judith Keene

pan III. Interrogations: Right-Thinking, FeD1inisD1s, and the len

14. Pauline and Other Perils: Women in Australian Right-Wing Politics 197
Bronwyn Winter
15. Playing "Femball)): Conservative Women's Organizations
and Political Representation in the United States 211
Ronnee Schreiber
16. Islamisms and Feminism in Egypt:
Three Generations of Women's Perspectives 225
Azza Karam

pan IV. Righted Bodies: Discipline, Excess, Pleasure

17. Confronting Double Patriarchy: Islamist Women in Turkey 245
Burrak Keskin
18. Queering Hindutva: Unruly Bodies and Pleasures
in Sadhavi Rithambara's Performances 259
Bishnupriya Ghosh
19. Right-Wing Women, Sexuality, and Politics
in Chile during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1973-1990 273
Margaret Power

Works Cited 287

Contributors 311

Index 313
Acknowledgments

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on this book was the opportunity
it gave us to work together with an outstanding group of scholars. We gratefully
acknowledge the expertise, enthusiasm, and dedication that all of the authors
contributed to their individual chapters and to the book as a whole. Putting this
book together was a very demanding process. We thank the authors for their
complete cooperation, support of the overall project, and for so many interesting
dialogues along the way.
Paola would like to thank first and foremost Margaret Power. Combining our
efforts and strengths to create this book together has again reinforced my faith in
feminist collective efforts. We have been able to rely on each other, together in
political and personal solidarity, every inch of the way. Working with Margaret,
getting to know her and developing our friendship, learning from her especially
about critical theory in history and critical feminist debates in Latin American
studies, have made this project both a joyful and very meaningful experience.
For Margaret, working together with Paola to produce this book has been
intense, exciting, productive, and fun. Although I barely knew Paola when we
began this project in 1998, I now think of her as a dear friend and a highly
trusted and respected colleague. I have learned a tremendous amount from her
about many things, ranging from right-wing women in India to postcolonial
and queer theory. I look forward to our next project together!
Paola would also like to thank Dr. Karl Raitz, Chair of the Department of
Geography, Joan Callahan, Director of the Women's Studies Program, and Pat
Cooper, former Director of the Women's Studies Program, all at the University
of Kentucky (Lexington), for their constant, outstanding support. She is grateful
to all members of the Women's Studies Steering Committee, the Department of
Geography, the Social Theory Program, and the Gender Globals group at the
University of Kentucky for fruitful dialogue. Thanks are due to Paola's many
graduate students whose questions and comments keep her on her toes.
Paola would like to recognize the contributions through stimulating dialogues
made by friends and colleagues who are members of the American Sociological
Association's Caucus on Research on Gender and Sexuality in International
Contexts, especially Frances Hasso, Jyoti Puri, Hyun Sook Kim, Seungsook
Moon, and Natalie Bennett; participants in the Rethinking South Asia/New
South Asia group at the University of California at Santa Cruz organized by
Anjali Arondekar; and the Gender and Sexuality group organized by Janet
Jakobson and Lauren Berlant. For their support, and for sharing all sorts of
insights at various points, I would also like to thank Leila Ahmed, Ritu Menon,
Veena Das, Geeta Patel, Ingrid Steinmeister, Rina Nissim, Laurence Cohen,
Martine Van Woerkens, Sheba Chhachhi, Kathleen Blee, Winddance Twine,
Sandhya Luther, Ashwini Sukthankar, and Heidi Nast.
We would both like to thank Amrita Basu for suggesting that we meet in the
first place.
viii Right-Wing Women

Margaret would like to thank Margaret Strobel, a pioneer in the study of

women and global history. She suggested that I organize a panel for the 1997
American Historical Association conference that examines the right's construc-
tion of maternalism in different regions of the world. This book developed out
of that panel. Margaret would also like to thank Temma Kaplan for her ongoing
support, fantastic insights, and the generous advice she gave me just when I
needed it most. I also appreciate Melinda Power's upbeat personality, positive
outlook, and unwavering confidence in me. She is both a good sister and a true
friend. Issam EI Naqa has cheerfully helped me in countless ways, ranging from
generously sharing his prodigious computer skills to discussing his thoughts on
gender relations in the Middle East. I also thank the Organization of American
States, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lewis Department of
Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology for their generous support of
my work.
We would like to thank Heather Brady for her initial work on the translation
of Claudie Lesselier's chapter.
We are grateful to Ilene Kalish, our editor at Routledge, for her faith in us and
for her commitment to this project, and to Kimberly Guinta for her efficient and
competent work on this book.
Introduction
Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

Right-Wing Women comes out of our desire to engage with other scholars who
work on this understudied subject, across national and regional contexts, and
across disciplines. We hope this book contributes to increased understandings of
and debates on the scope and importance of right-wing women and furthers
anti-right-wing practice.
It is something of an understatement to remark that historically and currently
studies of the right overwhelmingly focus on men. However, over the past twenty
years feminist scholars have produced some provocative nation-specific or
region-specific articles, books, and edited volumes on right-wing women located
variously in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and
South Asia (the bulk of this work is referenced within related individual chapters
herein). Right- Wing Women builds upon this prior work and energetically
extends it, to constitute the first globally comparative, interdisciplinary volume
on right-wing women ever. The contributors write on right-wing women in
Africa, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, South America, and
South Asia. Notwithstanding our efforts, the volume remains uneven in terms
of the countries represented. That is, we contacted authors whom we knew and
didn't know, and solicited articles through announcements in feminist journals
and on the Internet. We also sought to balance the volume by searching for con-
tributors through area studies channels, and writing to universities around the
globe. We received many submissions on North American and western European
right wings, very few on right-wing women in postcolonial societies across the
globe, and none on areas such as Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China, Japan,
and sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa. We feel this dearth of
submissions reflects current power imbalances in "international" scholarly
debates more widely. It also attests to the politics of the English language as an
"international" Internet medium of "exchange." We note transnational imbal-
ances in both the differential perceived relevance of this topic across borders and
the possibilities and resources for such research. In addition, within borders, in
many sites where resources exist, feminist scholars have preferred, understand-
ably, to prioritize research on women whose perspectives they share because these
have been silenced. However, we feel that feminist projects will benefit from
understanding right-wing women precisely because in many cases they constitute
major obstacles to feminism.
2 Paola BaccheUa and Margaret Power

The chapters that are included in this volume come from disciplines across
the social sciences and humanities: women's studies; history; sociology; area
studies; French, Italian, and English literature; geography; political science; and
cultural studies. Given the heterogeneity of the contributors' contexts, disci-
plines' and mother tongues, the chapters are necessarily positioned within
some different, same, and intersecting sets of debates, and make use of some
different, same, and overlapping theoretical tools. Many contributors provide
brief literature reviews to place their scholarship in wider debates within and
beyond their context, or explicate the context generously, to enable the unfa-
miliar reader to more easily situate the text and its arguments. In some cases,
chapters herein constitute the first text on right-wing women's groups, orga-
nizations, or social actors in their context to ever appear in print. In other
cases, scholars revisit prior scholarship in their area to push it further theoret-
ically and empirically. In many cases, authors examine previously unexplored
dimensions of right-wing women altogether. The reader will remark that some
contributors' stances conflict with stances taken by other contributors. Indeed,
we did not produce this book to present a homogenous feminist perspective on
right-wing women; instead we desire to render accessible a heterogeneity of
feminist debates and positions within this growing field of inquiry. As such,
just as authors may disagree among themselves, so we as editors do not concur
with every argument and point in every chapter presented herein. However,
we do feel that every chapter, without exception, is extremely important to
feminist transnational, interdisciplinary debates on right-wing women. We have
learned immensely from the contributions of each author and hope the readers
will, too.
Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of this book, a number of problem-
atics and some common thematics emerge. Given our limitations of space here,
we will point to a few of the more central ones.

Interrogating Notions of the Right through Gender, Geopolitics, and Power

By centering on right-wing women in diverse temporal and geographical set-
tings, this book challenges dominant notions of the right: those that efface or
downplay the place of women and gender; that limit the right wing to its mani-
festations in social movements, political parties, or states; that globalize particu-
laristic Eurocentric defining criteria by applying it to all rights; or that recognize
the far-right's anti-Other discourses and practices (fascisms) while too often
deemphasizing similar attitudes and activities on the center-right.
In her insightful study of women and/in nationalism, Yuval-Davis (1997) dis-
cerns that women participate in nationalism in four ways: as biological, cultural,
and national producers; as cultural embodiments of collectivities and their
boundaries; as carriers of collective «honor"; and as participants in national and
ethnic struggles. This volume confirms and extends these insights: women are
found in all those categories within both national and transnational right
wings, and they are often contradictorily positioned therein. Further, centering
women and gender opens up the right to new interrogations across right-wing
forms and across scale: the body, the city, streets, nation, region, and transnation.
It enables us to more fully understand the scope of right-wing political projects:
the ideologies that right wings produce and diffuse, their recruitment strategies,
 Introduction 3

the modes of adherence and participation they include, the identities they pro-
duce, how they reproduce themselves across generations, and their actions.
Right-wing ideologies, whether forged by male or female ideologues, are
always gendered and elicit gendered responses; gender is central to what makes
them tick. For example, men and women may be drawn to the right because it
produces and affirms masculinities and feminities with which they identify. Dif-
ferent types of male right-wing appeals that include, exclude, exalt, or denigrate
women affect in gendered ways overall recruitment, participation, the right's
reproduction of itself, and its ultimate goals. In some instances where they find
their male right discourses and practices unacceptable, right-wing women cre-
atively construct women-friendly ideologies and practices that place them con-
flict with their male counterparts. And the right uses unconscious and conscious
desire and sexuality to market itself, recruit, and incite action. Women activists
are highly implicated in practices of recruitment: they bring in other women and
men, also transmit right-wing values to their children, thereby encouraging a
next generation of rightists. From the individual, through the family, to the com-
munity, the nation, and the transnation, women's participation enables the right
to organize a totalizing project that moves through different spheres and encom-
passes a variety of spaces. These chapters clearly illustrate that women in the
right are neither dupes of right-wing men nor less powerful replicas of them. As
a body, they demonstrate that rightist women consciously choose to support and
help build the projects of which they are a part. In so doing, right-wing women
carve out a space and identity for themselves and enhance the ability of their
right wings to implement their agendas. In many cases, right-wing women and
right-wing men interpret women's place and role in the right quite differently: it
is not uncommon for men to understand women as just tea makers, while
women act and see themselves as essential (see Gottlieb, this volume, chap. 2).
Women and gender are essential to the right throughout its many manifesta-
tions across the globe, across scale, within and across axes of power, within and
across wider political settings. Beyond its presence as rightist states, or social
movements and parties within states, the right operates trans nationally, in the
forms of oppositional social movements, submerged social movement networks
(Mellucci), and other collectivities across states. The right can emerge with and
within, and merge with or oppose, modernity, postmodernity, colonialism, post-
colonialism. Most important, the right has not only an ideological presence as
doctrine and a material presence in institutions, social actors, practices, and rit-
uals across its various forms. It is also an «elusive network of (quasi-spontaneous'
presuppositions and attitudes" (Zizec 1999).
The most widely diffused definitions of the right in scholarship are problem-
atically derived from studies of European right wings, new and old, from con-
servative to fascist projects. They tend to posit the right oppositionally in relation
to national left states, parties, and social movements, and in relation to «tradition"
which right wings purport to «preserve." We find these definitions highly debat-
able. First, where these criteria are universalized and imposed beyond Europe,
they inadvertently or even openly rest upon the assumption that politics itself
within societies beyond Europe are European-derived. (This point was first made
analogously by Chatterjee [1994] in his critique of Anderson's [1983] notion that
«Third World" nationalisms are «modular," that is, merely mimicked upon offi-
cial, original European nationalisms.) This problematically positions Europe at
4 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

the center of the world, as the originator of all complicated social organization
and thought. Second, the notion that every society actually has a left is disputable,
a point illustrated for example by the Boer period in South Africa (see du Toit,
chap. 4). And, in some cases where a left does exist, the right does not necessarily
identify it as the main enemy, as evidenced by Karam's study of Egyptian Islamist
women (see Karam, chap. 16). Third, in some postcolonial nations that do have
a clearly defined left, the right may share anticapitalist and anti-imperialist posi-
tions with it, as is the case with some Islamist movements.
Some Eurocentric definitions of the right presuppose tradition as an essen-
tialist, ahistorical entity and imagine the right preserving or reviving it. With
many contemporary feminist and nonfeminist scholars of the right we under-
stand «tradition" in Hobsbawmian (1993) terms, as something invented,
dynamic, fluid, constantly being reformulated, but that is made to crystallize
periodically in one site or another, in one form or another, and as always con-
testable. «Tradition" is produced by and crystallizes within internal and transna-
tional relations of power. And «tradition" is gendered differently: women or men
are supposed to embody, and women are most often called upon to symbolize,
preserve, and transmit it. While many male and female rights do claim to be pre-
serving or resurrecting «tradition;' several chapters herein demonstrate that some
right-wing women subjects frame their relationship to «tradition" in terms of
purposefully redefining it to forge «new women."
For us, if there is anything that actually distinguishes (both the center and far)
right from other political tendencies, it is the right's reliance on some form of
internal or external Other. Right wings differentially draw on, produce, and
mobilize naturalized or culturalized self/Other criteria to reify or forge hierar-
chical differences. These are based in gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion,
race, caste, or at their various intersections. Right wings may also work to aggra-
vate some of these hierarchies (within the self/Other dichotomy but also within
the self community), while actually proposing to reduce other hierarchies (within
the self-community). Right-wing doctrines, diffused notions, and practices
regarding Others may take many forms, from coexistence to annihilation, and
may be subject to a range of justifications, from differentialist complementarity,
to incompatibility, to total antagonism.

Subject-Positions, Subjectivities, and Practices

The women studied in this volume are situated across the right-wing forms enu-
merated above. They espouse a range of ideologies: conservativism, neoconser-
vativism, secular extremist nationalism, religious nationalism, fascism. As
subjects, they are positioned across the socioeconomic spectrum, from elite to
poor. They are heterosexual, married, single, mothers, childless, and in one case
(see Scheck, chap. 10) an out lesbian who is openly partnered. In many right
wings, women activists are not under obligation to marry men as long as they
frame their primary commitment as to the right-wing cause (ultimately domi-
nated by men) (see Bacchetta, chap. 3) or to the higher power (God) that ani-
mates the cause (see Karam, chap. 16).
Across this volume, right-wing women are most often segregated into separate
women's organizations. These are connected to male counterparts to varying
degrees. All the right-wing women's organizations included here are structured in
 Introduction 5

clearly hierarchic ways (not as collectives). Some mobilize primarily vertically,

with vast gaps between the leadership and rank and file based in wider axes of
class, «race:' ethnicity, or castes. Others organize primarily horizontally, within
classes, «races:' ethnicities, religions, or castes. In some cases, a range of different
but related right-wing women's organizations, connected to the same project,
exist to mobilize different sectors of the same society, or to organize around spe-
cific issues or professions. Right-wing sex segregation has two main conse-
quences. On the one hand it fosters women's exclusion from the realms of the
overall (gender-combined) organizational power. But on the other hand, it can
enable women to forge their own discourse, practice, and modes of solidarity in
ways that sometimes have the potential to threaten the overall male-dominated
right itself by contesting male power.
In general, right-wing women (like other female social actors) are less publicly
visible than their male counterparts. When they are indeed highly visible they
often exhibit exaggerated femininity while defending masculine right-wing
values, or appear as transgressive, even bigendered, figures. For example, Pauline
Hanson of Australia shifts from performing femme fatale, to everybody's
daughter, to (antilesbian) lesbian chic while defending the same masculinist,
racist, and capitalist stances (see Winter, chap. 14). In a different type of example,
the mainstream media and tabloid press alike construct the women of the British
Union of Fascists (BUF) not as newsworthy political activists but rather as female
figures around whom crystallize highly publicized money and sex scandals (see
Gottlieb, chap. 2). Finally, in another exception to the rule of lowered visibility,
Hindu nationalist spokeswoman Sadhavi Rithambara provokes Hindu nation-
alist men to anti-Muslim violence through speech-performances that travel via
cassette recordings into homes, courtyards, and the streets (see Ghosh, chap. 18).
In these, Rithambara positions herself in a bigendered manner: she appropriates
the privilege of male speech (curse words, sexual imagery), but also posits herself
and other women as victims of Muslim male sexual aggression. Where right-
wing women are less visible, their effacement is as often a function of their over-
whelming positioning within the rather silenced mixed-gendered rank and file
(see Blee, chap. 7) as in their society's preference for the authority of male speech
and actions. In that sense, some right-wing women political actors are received
and projected in ways not so unlike their left-wing female and feminist counter-
parts within their own societies.
One striking feature of a great many right-wing women leaders and full-time
activists is their system of double standards. There is a huge gap between how
right-wing women leaders and full-time activists live out their lives as individuals
on the one hand, and the subjectivities they propose for other women on the
other. Many behave in feisty ways that run against the grain of their discourses on
ideal feminine domesticity (see Vervenioti, chap. 8; Scheck, chap. 10). Among
them we find a divorced woman who opposes divorce (Winter, chap. 14), child-
less women who propagate the centrality of motherhood for women (Karam,
chap. 16), and car-racing, plane-flying, dancing northern European supporters of
Franco's solemn and highly sexist fascist regime in Spain, a country whose pop-
ulation they view with distanced contempt (Keene, chap. 13). In some cases, the
right-wing women subjects' feistiness is primarily a product of their upper-class
position, from which they draw confidence and a sense of superiority. Regardless
of the reasons for these gaps between leaders' and activists' lives and the identi-
6 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

ties they propose for other women, it is a fact that in many cases right-wing
women, leaders and activists, alike, fight for societies that would totally elimi-
nate women who behave as they do.
We find that a number of right-wing women's trajectories into the right are
through male family members who belong to the right (see especially Lesselier,
chap. 9). Accordingly, many right wings conceptualize women's and men's par-
ticipation along normative heterofamiliallines (see Saktanber, chap. 5, and Les-
selier's analysis of the party as party-family). But, there are also cases wherein
the typical familial gender circuit (but not the gender hierarchy) is reversed as
women recruit their male or female family members (Gottlieb, chap. 2). In yet
other cases, women circumvent the heterofamilial altogether as they recruit non-
kin women (Schreiber, chap. 15; Power, chap. 19). In these latter cases, particu-
larly where the right is a micro-oppositional and socially disrespected movement,
joining can be a difficult choice pitting women against their families (Gottlieb).
The chapters indicate that women join and remain in the right for a wide
range of reasons. First, many authors argue that women recruits feel the right,
unlike accessible alternatives to it, provides them with a familiar, nonthreatening
discursive and practice framework centering on problems they identify as vital,
such as social disorder, immorality, crime, the «threatened" family, and degraded
schools (see Blee; Deutsch, chap. 11; and Power). Second, the chapters demon-
strate unequivocally that women feel their activism empowers them as women.
It does so differently in each context, such as by positioning them variously as
respectable, selfless agents of change deemed necessary, or as independent rebels.
Whatever the case, their activism almost invariably permits them to inscribe
themselves into the social in ways otherwise forbidden to women in their milieu.
Right-wing women's political activities are as wide-ranging as elsewhere
within the political spectrum, encompassing both illegal and legal dimensions.
Women's activities tend to depend upon how the right imagines women, how
women activists imagine themselves, whether the particular right in question is
a micro-oppositional movement or in power, and the degree of extremism of its
ideology. Thus, women are more likely to engage in illegal acts where the right in
question is more oppositional, more extremist ideologically, and wherein gender
separatism operates to guarantee gender equilibrium (not egalitarianism [Bac-
chetta]) in the overall organizational structure. Some of their illegal activities are
violent or violence-related, such as when they constitute women's militias or use
explosives and arms. Others involve civil disobedience, such as defying curfews
and bans on demonstrations, illegally supporting clergy and nuns and their social
projects (Boylan), or hiding right-wing male criminals wanted by the law
(Scheck). At the threshold of the law they organize boycotts (Blee), do daily para-
military training (Bacchetta), incite male counterparts to violence against their
Others (Ghosh), or replace male counterparts in leadership roles when the men
are under repression or in prison (Gottlieb; Karam). Right-wing women can be
«vicious perpetrators of terrorism against their Others" (Blee). For some of their
activities they lose their jobs (see Keskin, chap. 17), and get arrested, detained,
tried, and imprisoned (Karam; Gottlieb).
Right-wing women occupy all sorts of positions in and in relation to electoral
politics. They stand as candidates in elections either on their own (Gottlieb;
Ghosh; Winter) or to replace their temporarily ineligible men (Lesselier). They
represent their country to the United Nations (Vervenioti). They influence their
 Introduction 7

powerful male counterparts' political decisions (see Gallucci, chap. 1), sometimes
inducing the latter to present their views as the men's own (Scheck). They lobby
their governments (Schreiber). They draft legislation such as for censorship
(Scheck). They canvass for votes, hand out leaflets, and hang up posters (Lesselier).
Right-wing women's daily activism takes on a variety of forms in the civil
public space. They work across scales, at various local, national, and transna-
tionallevels. They aim to impose themselves and their projects for a right-wing
society in the material, symbolic, and cultural dimensions of life. They are major
protagonists in grass-roots organizing (Boylan; Saktanber; Enders, chap. 6). They
infiltrate left groups, parents' groups at schools, cooperative societies, unions,
and other organizations (Gottlieb). They organize protests against sex education
in schools (Boylan). They write letters to the press or appear on radio shows to
express their views to mass audiences (Gottlieb; Schreiber). They set up and run
women's organizations (Karam), including women's charity unions (Vervenioti),
and mixed-gender organizations (Lesselier). They compete with the state to pro-
vide community services (Boylan) by founding right-wing charities (Vervenioti))
schools for the poor (du Toit) chap. 4) and for youth (Gottlieb)) or structures
providing hygiene) health services) clothing) and food (Boylan; Power). They pub-
licly display their productions in art exhibitions and literary and musical events
(Deutsch). Some set up public fashion shows (Saktanber) while others protest
against them. They sell right-wing newspapers on the streets (Gottlieb). They
spread rumors to discredit their Others (Blee). They organize activities such as
sports events to produce healthy female bodies for bearing children and subli-
mating sex (Deutsch). In times of war) they knit garments for soldiers) serve in
medical units (Keene), and fight. They reach transnational audiences, using the
Internet to diffuse their ideas (Keskin). And they work across borders by sup-
porting foreign right movements and regimes (Keene).
We find it troubling) albeit unavoidable, that many of the above right-wing
women's activities are in form identical or similar to feminist ones. In addition)
in a surprising number of cases, right-wing women are engaged in politically
pluralist projects for women's rights) from suffragist movements (Vervenioti;
Gottlieb) to movements for equal pay for equal work. Let us now turn to examine
constants and variations in the systems of thought that right-wing women pro-
duce and mobilize to inform) provoke, and legitimize their activities) before
turning to the very complex relations between right-wing women and feminism.

Right-WingWomen)s Discourses and Discursive Strategies

Across the chapters) there are many more common and divergent thematics than
we can reasonably discuss here. So) we focus on a few that very often recur and
intersect: self/Other constructions) motherhood and the family, the right's male
and female Others) sexuality) and space.
First) across the chapters) right-wing women define themselves and their posi-
tions in terms of selves/Others) by relying variously on criteria that are essen-
tialist) political-choice based) culturalist) civilizational) or at the intersections of
these. However, across the board they conceptualize relations between women
and men in their own communities in terms of essentialist-differentialist-com-
plementarity. That is) they posit that men and women are essentially) naturally)
biologically different from each other) and that these naturalized differences
8 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

should be the basis for distinct gender roles that are complementary. Yet several
definitions of complementarity abound. In the most recurring definition, com-
plementarity signifies that men and women are different but equal. A second
notion of complementarity propounds divinely ordained subordination of
women to men. And a third maintains that differentialist complementarity based
on female subordination to their men actually translates into equality.
In contrast, the right-wing women in this volume differentiate themselves in
relation to women of their communities who are not right-wing not through
essentialist criteria but rather by political choice. For example, Egyptian Islamist
women define themselves against the negative backdrop of Western women and
«Westernized" or feminist women in their context (Karam). For Greek and
Chilean right-wing women, leftist women serve that purpose. A whole range of
right-wing women operationalize feminists as enemies to distinguish their own
identities and positions (Keskin; Schreiber; Lesselier).
Finally, right-wing women rely on the widest range of arguments to erect
boundaries between themselves and their female and male Others (those they
claim do not belong to their racial, national, ethnic, or religious communities). In
the United States, for example, women members of the Ku Klux Klan deploy bio-
logical notions to reduce African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and others, to ani-
mals (Blee), while Hindu nationalist Sadhavi Rithambara accuses Indian Muslims
of being uncivilized (Ghosh).
Second, the right-wing women in this volume all exalt the motherhood of the
women of their own community, even when they themselves are childless (such
as Zaynab Al-Ghazali, an Egyptian Islamist woman discussed in chapt. 16). They
may conceptualize motherhood in primarily material terms (as the KKK's «racial
mothers" in Blee) or symbolic terms (as the mother goddesses in Ghosh; Bac-
chetta), or equally accentuate both dimensions (Saktanber; Power).
Nearly all right-wing women idealize the heteronormative family. (There are
exceptions to this rule herein and beyond.) Those who exalt the family generally
see it as the privileged site of women's power and self-realization, threatened by
a host of internal and external Others. Beyond individual attachment to the
family, right-wing women who glorify it extend it across spatial scales: it is the
pillar of society, the bastion of society's security, order, and naturalized hierarchy
(Lesselier), and a microcosm of society (Power; Lesselier) or of all humanity
(Deutsch). Further, right-wing women and men often deploy the heteronorma-
tive family as a model for right-wing women's and men's relational subjectivi-
ties, for the structures of right-wing organizations, and for the relationship
between women's and men's wings within the same overall right-wing project.
Thus, the Turkish Islamist women Saktanber studied participate politically along
a familial mode. Spanish fascist women idealize the fascist Primo de Rivera family
as exemplary for the nation (Enders). And Hindu nationalists conceptualize the
hierarchic relations between their respective leaders of men's and women's orga-
nizations as an elder brother-younger sister relation (Bacchetta).
A third constant in this volume (and without) is anti-Other discourse and
practice. The Other is a site for the production and mobilization of fear that sus-
tains many right-wing projects. But the Other is also gendered: for some, it is
Othered women who are primary targets, while for others it is Othered men.
Nearly all right-wing women in this volume imagine Othered women in terms
 Introduction 9

of a normative femininity and sexuality, as aggressors or victims. Some construct

Othered women as sexually overactive, predatory, and duplicitous, but also as
asexual, passive victims of their men, or baby breeders for the enemy camp
(Blee). As aggressors, Othered women threaten the integrity of right-wing
women's heteronormative family, «race," society, religious community, or nation.
As victims of their male Othered counterparts, they can be used to illustrate the
inherent inferiority of the Othered community, and the aggression of its men.
Many right-wing men and women alike who will not critique the sexism within
their own right-wing projects may strongly condemn women's conditions in
Othered communities. For example, the French National Front, which consis-
tently opposes feminist demands in France, maintains that African, Maghrebian,
Caribbean, and Jewish men treat their own women badly (Lesselier). Beyond this
volume, Laura and George W. Bush, who oppose most u.S. feminist demands
and did not note any sexism in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan before September II,
2001, now strategically position themselves as worldwide champions of Afghan
women's liberation to soften the machoism of the «hunt 'em down" discourse
and to attract u.S. women's complicity with the war. In some situations, indi-
vidual Othered women are deployed to speak against their own communities,
such as by publicly opposing affirmative action (Schreiber). Right wings also use
Othered women to project an image of inclusion while maintaining policies of
exclusion. Thus, the French National Front puts forward women members of
color while opposing immigrant rights (Lesselier). And Integralists in Brazil
appeal to women of native and African ancestry but oppose black demands for
civil rights (Deutsch). In still other cases, what appears as an anti-Othered
woman discourse can be at least partially based in an anticolonial stance, as is
the case for Islamist women who condemn what they interpret as Western
women's promiscuity (Karam, Keskin).
Othered men are major foci of right-wing disgust, hatred, violence, exclusion,
and annihilation. But right-wing women and men target Othered males differ-
ently. In many cases right-wing women come out even more against the male
Other than do right-wing men (see especially Scheck), though ultimately vio-
lence against the male Other remains the monopoly of right-wing men. We feel
there are several explanations for this gendered targeting. First, male and mixed-
gender right wings conceptualize men as the ultimate (but not exclusive) agents
of their communities, and they support, directly or indirectly, men's more exten-
sive power. Many right-wing women, like their male counterparts, project this
preferential male agency onto Othered communities, such that Othered men are
made to epitomize the Othered community. Second, while some right-wing
women imagine male and female Others in vaguer, less targeted terms than do
their own male counterparts (Lesselier), most right-wing women see Othered
men in personal terms, often as sexualized threats to their and other women's
physical purity and integrity (Blee; du Toit). Third, right-wing women's extremist
stance against Othered males can be based in misguided antisexist stances. Some
right-wing women recognize and contest sexism within their own communities;
others do not. Across the board, right-wing women direct much of the rage they
feel against mysogyny primarily against Othered men (see Scheck, Blee, Lesse-
lier, Ghosh). The Other male must be made to epitomize misogyny, so that right-
wing women can keep the peace with their own men. Right-wing men approve
10 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

of this gendered Other targeting; it ensures that women remain within the
bounds of the right-wing project, directs women's anger away from them, and
eliminates the Othered male as potential heterosexual competition (Bacchetta).
Fourth, sexuality (heteronormative and homosexual) is yet another charged
site for right-wing women. As the reader might expect, in this volume many right
wings favor containing sexuality within the heteronormative married couple
solely for reproductive purposes (Deutsch; Enders). They propose to control
women's sexuality within and beyond the bedroom, through censorship of
women's bodily expressions and of the media (Boylan). However, some right-
wing women actually mobilize for recognition of their sexual claims (within het-
eronormative familial confines). For example, many Chilean Catholic right-wing
women believed they had the right to sexual pleasure within heteronormative
marriage, and some urged others to use ((natural birth control" as one way to
achieve it (Power).
On homosexuality we find similar complexities: on the one hand, the over-
whelming majority of right-wing women abhor homosexuality. They consider it
a threat to the heteronormative family or as a nasty habit that needs to be kept in
the closet (Karam). Most often right-wing discourse produces and attempts to
justify violence against lesbians, gays, transsexuals, and transgendered people.
Notwithstanding this, at least one primarily heteronormative right wing, the
Weimar Republic's DNVP, had an out lesbian leader, Kathe Shirmacher, who
openly lived with her partner into old age (Scheck). And in one case, a hetero-
sexual identified right-wing leader, Pauline Hanson of Australia, supports some
forms of gay rights (Winter). Beyond this volume, in other, albeit rare cases, there
are right-wing groups organized around homosexual subjectivities, such as the
Log Cabin Republicans in the United States and gay Nazis in France.
Sexuality operates in right wings at unconscious to conscious levels to evoke
pleasures, adherence, and other emotions that help sustain right-wing actions.
For example, Ghosh argues that when Hindu nationalist Sadhavi Rithambara
gives a public speech there is a radical disjuncture between the pedagogic intent
of the speech-performance and its effect. Rithambara purports to be com-
menting on Hindus, Muslims, mosques, and temples, but in so doing sparks
unconscious sexual desire. In other right wings, such as the BUF, performances of
sexuality may take the form of sex-evocative salutes, drum corps, or the openly
recognized ((sexually charged image of young women in uniform, trained in phys-
ical fitness and self-defense" (Gottlieb). Still elsewhere in many rights, women
experience male leaders in terms of their heterosexual, supposedly charismatic
appeal (Lesselier; Enders). Some articulate this openly; for example BUF women
have described Mosley, the movement's chief, as ((the Rudolph Valentino of fas-
cism" (Gottlieb).
Fifth, space is evoked in a myriad of modes throughout this volume: in
women's ideologies and practices, in women's identities and subjectivities, as sites
the right produces and intervenes within, and as actors that intervene in pro-
ducing the right itself. Many right-wing women are directly involved in the right's
construction and reconfiguration of space. Rights require and grow through ter-
ritories in the form of communities, regions, nations, or transnations. Right-
wing women create and/or reproduce discourses of self/Othered communities
within and across nations (Blee). They produce new spatialities or reframe
existing spatialities for their own purposes (Bacchetta). Right-wing women also
 Introduction 11

take advantage of certain flows across space, such as in Turkey where rural migra-
tion to urban centers is key to the rise of Islamist movements and of women
members therein (Keskin). But right-wing women are also used by their male
counterparts to extend the right across space, such as when Hindu nationalist
Sadhavi Rithambara's speeches at demonstrations are marketed to diffuse Hindu
nationalism across scales (into the home, courtyard, neighborhood, nation, dias-
pora), or when right-wing women are made to be go-betweens in diasporic and
cross national financing that extend right wings (Ghosh). Right-wing women
also work to block flows constituted by their Others across space. These blockages
may be bodily such in cases of anti-immigrant practices (Lesselier) and racial
segregation (du Toit). They may also be discursive, such as when right-wing
Catholics try to prevent Spanish atheism's entrance into Brazil (Deutsch). But
furthermore, space also acts, variously, in women's subjectivities. For example,
Egyptian Islamist Safinaz Qazim's international travels, including one trip to the
u.s. that brought her into contact with the thought of Malcolm X, inspired her
ideological productions, while in Ahmedabad a city park plays a key role in pro-
ducing Hindu nationalist women as fierce (Bacchetta). Symbolic space mediates
identities, such as when Hindu nationalist women construct and mobilize the
Hindu nation's all-powerful territorial goddess as a model for their own mili-
tarism (Bacchetta). And combined material and symbolic space produces effects
such as when railroads set in the South African landscape signify mobility and
imperialist triumph in which right-wing women participate (du Toit).
The types of processes and mechanisms that right-wing women mobilize to
produce their own separate discourses vary a great deal. In many cases, women
ideologues selectively instrumentalize diffuse notions of popular culture to pro-
duce legitimate, unconventional models for women's identity. They choose from
a pantheon of preexisting symbolic referents for women's identities and reframe
them in right-wing terms. Some examples are: Islamist women saints (Sak-
tanber), historical female heroes (Deutsch), the Virgin Mary (Power), powerful
Hindu goddesses (Ghosh), St. Teresa of Avila (Enders), or Queen Isabella of
Spain (Enders). The chapters demonstrate a whole array of discursive interven-
tions, from right-wing women ideologues formulating and inserting women's
identities and issues into the wider gender-mixed right, to women ideologues
producing a totalizing female right-wing project that may have points of antag-
onism with their male counterparts' projects.

Right-Wing Women and Feminism

Among right-wing women, there are those who assert that they are antifeminist,
and those, much less numerous, who actually claim to be feminist. The reasons
for these stances, and how they translate into practice, merit discussion.
First, the overwhelming majority of right-wing women, like their male coun-
terparts, position themselves as virulently antifeminist. Some right-wing women's
organizations identify combating feminism as their sole raison d'etre (Schreiber).
In many cases, however, antifeminist rightist women spend their lives working for
some form of women's empowerment (not liberation) within the context of the
right (Karam; Keskin).
A range of right-wing antifeminist stances can be usefully distinguished in
terms of geopolitical contexts, the type of right in question, and contextual def-
12 Paola BaccheUa and Margaret Power

initions of the term feminism itself. Thus, colonizing right wings (such as British,
French, Australian) and postcolonial ones (such as in the Middle East and South
Asia) have different relationships to struggles for women's rights and to the term
«feminism." Colonialism was a gendered and sexed project. It deployed hetero-
sexual male projections of colonized women's bodies, status, and conditions to
denigrate colonized subjects of both genders and to justify colonialism as a civi-
lizing mission. The colonizers set themselves up, as Spivak (1994) aptly puts it, as
white-men-saving-brown-women-from-brown-men. This savior narrative and
the repressive colonial practices that accompany it variously bear upon post-
colonial women, right or left, who critique their internal patriarchies, filiarchies,
or fraternarchies. Postcolonial antiwoman forces may simply accuse postcolonial
woman's liberation forces of collaboration with (neo)colonialism to undermine
their own societies. In this light, some postcolonial women's antifeminist claims,
whether on the right or the left, may be intended primarily to be anticolonial
positions rather than antiwoman (Karam). Further, the notion that women's lib-
eration struggles are not indigenous to the «Third World" is not only false but
ultimately is complicit with the colonial savior narrative itself. As Jayawardena
(1986) and others demonstrate, internal «Third World" struggles for women's
liberation precede colonialism, continue parallel and integral to nationalist move-
ments for liberation from colonialism, and abound in the postcolonial present.
At issue in many postcolonial contexts, for right-wing and left-wing women
alike, is the politics of the term «feminism" itself, its definitions and its translata-
bility. Many «Third World" women engaged in women's liberation have long used
the term « feminist" to describe their struggles and to inscribe their solidarities
with women across borders. But many others, who are not less committed to
women's liberation and transnational solidarities with women's liberation else-
where, reject the term. The reasons for this are many. Some feel the term is too
widely associated with colonial and neocolonial cultural imperialism. Often the
term «feminism" is untranslatable into local languages, thus standing out as for-
eign in the flow of discourse. Under these circumstances, some women feel that
using the term would position them in an obligatory public combat to decon-
struct feminism's colonial associations, thereby diverting their energies and
undermining the public appeal of their struggles. Others who struggle for
women's liberation projects do not self-designate as feminist because they feel
that some of the projects globally that self-identify as feminist actually are impe-
rialist. This position is clear in stances against certain «international" women's-
rights-as-human-rights projects based in the West; they are critiqued for
imposing Western notions of the self, of the human, and of rights, on postcolo-
nial societies, in modes that collude with Western governments or operationalize
the colonial savior narrative gender-substitutively (as white-women-save-brown-
women-from-brown-men). In still other contexts, the political semantic and def-
initional problems of the term «feminism" are compounded by the difficulty of
speaking of women's issues contextually. Thus, Karam points out that in the
Egyptian Islamic context, where issues of justice and injustice are central, these
issues are framed in terms not of women and men but rather bani Adam (human
race). However, Karam categorizes the women she interviews as feminist even
though they self-identify as antifeminist because they dedicate their lives to con-
testing many forms of sexism in their societies, braving their male counterparts'
strong opposition.
 Introduction 13

The pro-feminist right-wing stances in this volume are located in the West or
among West-origin sectors of postcolonial societies. They are specifically histor-
ical cases confined to the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. In that
period, feminist movements in Western Europe, the United States, parts of Latin
America, and South Africa organized for women's suffrage. (In contrast, in many
postcolonial sites, suffrage was achieved as an integral part of national liberation
from colonialism.) Suffragette activists did not necessarily seek to challenge het-
eronormative gender roles. Many believed they should be able to vote in order to
protect their families and clean up politics. Most were positioned in dominant
social sectors, such as Chilean conservatives (see Lavrin 1995; and in this volume
Power), South African Boers (Du Toit), or Ku Klux Klan women (Blee), and
argued they should obtain the vote to safeguard the elite position of their class or
«race." In one case, a whole movement, the BUF, called for women's equality, a
demand they attributed to the British character and one which they used to
demonstrate their differences from and superiority to other (sexist) European
fascist regimes (Gottlieb). Ultimately, self-declared feminist right-wing women
saw no contradiction between their enfranchisement struggles and fascist or
white supremacist projects. In their minds, both movements worked toward the
same goal: their own political and social rights. This of course poses a serious
problem for feminism, its definitions and projects, which we deal with below.
By the end of the twentieth century, definitions of feminism and some right-
wing women's friendly relations with it had changed considerably. Feminisms
began to challenge the «naturalness" of gender, to reject the conflation of wom-
anhood with motherhood and the heteronormative family, to support diverse
expressions of sexuality, and, as Pateman (1989) notes, to contest the notion of
separate gendered spheres. Today, many right-wing women in the same earlier
pro-feminist sites target feminism as their primary enemy because, in their eyes,
feminism denies women's biological nature and thus their potential for fulfill-
ment and happiness. For example, women of the National Front in France pro-
pose to «liberate women from feminism"; they see it as worsening women's
position by dissolving the heteropatriarchal family (Lesselier). Islamist women in
Egypt feel feminism's "sexual liberation" turns women into commodities for men
(Karam). Further, many right-wing women oppose feminism because it now pro-
poses cross-positional alliances that defy right-wing anti-Other tenets. Even
though many right-wing women continue to favor some forms of women's rights
(political representation, employment, etc.), they proactively oppose extending
them to Othered women (and men).
Further, across the different rights examined in this volume, antifeminist and
self-declared feminist women alike espouse views on gender and society that
differ from their male counterparts (Blee; Karam). Some women critique the
sexism of the men of their own and related right organizations (du Toit; Keene).
Thus, Ku Klux Klan women flatly denounce their men's "hostility, condescen-
sion, and hypocrisy" toward women (Blee). DNVP women in Germany strategi-
cally framed, sexism as a threat to the right and the race it defended: they warned
that Nazi male preference for submissive women would lead to the downfall of
the Nordic race because true Nordic women are self-assertive and bold (Scheck).
It is useful to distinguish between women's liberation and women's empower-
ment, and between different types of empowerment. Feisty right-wing women
who fight for societies that would abolish women like themselves can be said to
14 Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power

be engaged in individual empowerment practices. Those who work to improve

conditions for all women in their self-defined communities can be considered
collective empowerment actors. Both right-wing individual and collective empow-
erment are specifically anti-Other. Right-wing women create or preserve borders
(between self and selves, or between self and Other) and they refuse to extend
women's empowerment beyond their self-designated community.

Resisting the Right

The understanding gained about the right in this book leads us to some prelim-
inary thoughts about resisting the right. One of the best ways to confront the
right is to build or rebuild a women's liberation movement that not only con-
fronts patriarchal, filiarchal, and fraternarchal attitudes and power and the right's
multiple constructions of Otherness, but also offers women tangible, symbolic,
and attractive alternatives. A feminism that can do more than empower certain
sectors of women (who are often already relatively privileged in their society)
must recognize intersecting oppressions (based in gender, "race:' sexuality, reli-
gion, ethnicity, nation, colonialism etc.) and how they operate through and across
scales transnationally, and must forge strategies with all women's liberation in
mind. This means constructing transversal alliances within and across borders,
and mutually and simultaneously opposing racism, homophobia, religious and
ethnic oppressions, class oppression, neocolonialism, and war. In fact, inter-
sections between the right and certain forms of feminism have been possible
because some feminisms have been narrowly defined (Yuval-Davis 1998:
184-85). Second, in some instances right-wing assaults on feminisms have
pushed feminists into defensive positions and effectively silenced feminists. We
need to find ways to develop and diffuse feminist debates and actions in the
public discursive space across scale, from the local to the transnational. Due to
intersecting oppressions, it has been difficult for feminists to have an impact in
the media. This is an area that we need to work on. Third, this volume provides
a glimpse at reasons why women join the right; some of these could be coun-
tered to reduce recruitment. For example, the right produces, confirms, or pro-
tects identities and issues to which its women recruits relate (the heteronormative
family, social order, crime, etc.). Feminists need to more extensively address these
issues, providing alternative analyses and framing them in understandable ways.
Like other political formations, the right mobilizes women's desires to be useful
and to have an impact on events. In some sites feminists could extend invitations
to a wider range of women to participate in corresponding feminist actions.
Fourth, several authors have identified points of tension between the right-wing
projects of men and their female counterparts. They often center on gender itself.
The bulk of these tensions arise from wider societal gains by feminists, of which
nearly all women, regardless of positionality or political choice, might benefit.
While we do not see the right imploding because of its gender tensions (there
are too many mechanisms in place within the right to prevent this), we hope that
knowledge of the location of these tensions will encourage feminist possibilities
for aggravating them through interventions in the public discursive space. If
effectively and massively accomplished, this might induce some borderline right-
wing women into eventually abandoning the right, thereby weakening it. And it
might potentially curb the right's further recruitment of women.
 Introduction 15

Some Directions for Future Research

Briefly we would like to suggest some immediate future directions for research on
right-wing women. It is important to find ways to support scholarship on right-
wing women in sites where such scholarship is desired and yet has been inhibited.
Also, many insights could be gained through future in-depth comparisons of
rights within and across geopolitical contexts, colonizing, colonized, and post-
colonial ideologies (fascisms, religious nationalisms, and transnationalisms, con-
servative rights, populist rights, colonial rights, postcolonial rights), forms (states,
parties, movements, and less organized manifestations, within and across
nations), generations, and contextual social positionings of rights (as majorities
or oppositional formations). It would be useful to come to a better understanding
of transnational connections between and among the rights, their exchanges of
ideas and resources across borders and scales, the conditions that facilitate or
block their collective alignments, and how they support and influence each other.
Further work on right-wing women actors (leaders to rank and file [Blee]), their
actions, organizational structures, finances and economic programs, ideologies,
and modalities of ideological diffusion and their roles in reproducing the right
across generations is necessary, as is more inquiry into right wings and sexuality.
And finally, a local to transnationally comparative examination of forms of
women's liberationist resistance to the right and how they fare would contribute
to configuring future successful strategies against the right.
 pan I.

Auencvl
Subieclivitvl
Subieci Posilions
 1.
She Loved Mussolini:
Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Fascism
Carole C. Gallucci

Margherita Grassini Sarfatti (1880-1961) is famous for founding the Novecento

art group in Italy in 1925, and infamous for being Benito Mussolini's mistress
for nineteen years. An important and influential intellectual in her day, Sarfatti
published thousands of articles on topics ranging from art and politics to litera-
ture and culture, hosted a literary and artistic salon that drew major cultural
figures of the day, and enjoyed access to powerful people and institutions. Her
biography of Mussolini, Dux, was an international best-seller translated into
eighteen languages. So well known was Sarfatti that she was invited by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt to tea at the White House on
April 15, 1934. In the 1930s she lost favor in Mussolini's Fascist regime and went
into exile in Paris and Argentina, where she attempted to reclaim her earlier iden-
tities and recast her life. Sarfatti occupies seemingly multiple and contradictory
subject positions, as Jewish and Catholic, politically left and right, feminist and
Fascist. When studying Sarfatti, scholars typically speak of categories such as pre-
Fascist, post-Fascist, feminist, antifeminist, postwar, and post-Mussolini. While
these qualifiers rightly reflect the complexity of Sarfatti's life and works, they
suggest an uncomplicated relationship of self to ideology that may prove to be
too limiting. Is she, as Victoria de Grazia has argued, an «an organizer of culture:'
or is she, as Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan have suggested, a Fascist ideo-
logue?l If we take Barbara Spackman's theory of Fascist discourse (1996) as
combining oppositional positions and apply it to Sarfatti, we are left with a
perplexing question: is it possible to be both a feminist and a fascist?
A complex and contradictory figure, Sarfatti has been clearly viewed as a
Fascist. While critics overwhelmingly agree that Sarfatti was a member of the
Fascist Party, a proclamation she herself made in 1919, there is no critical
consensus on whether she was, or can even be considered, a feminist. Scholars
such as Franca Pieroni Bortolotti and Giovanna Bosi Maramotti have argued that
even her so-called early period is nothing short of antifeminism in the service of
self-interest. 2 More recent studies find a definite ideological break with feminism
by Sarfatti in the mid to late 1920s, in part a result of the consolidation of the
Fascist regime (de Grazia 1982, 152; Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, 307;
Harrowitz 1996, 145). Yet Sarfatti considered herself a feminist from her earliest
writings beginning in 1901 and, to the best of my knowledge, never disavowed
this position in her own writings. Rather, it seems, she simply changed, under
20 Carole C. Gallucci

Fascism, what it meant to be a feminist. Indeed, Sarfatti's complicated (re)posi-

tionings over time raise important issues for subsequent critical studies on women
and Italian Fascism, such as the relationship of feminism to fascism, the definition
of feminism itself, and the factors that may condition producers of culture.
Sarfatti is an important figure to study for several reasons. First, an analysis of
women intellectuals who supported Fascism in Italy will open up new areas of
inquiry and alter feminist discourses. While Sarfatti herself may not be able to
cross the lines between feminism and fascism or even occupy a liminal space
between them, she severely complicates the notion that all Fascists were anti-
women or that all women were anti-Fascist. Much work still needs to be done, for
example, on the "Fasci Femminili:' or women's auxiliaries of the Fascist Party,
and their attempt to formulate a "Fascist feminism." By studying women's
production, consumption, and attitudes of support toward fascism, future
research will lead to the construction of a more accurate picture of women's
writing in twentieth-century Italy and Europe. In this way, we can connect the
work of Italian women Fascists with the history of other women intellectuals in
Europe, particularly Germany, who openly sympathized with Nazism and
fascism. 3 Furthermore, the previously unknown story of Fascist women
supporters can be linked to a more established historiography of anti-Fascist
activists, providing a better context for their actions. 4 The kind of research I
propose may create alternative paradigms on women and fascism. 5
In this essay, I propose a new study of Sarfatti's texts written between 1913
and 1955. I will explore how Sarfatti attempted to reconcile feminism with
Fascism. I have organized Sarfatti's life and works into three phases: her early
years of socialist feminism; her middle years at the height of Mussolini's power,
when she is more clearly in line with Fascist thinking about women; and her later
years, when she attempts to reposition herself in history and absolve herself from
her own responsibility in the development of Fascism. This helps explain her
silence about Mussolini in her final memoirs. Yet I would like to suggest even in
her writings of the middle years, which are antiwomen, that Sarfatti is still
concerned with women's issues and may even subtly contest some elements of
Fascist ideology.
To this end, it will be useful to begin with an overview of Sarfatti's life. Sarfatti
was an art critic, novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist. She was interna-
tionally recognized as an art critic, both for her support of the arts and for her
literary and artistic salon, which drew major figures of Italian and European intel-
lectuallife, such as Luigi Pirandello and F. T. Marinetti. Sarfatti began writing and
publishing as early as 1901. Her writings appeared in major feminist and socialist
publications, such as the socialist daily Avanti! in Milan, the feminist review La
Rassegna femminile in Florence, and the socialist literary review Avanti della
domenica published first in Florence and later in Rome. Many of her early writings
addressed women's issues. In these early years from 1901 to 1925, Sarfatti posi-
tioned herself as a feminist and a supporter of women's rights. In 1901, Sarfatti
joined the Milan Feminist League and wrote articles for that organization's
journal, Unione Femminile, supporting voting rights for women. Socialist men
and women were divided over whether female emancipation would take place
under the revolution or whether women were immediately entitled to equal
rights, including the right to vote. After years of debate, the Socialist Party offi-
cially endorsed universal suffrage for women only by 1910. In 1912, the year after
 She Loved MussoUni 21

Sarfatti met Mussolini, she was writing for La Difesa delle Lavoratrici (The Defense
ofWomen Workers), the official voice of socialist feminism. Sarfatti wrote articles
for La Difesa on voting, work conditions, equal pay, family law, and divorce. For
instance, in her 1913 article ((Perche Ie donne han bisogno del voto" [((Why women
need the vote"], Sarfatti argued that, contrary to pervasive antiwomen rhetoric
which said that granting women the vote would destroy the home, voting women
had a higher intellectual and moral program then men: (([Women] have saved
houses, families and innumerable hearths, for the present and the future" (2).
Sarfatti also supported legal rights for women. Sarfatti's 1914 article ((Le nuove
leggi sull'ordinamento della famiglia" [((New family laws"], listed the proposed
bills for new family laws: ((Bill for civil marriage over religious, bill for divorce, bill
for paternity laws, who therefore would dare to say that politics is (men's business:
that politics is (something that doesn't concern women'?" (1). Sarfatti insisted
that society, now that women were a significant presence in political life, correct
the injustices affecting women (1). Sarfatti understood that society as a whole,
and specifically the working class and the bourgeoisie, would have to band
together in order to obtain equal rights for women.
Sarfatti often invoked the first-person plural in her early writings, insisting
that ((we women" take matters into our own hands. Using this rhetorical strategy,
Sarfatti created a common bond and sense of community with her female
readers. She attempted to universalize women's experiences by addressing the
reader directly: ((Italian women, you socialists and working women, be on the
alert!" (1). Sarfatti reiterated the rhetoric first proposed by early feminists who
encouraged female empowerment through increased economic and political
participation. Sarfatti's subsumption of the category of women under the cate-
gory of mothers in this early phase, sometimes construed as anticipating Fascist
rhetoric, was rather a common rhetorical strategy of the natural rights philos-
ophy of the Enlightenment. 6
In her middle phase, roughly 1926 to 1936, Sarfatti recast her earlier positions
on women's role and function in Fascist society. In this group of writings, Sarfatti
was more in line with Fascist thinking about the proper place of Woman. For the
Fascists, women's rights now meant prolific motherhood in service to the new
Italy. Scholars have argued that as mistress to the duce, Sarfatti abandoned femi-
nism and chose to concentrate instead on modern art, not modern women. 7 A
more Fascist and less feminist Sarfatti appears in two of her major publications
during this period: the 1926 biography, Dux, and the 1929 novel, II palazzone.
Sarfatti considered her biography of Mussolini, Dux, her greatest literary
achievement. Giuseppe Prezzolini had suggested the idea to Sarfatti in 1924 after
being approached by an English publisher interested in a biography of Mussolini
(Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993,299). Sarfatti's biography was published first in
English in 1925 with the title The Life ofBenito Mussolini, and in Italian in 1926
as Dux. Mussolini, who had earlier provided Sarfatti with personal diaries and
letters, wrote the preface to the Italian edition, and there he insisted: ((In thus
presenting myself I am giving the highest proof of human endurance for the
moral edification of my fellow-mortals" (The Life, 9; Dux, 7). Dux quickly became
a best-seller. It was translated into eighteen languages and went through seven-
teen editions from 1926 to 1938. Its status as a best-seller in Italy may have been
determined by censorship laws and Fascist control of printing. The Fascist ideo-
logue Arturo Marpicati went so far as to insist that it was the duty of everyone to
22 Carole C. Gallucci

read it: "It is one's duty to know it. It is necessary to those who live today, as it will
be indispensable to the historical future.»8
Fascist propagandists called Sarfatti the "artefice del Duce» or image maker of
the duce (de Grazia 1992, 230). Historians, including Philip Cannistraro, have
credited Sarfatti with creating a myth of Mussolini by helping to shape his cult of
the personality (Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993,302-305). Sarfatti created a myth
for the masses of a man destined to remake Italy: "Benito Mussolini is an arche-
type of the Italian-he is a Roman from top to toe and to the marrow of his
bones.... Roman in spirit and appearance, Benito Mussolini is the resurrection of
the pure Italic type, which after many centuries flourishes once again» (The Life,
20; Dux, 10). As an officially sanctioned biography, Sarfatti rewrote the past and
largely omitted Fascist violence, including the murder of Socialist leader Giacomo
Matteotti in 1924 (The Life, 138, 149; Dux, 98). We can only speculate as to her
knowledge or ignorance of Fascist violence and repression. Given her intimate
relationship with Mussolini, it would appear that Sarfatti was well aware of such
acts. She excused the murder of Matteotti as an expression of manly rivalries:
"With a party of energetic young men, some of them inclined to violence, the
more that is accomplished the more likely is friction to arise, and it is impossible
that mistakes will not be made.»9 In his review of 1926, Luigi Tonelli saw Dux as
the embodiment of an epoch: "Besides being a great and acute biography, Dux
seems to be the story of thirty years of Italian political and spiritual life» (251; see
also Cecchi 1926,245). Dux reflects the height of Sarfatti's power in Fascist Italy.
Crucially, Sarfatti does not present an ideal ruler, but rather a very real man.
She included his accounts of violence, opportunism, and antifeminism. Sarfatti
presented Mussolini as a virile leader surrounded by adoring women. In the
conclusion, Sarfatti defined the biography as "a woman's book.» Reviewers
agreed. IO By doing so, while seemingly demeaning it, Sarfatti actually valorized
microhistory and oral history by focusing on the relations between history and
story. According to Sarfatti, History may be made up of, in this case, a great man
and great deeds, but it is also made up of important women and quotidian
stories. Although Sarfatti concluded that «[t]he scene, Signor Presidente, is domi-
nated by your figure» (The Life, 346), she made quite sure that he was nonethe-
less surrounded by influential women, including Sarfatti herself.
When Sarfatti's only novel, II palazzone, was published in the spring of 1929,
she defined it a "love story.» I I In 1929, Goffredo Bellonci aligned Dux with II
palazzone, arguing that Dux recounted the story of a man representing "mascu-
line virtues:' while II palazzone narrated "the feminine essence, woman» (8). The
main themes of the novel include the obedient, subservient woman ["Woman,
woman, woman: unremittingly woman!» (238)], male virility and domination,
and the necessity of Fascism because Italy "needs a leader» (198). The represen-
tation of the main female character, Fiorella Maggi, conforms perfectly with
Fascist thinking about women as lovers, sexual objects for the new man, and as
"exemplary wife and mother" (sposa e madre esemplare; Meldini 1975). Fiorella is
all of these, wife, mother, and lover, who exists insofar as men confer a social role
on her: "to feel his, protected by him, led and scolded, possessed by him
completely and totally!» (236). In the novel, Sarfatti set up a "war of the sexes» in
which men are dominant, violent, and active, and women are tender, obedient,
and passive (116, 121, 123-125).
According to Giovanna Bosi Maramotti, II palazzone is clearly a Fascist novel:
 She Loved Mussolini 23
"II palazzone is a Fascist historical novel for its able introduction of myths which
provide the basis of an education largely affirmed in the thirties" (1982, 106).
While women are represented as sexual objects, men are violent Fascist leaders,
aligned with unruly, violent, aggressive forces. For instance, the character Manlio
Valdeschi, after attacking nearby workers, "impersonated [the] ideal of high and
industrious virility" (240). Whereas femininity is presented as passive submis-
sion, masculinity is presented as positive aggression. Furthermore, in this book,
Sarfatti presented striking workers as potential enemies of the state: "You must be
joking! They are a hundred thousand chatterboxes, greedy to overpower, little
tyrants by cowardice" (198). When not focusing on the specifics of a so-called
female writing, critics seemed to applaud "the ideal story of a generation, our
generation from war to Fascism" (Panzini 1929, 3).
Sarfatti herself seems to admit that the fictional novel is actually autobio-
graphical in nature. 12 She saw herself in the role of Fiorella and Mussolini in the
role of Manlio: "We will keep our secret [love] quiet, jealously, if you want it, but
you must be mine and no one can stop it" (225). If we read II palazzone as a
romanticized version of Sarfatti's relationship with Mussolini, then we are imme-
diately struck by her self-portrait, in which the real powerful working woman is
reduced to the fictional passive sexual object. One must recall that this was
Sarfatti's only foray into fiction writing. Besides her waning power, one possible
explanation for this novel may be that her female representations and concomi-
tant ideas seem to be based on prevalent literary trends, most notably the work
of the Futurists and D'Annunzio (Bosi Maramotti 1982, 110-111). In these
models, women are sexual objects to be conquered and dominated in a lyrical
prose of hyperbolic proportions.
Sarfatti and her family converted to Catholicism in 1928. Scholars explain
Sarfatti's conversion as a way to align herself with and protect herself from the
increasingly intolerant Fascist regime, where Fascist ideologues began publicly
voicing anti-Semitic sentiments. 13 Nancy Harrowitz, among others, points out
that Sarfatti never abandoned her aesthetic principles on art (1996, 144), since
she was dubbed the "Fascist dictator of culture" in the 1920s. Rather, Sarfatti
continually argued for modernism in art, devoid of any so-called Fascist content,
a higWy controversial and increasingly unpopular position. This stance, together
with her Jewish origins, were at least partly responsible for her waning influence
on Mussolini and her decreasing position of power in the regime. Her increas-
ingly difficult position may in part explain her other pro-Fascist articles
published in the 1930s, which focus on the regime's demographic campaign and
the cult of domesticity. One notable example is her speech "Women of Fascism:'
published in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine on November 12,
1933. Even so, it will be useful to recall that in the 1930s Sarfatti tried desper-
ately to persuade Mussolini not to form an alliance with Hitler. Nonetheless, the
regime passed and enforced the Racial Laws of 1938, which denied many rights
to Italian Jews, including forbidding intermarriage between Italians and Jews,
removing Jews from positions in government, banking, and education, and
restricting their property.
One must consider that even in works in which Sarfatti is more closely aligned
with Fascist ideology, these writings may also contain feminist impulses. For
example, in Dux, besides offering readers a pervasive and positive self-portrait,
Sarfatti also drew other positive portraits of women. Sarfatti presented Mussolini
24 Carole C. Gallucci

as a virile leader surrounded by worshiping women, as would be expected with

myth making. Yet Mussolini's lovers are not the only women we encounter.
Women are present in a variety of roles as lovers, intellectuals, advisors, socialists
and Fascists. In Dux, Sarfatti attempted to reconcile feminism to Fascism by
presenting women not only as lovers and mothers, but also as influential, intel-
lectual women. Sarfatti included many lively portraits of important figures in
Italian cultural life before Fascism, particularly socialist women leaders, such as
Anna Kuliscioff and Angelica Balabanoff. Sarfatti showed how Fascist gender
ideology disempowered women in many of her writings of this middle period.
For example, she painted a portrait of Kuliscioff as a brilliant political woman
whose power had to be channeled through men by convention: "Anna Kuliscioff
... was a great woman, with the hard brilliance and many-sidedness of a
diamond.... She was destined to see the ambitions of her whole life thwarted
by the mediocrity of the men through whom she worked" (The Life, 170-171;
Dux, 129-130). Sarfatti reworked a much similar portrait in her 1955 final
memoir, Acqua passata. In her female portraits, Sarfatti appears to be struggling
with two pervasive Fascist female models: the lover and the "masculinized" intel-
lectual woman. While Sarfatti presented Kuliscioff as brilliant but circumscribed,
she reiterated cultural stereotypes of sexual difference and deviant femininity
with her portrayal of Balabanoff. The rhetorical device of "we women" found in
her earlier writings disappears because Sarfatti has set up (or admitted to) a
conflictual relationship with her rivals. 14
In 1937, Sarfatti published a memoir of her travels in the United States called
L'America, ricerca della felicita (America: The Pursuit of Happiness). During her
tour of the United States, the press called her the "most influential woman in
Italy,"lS a Fascist and a feminist. In an interview with Hope Ridings Miller of the
Washington Post on April 17, 1934, two days after her meeting with the
Roosevelts, a glowing photograph of Sarfatti identified her as "Italian feminist,
Fascist editor, and official biographer of MussolinL" Here feminism and Fascism
are juxtaposed without comment, suggesting that Sarfatti's dedication to
women's issues, however defined, entitled her to be considered a feminist. What
appears to be mutually exclusive is presented as paradoxically harmonious:
Sarfatti can present Mussolini's demographic campaign as somehow pro-women
because "all this domesticity doesn't prevent interest in things intellectual" (13).
The hearth does not negate the mind. Sarfatti insisted that American and Italian
women were simply "different in their ideas and aims" (13). Nearly half of the
interview is dedicated to Sarfatti's great admiration for American women,
including Eleanor Roosevelt, and American women writers, themes that will later
run through L'America.
Sarfatti's book contains two representative chapters on women that demon-
strate her continuing concern for women's issues. Sarfatti showed herself to be
capable of writing an important study of comparative feminism, as she addressed
the condition of women in America compared to Fascist Italy.16 In a chapter
titled "Eve in America:' Sarfatti used the United States Constitution as a point of
departure to talk about "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
which American women fought for and obtained "with hard work, struggle and
sacrifice" (189-204). Indeed, America and Italy share a common bond in strong
women: both countries are made up of the "blood, tears and bodies of women
who nobly died in forging it" (191). Moreover, the concept of woman's equality
 She Loved Mussolini 25

to man in America is totally different from that ancient concept found in Europe,
and affects everything from marriage to family to divorce (192). The right to
happiness for an Italian woman was an «enormous heresy, given the European
and Latin conception of woman; indeed, it was subversive of the invulnerable
and unwritten laws of custom" (192). Instead, in Italy, «we don't teach women
their right, but rather sacrifice and submission to duty" (199). Here Sarfatti
appears at her most critical not only of Fascist Italy, but Italy in general. Sarfatti
suggests that the cultural roots of Fascist thinking about women derived from
stereotypes already present in Italian culture, from Catholicism to nationalism to
futurism. In constructing its images of women, Fascism in large part recycled the
traditional images of women found in the fabric of Italian culture and society.
While American women pursued the right to happiness, in Sarfatti's view, Italian
women pursued the «right" to sacrifice.
In her second chapter on women, «More Power to Woman:' Sarfatti returned
to one of her most important subjects in the days she wrote for La Difesa delle
Lavoratrici: women's work. During meetings with female college students in
Washington, D.C., Sarfatti insisted that «all schools are open to both men and
women and that non-political professions and jobs are accessible to women"
(209). Debates during the late 1920s and 1930s centered not only on what mate-
rial to teach women, but also on whether or not to educate women at all outside
of home economics and those areas that privileged the cult of domesticity. Sarfatti
failed to mention that, beginning in 1926, Fascist laws were introduced to force
women out of schools and teaching positions. That year, a law was passed barring
women from teaching subjects such as Latin, Greek, history, and philosophy in the
liceo and ginnasio, and from holding major positions of authority in both middle
and technical schools (De Grand 1976, 949). In 1928, university tuition doubled
for female students (Saracinelli and Totti 1983, 120). Sarfatti pointed out that, in
America, women were seen «in every kind of occupation:' which created an
immediate female «solidarity" no longer found in Europe (210). From the Daugh-
ters of the American Revolution to society women, from stewardesses to secre-
taries, Sarfatti saw an equality and a freedom for women unparalleled in the
world, evident in American women's literature. In the end, American women «are
capable of creating great things" by their own hard work (215).
While L'America may perpetuate Fascist economic and social inaccuracies,
Sarfatti also suggests that Fascist policies were not beneficial for Italian women.
For instance, she deconstructs pervasive stereotypes in Italy that deny women
equal rights, applauds women's increased mobility and freedom in the United
States, and valorizes American women's work in a variety of fields unavailable in
Italy. By comparing Fascist Italy to the democratic United States, Italy is dimin-
ished in these examples vis-a.-vis women's rights. Sarfatti now challenged, rather
than perpetuated, the Fascist feminine model whose «right" meant only submis-
sion and sacrifice. Moreover, Sarfatti implicitly critiqued her own right-wing
ideology, which predicated a so-called «natural" gender order that identified
masculinity with the public sphere and femininity with the private sphere of
home and family.
After the war, Sarfatti wrote two major works, Mussolini as I Knew Him (orig-
inally titled My Fault: Mussolini as I Knew Him) in 1945 and Acqua passata (Water
under the bridge) in 1955. Mussolini provided Sarfatti with a passport after the
institution of the Racial Laws in 1938-39. She went into exile first to Paris, then
26 Carole C. Gallucci

Uruguay, and finally to Argentina, where she lived out the war. As an exile in
Paris, Sarfatti tried to identify as a Jew, but was largely marginalized by the Jewish
community, which remembered that she had acquired power and prestige from
her long-standing association with Mussolini's Fascist regime (Cannistraro and
Sullivan 1993, 520ff). Sarfatti returned to Italy in 1947 and died there in 1961. She
is buried at Cavallasca, Como. Sarfatti's Fascist past made it impossible for her to
publish her postwar biography of Mussolini in English or Italian; she was able to
publish it only in Spanish. In her second biography of Mussolini, Sarfatti excul-
pated herself from her Fascist past by taking some historical responsibility for
her role in the development of Fascism and in helping to create the myth of
Mussolini in Dux. But her postwar apologia received little critical attention.
In her final memoirs, Acqua passata, Mussolini is the absent presence. 17 Acqua
passata chronicles the period from Sarfatti's childhood in Venice to her 1934 visit
to the White House. The spirited writer tells of her childhood, vividly recalls the
cultural climate, but makes no mention of her intimate relationship with
Mussolini. This is especially surprising because the two-hundred-page-plus book
literally contains a cast of thousands, socialists and politicians, actresses and
artists, friends and enemies, but no Mussolini. In Acqua passata, Fascism is
mentioned only three times in the book, all in one chapter on the pivotal salon of
socialist leaders Anna Kuliscioff and Filippo Turati. In this chapter, Sarfatti
suggested that the "Fasci di Combattimento" (or the earliest local cells of the
Fascist movement) attempted a material, as opposed to a spiritual, revolution
(68); she notes how she petitioned the Fascist government for a pension for an
ex-government official (70); and she argued that in February 1921 «Fascism in
Milan brought together the almost unanimity of popular forces" (83). As in Dux,
Sarfatti disregarded actual Fascist violence. As Bosi Maramotti has noted, Fascism
is largely erased by Sarfatti: «about the Fascist period and the men who made it:
cancelled, eliminated by writing, something that never existed. The woman who
received much from Fascism and who gave much, through her official participa-
tion, through her political culture in Italy and abroad, forgets it, (skips over' it, like
a youthful and ephemeral adventure" (1982, 112).
Sarfatti's own self-portrait is as interesting as Mussolini's absence from it.
Critics have emphasized the book's inaccuracies and lack of self-criticism, despite
the postwar environment. IS Sarfatti presents her own position in Fascist history
as unproblematic. Regarding her Fascist past, Sarfatti simply claims that she was
not bound to anyone position: «but my Venetian humor did not permit me to
yoke myself to any cart. I see the clay feet in the idol whose head I worship" (81).
Harrowitz argues that Sarfatti's «claim regarding her ability to see the defects of
her idols can only be read as revisionary, given her role in developing Fascism
and her own attachment to Mussolini" (1996, 147). Of the years under Fascism,
Sarfatti wrote instead about growing up in Venice, attending socialist meetings,
and holding court as salon mistress and art patron. She takes no true responsi-
bility for her own role in Italy's Fascist past.
It is difficult to categorize Acqua passata in terms of traditional narratives of
self. Sarfatti's narrative moves from the traditional first-person «I" to the omni-
scient third-person narrator. While the «I" participates in parties and meetings,
the third-person narrator describes important events. The traditional narrative
«I" is eclipsed by a third-person narration, complete with serpentine dependent
clauses, which functions to distance Sarfatti from the problematic interwar years.
 She Loved Mussolini 27

Sarfatti considered Acqua passata a book of memories, rather than a memoir

(Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, 558). By doing so, perhaps Sarfatti would rather
be accused of having a bad memory, rather than remembering badly. In the end,
Acqua passata is neither an apology of nor rationale for her earlier writings. Nor
is it a confession. In Acqua passata, as in her previous works, Sarfatti takes on
multiple subject positions.
In life as in art, Margherita Sarfatti emerges as a powerful presence. In one
obituary, Sarfatti was remembered primarily for her biography of Mussolini:
"More than her articles on art, in which she supported the Novecento group, her
memory is tied to her controversial Life of the Fascist leader, for whom she was
devoted friend" (Geraldini 1961, 8). But Sarfatti was also an influential figure in
her own right. Renewed interest in Sarfatti is evidenced by her appearance in the
1999 film Cradle Will Rock, in which she is portrayed by Susan Sarandon. As one
of the most powerful women in Fascist Italy, she helped to legitimate the regime
and helped to promote modern art. Through her salon, political contacts, and
innumerable writings, Sarfatti tackled issues ranging from voting rights to the
novel and painting to the modern state. One of her most pressing concerns was
women's rights. As I have attempted to show, in some of her most important
works, Sarfatti tried to reconcile feminism with Fascism. Although seemingly
impossible to achieve in practice, Sarfatti sought to cross the lines between
support of women's rights and support of a repressive regime, or at least to
conjoin them. Sarfatti does not seem to display the sharp contradictions of iden-
tity that some critics have perceived. Rather than reinforce our own fixed cate-
gories of fascist or antifascist, feminist or antifeminist, Sarfatti challenges us to
rethink critical categories of identity, to reformulate historical paradigms of
fascism, and to redefine contemporary notions of feminism.

Notes
Research for this article was carried out under the auspices of a College of William &
Mary Faculty Research Grant.
1. De Grazia (1982, 149; 1992, 230) and Nozzoli (1988) define her as an "organizer of
culture." Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan offer one of the most comprehen-
sive studies to date with II Duce's Other Woman (1993).
2. See Bosi Maramotti (1982, 110) and Pieroni Bortolotti (1978, 171-172). Simona
Urso defines Sarfatti's feminism as "superficial" and secondary to her interest in cre-
ating a new ethical state founded on heroic individualism (1994, 158).
3. See, for example, Bock 1984, and Bridenthal and Koonz 1977.
4. See Gallucci and Nerenberg, 2000; Gabrielli 1999; Addis Saba 1998; Slaughter 1997;
Jeansonne 1996; Cutrufelli et al. 1994.
5. See Addis Saba 1988; de Grazia 1992; Gallucci 1999, 1995; Gallucci and Nerenberg,
2000; Mondello 1987; Pickering-Iazzi 1995, 1997; Pinkus 1995; Spackman 1996; and
Stone 1998.
6. Urso argues: "In spite of her presumed feminism, [Sarfatti] seems more interested in
exalting the role of the woman-mother (even during the Libyan war): female suffrage
seems to be a secondary problem for her, absolutely subordinated to the new order. If
feminism was often seen by these same suffragists as the praising of difference, Sar-
fatti goes even further. She subordinates it to the preservation of the race and hearth.
Sarfatti is already building the foundation for an ethics of female responsibility
within the nation" (1994, 158). Urso does well to contextualize Sarfatti's early period,
but may overlook the historical referents in the rhetoric of the suffragists.
7. Cannistraro and Sullivan may themselves be accused of perpetuating stereotypes of
28 Carole C. Gallucci

women with this assertion on Sarfatti's feminine wiles over Mussolini: ((Over the next
decade, as Mussolini adopted increasing anti-feminist policies toward women,
Margherita abandoned any illusions she might have had that her feminism was com-
patible with Fascism.... Privately she found herself forced to use against Mussolini
the weapons of flattery and manipulation that she had been taught as a girl in patri-
archal society. She had long since recognized the strategic benefits of assuming stereo-
typically (feminine) roles in order to secure advantage and power: as hostess of a
literary and artistic salon, as cultural activist, as 'mother of a war hero,' and, of course,
as mistress to a leader" (1993, 307). Harrowitz argues that after the voting rights
debacle, when it became clear that Mussolini (and the Fascist regime) was not going
to support women's rights, ((She eventually shut up about women's rights and femi-
nism by the mid to late twenties when it became obvious to her that it was no longer
politically acceptable to support these positions" (1996, 145).
8. Arturo Marpicati (1933,398). See also Cecchi (1926,245).
9. Sarfatti, Dux, 298; The Life, 338. See also Dux, 282, on ((squadrismo" (the armed force
of Fascism).
10. Anonymous) 1926,464; Tonelli 1929,251; Cecchi 1926,244; Ruinas 1930, 102; Sar-
fatti, The Life, 346.
11. Bellonci 1929,8; Panzini 1929,3; de Grazia 1982, 153-154; Bosi Maramotti 1982,
101-112; Gramsci 1971, 181.
12. In interviews with the Sarfatti family, Cannistraro and Sullivan (1993,337) find all
the major players present in this ((perversely autobiographical" novel: Fiorella is Sar-
fatti herself as the name suggests (both Fiorella and Margherita are flowers in Ital-
ian); Sergio is Sarfatti's husband, Cesare, who died in 1924; Neri is Sarfatti's son,
Roberto, who was killed in the war in 1918; and Manlio is Mussolini.
13. Roberto Farinacci, editor of the Fascist daily Il Regime Fascista from 1926 to 1933, led
a series of public attacks on Sarfatti. Even so, in the regime's series ((Figure del tempo
mussoliniano," Margherita Sarfatti figures prominently ((in this extraordinary histori-
cal period, for her complete adherence to all the vast movements of thought, be they
literary, political and artistic" in the brief biography by Orazia Belsito Prini (1934, 5).
See also Enciclopedia Treccani (1936,870).
14. In Dux, on a narrative level, Sarfatti weaves together a mixture of voices, from the
intimate first-person singular and plural to the more traditional, ((objective" third-
person singular, the latter expected of a traditional biography.
15. The u.s. ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long) called her ((probably the best-
informed woman in Italy" (Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993,431). See also ((Italy-
America Party Honors Donna Sarfatti" (1934, 11) and Dolly Cameron, ((Reception at
Sulgrave Club for Eminent Italian Writer and Critic" (1934,14).
16. Sarfatti, I.:America, chapters 14 and 15, and Pieroni Bortolotti (1978,382-383). While
acknowledging Sarfatti's renewed interest in women, some critics think her last book
written during Fascism does not go far enough. Although Sarfatti does rethink her
own feminism, Victoria de Grazia argues that she does not analyze the condition of
women in Italy or the reactionary policies of the regime in any depth. This is ((above
all due to her isolation where she was voluntarily relegated in order to manage those
crumbs of power which were reserved for her as woman of the Fascist regime" (1982,
154).
17. I would like to thank Paula Blank for discussing this idea with me.
18. See Bosi Maramotti 1982,112; Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993,558; de Grazia 1982,
151-154; Harrowitz 1996, 145-148.
 2.
Female "Fanatics": Women's Sphere
in the British Union of Fascists
Julie ~ Gottlieb

Founded by the former Labour M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1932 after
the electoral defeat of his New Party, the British Union of Fascists (BUF)
(1932-1940) achieved only limited success in recruitment and never managed
to have any of its members elected to public office. Membership estimates suggest
that the movement recruited no more than fifty thousand members at its height
in 1934, dwindled to only a few thousand by 1938, and saw a rise in activism, if
not numbers, when it launched its antiwar campaign in 1939 (Webber 1984,
575-605). In 1940 the British Union (the BUF was renamed the British Union of
Fascists and National Socialists in 1936) was outlawed, its publications banned,
and 747 of its members-including ninety-six women-interned under the
British government's Defence Regulation 18B (la) as suspected Fifth Columnists
(Griffiths 1980).
Historical memories of the British Union of Fascists tend to evoke images of
a marginal movement, making a strong appeal to ex-servicemen, and drawing
support from anti-Semitic elements in London's East End,! with columns of male
Blackshirts marching in step to vainglorious calls for a "Greater Britain." This
general impression of the BUF as a paramilitary organization motivated by a
macho ethos has been reinforced by inevitable sideward glances to the models of
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. We might then expect that the BUF faithfully
replicated the existing fascist regimes in Europe and that the movement was male
chauvinist ideologically, and sexually discriminatory in terms of women's polit-
ical participation. Yet, the British Fascisti, Britain's first interwar fascist move-
ment, was launched by a woman in 1923 (see Farr 1987), setting a precedent for
the visibility of women in the politics of the extreme Right in Britain. During
the 1930s, 25 percent of the members in the much more influential British Union
of Fascists were women (Gottlieb 2000, 46-47).2 While the BUF first took its
inspiration from Italian Fascism, and from 1936 increasingly took its ideological
marching orders from German National Socialism, Mosley consistently claimed
that his fascism was a thoroughly British movement, born of a British political
tradition of dissent and uniquely equipped to confront the crisis in the British
polity. In Mosley's understanding, fascism "is the new faith born of the post-war
period in the last decade. It is not the product of Italy, nor of any other foreign
country" (Mosley 1933), and the BUF-in common with all fascist movements
in which the imagined community is the nation writ large-resisted the charge
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G/2367 Webb, J. G.
S/10901 Webb, J. A.
G/9076 Webb, L.
L/8856 Webb, P.
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G/26568 Webb, S. C.
G/10344 Webb, T. W.
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G/21207 Webber, H. G.
G/13181 Webster, J.
T/203970 Webster, W.
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T/203563 Weeks, G.
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T/243305 Welford, W. S.
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G/70 West, E. F.
G/25652 West, F. W.
G/5613 Westbrook, W.
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G/7068 Whale, R. F.
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G/17491 White, L. V.
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G/2559 White, P.
G/17471 White, R. W.
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G/1987 White, W. E.
G/5454 White, W.
L/9440 White, W. D.
L/9522 White, W. J.
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G/19030 Whitehead, L.
G/11669 Whiteley, G.
G/22145 Whiteman, W.
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G/14889 Whittington, G. W.
G/3962 Whittington, H.
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S/334 Whybrow, W. J.
T/2103 Wickens, F.
L/10039 Wicker, H.
T/1160 Wickham, T. H.
G/20183 Wiffen, E.
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G/2900 Wigg, G. A.
G/14557 Wigg, W.
T/204112 Wilber, T.
G/13959 Wilbraham, W. J.
G/8005 Wilcox, A. H.
G/12863 Wiles, A.
G/5721 Wiles, H.
G/2841 Wiles, L. W.
G/18677 Wiles, P. H.
G/1774 Wilkins, H.
L/8100 Wilkins, J.
G/6523 Wilkinson, E. W.
G/1124 Wilkinson, W. J.
G/308 Willard, J.
G/9030 Willard, M. W.
G/1551 Willard, R.
G/2227 Willett, H.
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G/25565 Williams, A. J.
T/1422 Williams, B. J.
L/10316 Williams, C.
G/1087 Williams, C. D.
G/4178 Williams, E.
G/12719 Williams, E. A.
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G/21199 Williams, F. A.
G/20054 Williams, G.
T/206029 Williams, G.
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L/9961 Williams, J.
L/6049 Williams, J. A.
G/6504 Williams, P.
G/1107 Williams, T.
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G/17477 Williams, W. C.
S/8322 Williams, W. G.
G/26567 Williams, W. S.
G/1664 Williamson, H.
G/40 Willis, H.
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G/4676 Willis, T.
G/23944 Willis, T.
G/3955 Willis, W.
G/8917 Willmore, G. H.
G/18871 Willmott, F.
G/17407 Willoughby, L. J.
G/9020 Wilshire, C. E.
G/17 Wilson, A.
G/3445 Wilson, A.
G/1084 Wilson, A. E.
G/23943 Wilson, F. W.
G/29262 Wilson, H.
G/303 Wilson, H.
G/9888 Wilson, H.
G/6660 Wilson, H.
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G/5506 Wilson, H. W.
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G/17385 Wilson, R.
G/5671 Wilson, R. H.
G/4820 Wilson, S. H.
G/14565 Wilson, T.
G/11866 Wilson, W.
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G/7565 Winkley, J. R.
G/9558 Winson, L.
G/6372 Winter, A. E.
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L/8239 Wise, W.
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G/13307 Wood, A. E.
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L/9869 Wood, C. E.
G/585 Wood, D.
G/5064 Wood, F.
G/9388 Wood, H.
G/729 Wood, H.
G/1957 Wood, H. J.
G/20839 Wood, H. T.
G/3718 Wood, J.
G/26440 Wood, L. A. G.
G/8581 Wood, R. G.
L/9182 Wood, R.
G/5541 Wood, T.
S/341 Wood, W. C.
G/8852 Wood, W. F.
G/3940 Wood, W. H.
G/14135 Wood, W. H.
S/10588 Wood, W. J.
G/48 Woodcock, E.
T/1132 Woodcock, N.
G/18926 Woodfield, W. C.
G/1086 Woodhouse, R. W.
G/10135 Woodland, E.
G/15718 Woodland, H.
G/4086 Woodley, F.
G/13180 Woodman, W. T.
G/323 Woods, E.
G/6788 Woodward, A.
S/216 Woodward, A. J.
S/10736 Woodward, B. J.
G/14952 Woodward, F. J.
G/1921 Woodward, H.
G/5606 Woodward, H. H.
L/8516 Woodwards, F. J.
G/15719 Woolf, J. W.
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L/9956 Woollett, H.
T/1411 Woollett, T.
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L/10502 Woolven, S.
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G/987 Wormley, H.
T/240190 Worsley, C.
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G/13383 Wraight, A. B.
S/352 Wraight, G. A.
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L/10046 Wraith, J. A.
T/203618 Wratten, A.
G/5178 Wrench, G.
G/1065 Wretham, A.
S/10637 Wright, A.
L/7568 Wright, A. E.
G/14580 Wright, E.
G/20021 Wright, E. V.
S/379 Wright, F. G.
G/4661 Wright, F. W.
L/7680 Wright, G. T.
G/20908 Wright, H. C.
S/420 Wright, H. H.
G/29257 Wright, J.
G/3204 Wright, J. G.
L/9101 Wright, R. L.
T/20061 Wright, T.
S/10468 Wright, W. G.
G/1790 Wright, W. H.
G/3355 Wyatt, G. E.
G/2849 Wyatt, W.
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G/8930 Wyeth, J. T.
G/7223 Wyett, H.

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G/14031 Yates, A.
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G/10373 York, A.
G/6088 Young, C. T.
G/3056 Young, F.
S/87 Young, F. G.
T/2427 Young, F. G.
G/6635 Young, H.
G/8160 Young, J.
T/201043 Young, S. W. T.
G/14287 Youngman, G.

G/24721 Zealey, G.
 APPENDIX III
REWARDS

All Ranks
(The ranks shown are those held at the time of award)
V.C.
Cotter, W. R., L.-Corpl., 6707.

K.C.B.
Bainbridge, Major-General E. G. T., C.B.
Lynden-Bell, Major-General Sir A. L., K.C.M.G., C.B.

C.B.
Hill, Lt.-Colonel H. C. de la M.
Lynden-Bell, Major-General A. L., C.M.G.
McDouall, Br.-General R., C.M.G., D.S.O.

K.C.M.G.
Lynden-Bell, Major-General A. L., C.B., C.M.G.

C.M.G.
Finch Hatton, Lt.-Colonel E. H., D.S.O.
Hulke, Lt.-Colonel L. I. B.
McDouall, Colonel R., D.S.O.
Porter, Br.-General C. ’L., D.S.O.
Vyvyan, Colonel Sir C. B., Bart., C.B.

C.H.
Perrott, Colonel Sir H. C., Bart., C.B.
 C.B.E.
Findlay, Colonel H.
McDouall, Lt.-Colonel R., C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O.

D.S.O.
Barnard, Major W. G. F.
Beevor, Lt.-Colonel M.
Body, Captain J.

Chapman, Major G. A. E.
Crookenden, Major J.

Friend, Lt.-Colonel R. S. I.

Green, Lt.-Colonel H. W.
Groves-Raines, Captain R. G. D.

Hayfield, Captain C. D., M.C.

Kirkpatrick, Lt.-Colonel H. F.

Lee, Major G., M.C.

Lucas, Major L. W., M.C.

Marshall, Captain F. A. J. E., M.C.

Morgan, Major H. de R.

Porter, Br.-General C. ’L.

Potter, Captain H. B.
Power, Lt.-Colonel R. E.

Sebastian, Captain E. G.
Smeltzer, Lt.-Colonel A. S., M.C.
Stronge, Lt.-Colonel H. C. T., M.C.
Studd, Lt.-Colonel F. C. R.

Thewles, Lt.-Colonel H. A.
Trevor, Major W. H.

Whitmarsh, Captain A. J.

CLASP TO D.S.O.
 Body, Lt.-Colonel J., D.S.O.

Kirkpatrick, Lt.-Colonel H. F., D.S.O.

Ransome, Lt.-Colonel A. L., D.S.O. (Dorsetshire Regt.).[37]

Smeltzer, Lt.-Colonel A. S., D.S.O., M.C.

SECOND CLASP TO D.S.O.

Curtis, Lt.-Colonel H. M. C., D.S.O. (6/N. Staffordshire Regt.).

[37]

O.B.E.
Body, Lt.-Colonel J., D.S.O.
Booth, Major W. H., D.S.O.

Dixon, Captain G. S.

Eaton, Lt.-Colonel W. A.

Forwood, Major H., D.C.M.

Gosling, Lt.-Colonel G., T.D.

Messel, Lt.-Colonel L. C. R., T.D.

Raikes, Lieut. W. O.

Ternan, Major H. A. B.
Trueman, Lt.-Colonel A. P. H.

Ward, Captain H. E.

M.B.E.
Barber, Lieut. L. W.
Beale, Captain G. S.

Corney, Lieut. A.
Cree, Captain H. F.

Filmer, Captain W. G. H.

Hardy, Major H. S., M.C.

Marshall, Lieut. F. A. J. E., D.S.O., M.C.

Mockett, Captain V.
Munday, Lieut. W. T.

Silverwood-Cope, Captain A. L.

Thomson, Captain A. B.

Watson, Captain F. W.
Wilkins, Captain D. A.
Wilson, Lieut. C. E.

M.C.
Allen, Captain J. F. W.
Anderson, Captain D. K.
Anderson, 2nd Lieut. L.
Asprey, 2nd Lieut. P. R.
Aylward, Lieut. J. A. S.

Baldry, No. G/1851 C.S.M. P. W., M.M.

Barber, Lieut. L. W.
Beagley, 2nd Lieut. F. P.
Beswick, Captain A. H.
Birrell, Captain W. R.
Black, Captain C. K.
Bond, 2nd Lieut. H. G.
Bremner, Lieut. C. J.
Brice, Captain M. M.
 , p
Brock, Lieut. A. G.
Brown, 2nd Lieut. G.
Brown, 2nd Lieut. T. A.

Campbell, Captain D. S.
Caney, 2nd Lieut. C.
Carles, Captain C. W.
Carter, Captain E. A.
Cattley, Captain C. F.
Causton, Captain L. P.
Chapman, Lieut. C. M. B.
Chapman, Lieut. E. R.
Chater, 2nd Lieut. E. C.
Chilvers, 2nd Lieut. J. E.
(Christopherson, Rev. N. C.)
Church, 2nd Lieut. G. W.
Clapperton, Captain T.
Clarke, Lieut. A. H.
Clouting, 2nd Lieut. C. E.
Cockeram, 2nd Lieut. P. A.
Connell, Lieut. W. C.
Corrall, Captain W. R.
Cotching, 2nd Lieut. E. G.

Dangerfield, 2nd Lieut. P.

Darling, 2nd Lieut. W. H. J.
Davies, Captain B. E.
Davis, 2nd Lieut. W. C.
D’Elboux, Lieut. R. H.

Emery, Major T. S.

Farmer, 2nd Lieut. T. C.

Ferguson, 2nd Lieut. D. G.
Figgis, Lieut. L. P.
Fine, Captain H.
Fiske, Lieut. C. W.
Fox, 2nd Lieut. P. R. H.
Friend, Captain J. I. H.

Gerard, 2nd Lieut. G. V.

Gold, Lieut. H. A.
Grant, 2nd Lieut. D.
Gray, 2nd Lieut. W. R.
Greig, Lieut. P. H.
Griffiths, 2nd Lieut. F. H.
Gullick, Captain C. D.
Gunther, 2nd Lieut. N. O. F.

Hale, Lieut. F. W.
Hall, 2nd Lieut. E. Foster.
Hamilton, Lieut. G. F.
Hanmer, 2nd Lieut. A. J.
Hardy, Captain H. S.
Harrison, No. 8798 C.S.M. A.
Hatfield, Captain C. E.
Haughton, Lieut. M. G.
Hawkins, No. 2948 R.S.M. A.
Hayfield, 2nd Lieut. C. D.
Hendin, 2nd Lieut. D. W.
Hicks, 2nd Lieut. P.
Holder, Lieut. F. D.
Hollis, 2nd Lieut. C. F. G.
Howcroft, Lieut. G. J.
Howgrave-Graham, Captain A. H.
Hudson, 2nd Lieut. F. N.
Hughes, 2nd Lieut. J. H.
Hunter, Captain H.

Jacobs, Lieut. B.
Jacobs, Lieut. I. A.
Jeffrey, No. S/191 S.-M. W.
Jessel, Lieut. G.
Johnston, Captain W. T.
Jones, 2nd Lieut. G. M.
Jones, 2nd Lieut. H. L.
Kenchington, Captain A. G.
Keown, Lieut. R. W.
Kidd, Lieut. L. G. M.

Laverton, Captain W. R. C.
Lawrence, 2nd Lieut. W. B.
Lee, Captain G.
Liles, 2nd Lieut. R. W.
Lilley, 2nd Lieut. A. A.
Lindley, Lieut. G.
Lister, 2nd Lieut. D. S.
Lucas, Captain L. W.

McCallum, Lieut. A.
Macfadyen, Lieut. W. A.
Marchant, Captain F. O.
Marchant, 2nd Lieut. S. H. S.
Marshall, Lieut. F. A. J. E.
Mason-Springgay, 2nd Lieut. W. H.
Mathias, 2nd Lieut. C. A. S.
Maxted, No. 141 C.S.M. G. W.
Milles, Lieut. H. L.
Mitchell, Lieut. H. V.
Morley, 2nd Lieut. H. L.
Morrell, Captain F. A.
Morse, 2nd Lieut. E. V.
Moss, Lieut. V. Newton.

Nicholas, Captain W. L. J.
Nicholson, 2nd Lieut. A. C. L.

Page, Captain J. C.
Pannell, 2nd Lieut. H.
Parnis, Lieut. W. H.
Peake, Captain W.
Peckham, Lieut. G. H.
Piper, Lieut. J. D.
Pritchard, No. 635 C.S.M. W. J.
Prothero, Captain L. E. A.

Ralph, No. 6170 C.S.M. E. W.

Reader, 2nd Lieut. C. H. A.
Reid, Lieut. T. R.
Routley, 2nd Lieut. E. G.

Sandilands, Captain R. B.
Sankey, 2nd Lieut. C. M.
Scarlett, Captain Hon. P. G.
Shafto, 2nd Lieut. J. S. H.
Shaw-Lawrence, 2nd Lieut. L. E.
Sherwill, 2nd Lieut. A. J.
Smeltzer, 2nd Lieut. A. S.
Spence, Captain F. A.
Stainforth, Captain A. G. C.
Stevens, 2nd Lieut. E. A. M.
Stevens, 2nd Lieut. G. E. W.
Stevens, Lieut. H. F.
Stevens, 2nd Lieut. W. T.
Strauss, Captain B. L.
Stronge, Captain H. C. T.

Tatam, 2nd Lieut. V. G. H.

Temple, 2nd Lieut. W. H.
Thornhill, Lieut. G. R.
Thornley, 2nd Lieut. J. D.
Toynbee, Lieut. J. W. H.
Tupper, 2nd Lieut. H.
Turk, 2nd Lieut. J.
Tyrrell, Captain G. Y.

Vaughan, 2nd Lieut. J.

Vertue, Captain N. G.

Walters, 2nd Lieut. W. M.

Weare, Captain F. G. C.
Wellman Lieut R S
Wellman, Lieut. R. S.
Whitaker, Captain F.
Whitmarsh, Captain A. J., D.S.O.
Wilkinson, 2nd Lieut. F. D.
Williams, 2nd Lieut. W. T.
Willis, Lieut. L. C.
Wood, Captain C. J.
Wood, Captain Ll.
Worster, 2nd Lieut. A. F.
Wort, Captain P. C.
Wray, 2nd Lieut. A. M.
Wyatt, 2nd Lieut. M. J.

CLASP TO M.C.
Black, Captain C. K., M.C.

Gullick, Captain C. D., M.C.

Hamilton, Captain G. F., M.C.

Hayfield, Lieut. C. D., M.C.

Jacobs, Captain B., M.C.

Kidd, Captain L. G. M., M.C.

McCallum, Captain A., M.C.

Morrell, Captain F. A., M.C.
Moss, Captain V. Newton, M.C.

Nicholson, Captain A. C. L., M.C.

Toynbee, Captain J. W. H., M.C.

Tupper, Lieut. H., M.C.

Worster, 2nd Lieut. A. F., M.C.

SECOND CLASP TO M.C.

 Hayfield, Captain C. D., M.C.

Nicholson, Captain A. C. L., M.C.

Warrant and Non-Commissioned Officers and Men

D.C.M.
NAME. RANK. REGTL. NO.
Adams, J. T. L.-Corpl. 135
Amos, E. T. Pte. 9904
Andrews, A. W. R.S.M. L/7051
Ashby, F. C.S.M. G/15767
Atkinson, J. Pte. 240261
Avis, H. J. Corpl. 1519
Ayres, A. J. Sgt. G/6884

Bacon, F. N. Sgt. G/3494

Baker, F. Sgt. 8781
Barrell, G., M.S.M. C.S.M. L/9036
Barton, L. R. W. Pte. 200105
Batchelor, C. C., M.M. Sgt. G/3377
Bigg, W. J. L.-Sergt. L/8893
Bloomfield, F. Pte. 10017
Bridges, F. Pte. 1153
Brooker, J. G. C.S.M. 511
Brown, A. C.S.M. 8021
Bugg, J. W. Pte. 18980
Burt, W. C.Q.M.S. 3635
Butler, W. Sgt. 5148

Carey, F. W., M.M. L.-Corpl. 5800

Carpenter, J. C.S.M. 6541
Caselton, T. G. C.S.M. G/1940
Chapman, A. H. R. L.-Sergt. 2258
Coffin, W. C.S.M. G/1985
Coleman, A. C., M.M., M.S.M. Pte. 1898
Cooper, H. Pte. 7636
Court, E. J. T. Sgt. 8999
Crame, C. J. L.-Corpl. G/3301

Dennis, G. W. Corpl. 9038

Dines, D. W. R.S.M. 5957
Field, W. J. C.S.M. 8213
Forwood, H. Sgt. 8560
France, M., M.M. Sgt. G/12873

Geoghegan, J. L.-Corpl. 4659

Gettins, F. L.-Sergt. 1663
Goldfinch, A. H. Sgt. L/8205
Gurney, A. Pte. 241138

Hall, E. Pte. 9051

Hall, F. L.-Corpl. 242905
Hamer, T. Sgt. 4267
Hickson, H. C. C.S.M. 242779
Hoddinott, H. H. Pte. 243
Hodges, F. Pte. 10464

Jagger, J. J. L.-Corpl. 242907

Joy, H. Sgt. 983

Keal, A. C. Corpl. 3591

Lawrence, H. J. C.S.M. 241496

Lever, H. Sgt. 206086
Luck, G. L.-Corpl. 452
Lucy, S. L.-Corpl. 8077

McDonough, W. H. C.S.M. 9074

McNeir, J. M. Sgt. 8922
MacWalter, C. C. L.-Sergt. 8669
MacWalter, J. R., M.M. Sgt. 9682
Marsh, A. Corpl. 9603
Mason, L., M.M. Pte. G/4269
Mitchell, A. Pte. 206128
Mordey, P. Corpl. 8777

Neve, G. S. L.-Corpl. 8740

Newham, M. H. C.S.M. 241481
Newman, H. J. L.-Corpl. L/8801
Norrington, V. Corpl. G/4202

Ongley, A. V. Corpl. 9905

Page, R. E. C.S.M. 5777

Parsons, J. Pte. G/1295