Mike doesn’t connect the dots:
I was arguing that restriction of gender roles is sneaking towards totalitarianism; VD said the opposite. He said that the loosening of gender roles contributed to the rise of totalitarian governments. I pointed out that totalitarian governments love strict gender roles.
These two statements are not opposites, they simply describe different parts of the same process. For example, the Italian Fascists were loud proponents of the women’s right to vote and hold office; it is the very first point in Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto. The National Socialists campaigned hard for the women’s vote and enjoyed great support from women; if you watch the old clips, you can see that Hitler was received with the sort of ecstatic rapture that was later seen in reaction to Elvis and the Beatles.
Once they’ve made use of women to obtain power, these totalitarian demagogues have little further use for them except as breeding stock. They then use the power of the central state to forcibly return women to those strict gender roles. I don’t believe women were essential to the Soviet Communists attaining power, as that was done through revolution, not the ballot box or negotiation, but the Soviets, too, enforced the same strict gender roles that we would consider conservative.
This apparent dichotomy makes sense, because totalitarians need women to attain power, but once there, they need to produce as many soldiers as possible to support their typically aggressive foreign policies.
The Chinese Communists, on the other hand, appear to have embraced looser gender roles in the hopes of reducing their birth rate. But since there are over a billion Chinese and they vastly outnumber their neighbors, the same logic would not apply.