Who Is Really Afraid of Empowered Women?
On the history of female disobedience and the power structures it continues to threaten today
History’s most prominent autocrats have quite a few things in common.
But apart from a fondness for splurging on grand tributes to their own legacy while the public struggles to put food on the table and an intense paranoia that drives them to eliminate anyone who so much as breathes in their direction the wrong way, most of them also share a deep-seated hatred and fear of women.
Napoléon Bonaparte, for instance, claimed that women ‘should not be regarded as the equals of men’ and described them as ‘mere machines to make children’ who ‘should be relegated to their homes.’ Treating women ‘too well,’ he wrote in his memoir, had ‘spoiled everything.’ Despite maintaining at least twenty mistresses himself, Bonaparte also decriminalised the murder of unfaithful wives.
Early twentieth-century dictators like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini similarly believed home is a woman’s supposedly ‘natural’ and ‘biological’ domain. Stalin’s sexism was more covert, veiled by Soviet rhetoric of equality, yet clearly embedded in the policy changes he championed, such as the restrictive 1936 Family Law. Mussolini, however, made no attempt to…
