“BRIDES OF STATE”

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 28 August 1942, Page 5

“BRIDES OF STATE”

The issue of this war is expressed better in terms of women’s lives than in abstract generalisations, said Archibald McLeish, Librarian of Congress, in an address at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The Nazi State is a State in which women are, first, bearers of children and, thereafter, providers of unskilled routine labour; a State in which women are obliged to undertake the duty of motherhood without the honour which, in every other country of the earth, accompanies that duty; a State in which women are taught the holy obligation of the wife without exercising the right of personal choice, the right of the disposition of their persons, which alone makes wifehood holy; a State in which, as Gottfried Feder truly puts it, woman has become “maid and servant” of the Nazi male. It is this destruction of human dignity which is the true face and image of the thing we fight against, and nowhere does it show itself more clearly than in the Nazi treatment of the German woman. Other nations have used the captured women of their enemies for the purposes the Nazis use their own.

But never before in history has any nation made its girls the brides, the indiscriminate and undiscriminating brides, of the State itself. And never before in history has any nation made a virtue of the necessity of denying to any woman, of its own or of another race, the central, the essential woman’s right to be mistress of herself.

The thing is done. It has been done from the beginning of time. But it was left to the Nazi philosophers to turn the doing of it into a patriotic virtue and to provide thereby the most revealing picture of their Nazi world which any word or action could convey.