Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’’s Fascist Movement

The British Fascisti, the first fascism movement in Britain, was founded by a woman in 1923. During the 1930s, 25 per cent of Sir Oswald Mosley’s supporters were women, and his movement was ’largely built up by the fanaticism of women.’ What was it about the British form of Fascism that accounted for this conspicuous female support? Gottlieb addresses these questions in the definitive work on women in fascism.

This book continues to fill a significant gap in the historiography of British fascism, which has generally overlooked the contribution of women on the one hand, and the importance of sexual politics and women’s issues on the other. Gottlieb’s extensive research makes use of government documents, a large range of contemporary pamphlets, newspapers and speeches, as well as original interviews with those personally involved in the movement.

This new edition includes a preface analysing the current affairs of the last 20 years, reframing the book according to contemporary context. Here, Gottlieb looks at the resurgence of populism, the rise of women as leaders of far-right parties across Europe and North America, and the normalisation of fascism in fiction and political discourse.

Julie Gottlieb is Professor of Modern History at University of Sheffield. She is the author of The Culture of Fascism (I.B. Tauris, 2004), The Aftermath of Suffrage (2013), ’Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (2015) and Rethinking Right-Wing Women (2017). She has appeared on BBC’s Woman’s Hour, The Sunday Politics and Sky News, and has blogged for The Huffington Post, The Conversation and History Matters. She was the historical adviser on the statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett, unveiled in 2018.