Try Nazism or Fascism. You'd find your answers there.
THIS, for a short answer to a stupid question. The devilish detail is, how do you make fascism sustainable and stable?
Also it wasn't clear in the OP just what the scope is. I assumed "the whole world, everywhere," and that's a tall order at first glance, what with the Bolsheviks and other Marxist-Leninists such as Mao committed in theory to complete gender equalty.
In theory that is. The fact is Soviet society remained quite sexist, I gather China did too, OTL. Also an all-fascist/reactionary world (which I gather from further clarification by Ulver downthread is
not being specified) clearly involves the defeat of the USSR or its preemption. Since the OP POD is post-1945 I suppose both the USSR and PRC continue to exist, and very likely some other Leninist inspired regimes such as OTL Vietnam and Cuba. Presumably then the rollback of women's rights is in the West, and despite the atrocious hypocrisy of Leninists observing women's rights more in the breach, they will in comparison stand forth as the torchbearers of gender equity, while perhaps being somewhat worse even than OTL.
Let me be very clear, personally any reversal of women's positions anywhere in the world makes for what I'd call a crapsack world. And I doubt it could be stable.
Fascism or the Nazis seems unlikely to be a huge factor post world war II. Women being property doesn’t require Taliban psychoville. They were effectively property until well into the nineteen century.
And as pointed out farther down, some Western nations such as France kept it up de jure amazingly far into the 20th Century.
This is to say, not that this stuff isn't "Taliban psychoville," but rather that "Taliban psychoville"
was the norm in Western Europe/USA.
By the way, if such a world can be contrived, I'd expect Islamic radicalism to be a lot less sexist, and to focus on the manner in which Islam has liberated rather than controlled women as part of the project of setting themselves against their colonialist/neo-colonialist oppressors. The Islamist radicals would be aligning with the Western revolutionary left more than its reactionary right, distinguished from the Left in general mainly by their theism.
OTL specifically Islamic radicalism in the post-WWII period was very slow to start gaining momentum, the generation of Arab and other Islamic-world radicals of the period 1945-1975 or so were characteristically secularist and more or less Marxist or quasi-Marxist. If your misogynist West is still standing come 1975 or so, I'd expect a smoother transition to a pietist but quite socially progressivist Islamic radicalism, or perhaps the Koran would play relatively little role and Middle Eastern unrest would continue to be more under the banner of Marx and local nationalists.
The problem with using Religion is that, along with women’s liberation, secularism had been gathering steam in Western civilization since the enlightenment – so using a religion just seems to be restating the problem. Any POD that makes even a little sense?
Yeah, well lots of luck achieving the disfranchisement of half of humanity
without invoking Divine Will. That would probably be quite as difficult as you imagine in Western Europe, but unfortunately I can well imagine a Christian Right sort of fascism in the USA, and that's probably exactly what it would take. An unholy Holy Alliance of racists, reactionary businessmen, xenophobes--sounds remarkably like a winning ticket in most eras of US politics
and fearing it has a long history. As Sinclair Lewis said in 1935, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Robert Heinlein then wrote it up in "If This Goes On..."
So now the question would be how to simultaneously achieve the same result in Western Europe? Farther down the thread we saw how close France was to the goal--on paper. I believe that in practice women very often demanded and got their way, or there would have been more of an effort to abolish the de jure patriarchalism. Basically I'm imagining a neo-fascist USA moving in as a rather heavy-handed Big Brother and manipulating things as necessary in Britain, France, and the other NATO nations to guarantee a sufficiently acquiescent set of local regimes there. Would this logically imply a harsh and sweeping gender backlash? Or would the Americans be in a position to impose that anyway even if not strictly necessary?
Assuming this is done it seems clear that the anti-Soviet alliance is basically similar to what would have happened if the Third Reich had won, hopefully without the latter's baroque flourishes of mass extermination. But it would be basically racist, doubtless committed to old-school colonialism (maybe reconfigured, with a "Federated Free Nations" (these guys are Orwellian to the hilt) claiming mandates over all former colonies, and farming out the functions of administration mainly to the old colonial nations but with the USA getting a cut and perhaps taking over headache cases, or forming a genuinely international administrative arm for that purpose).
The Americans might be canny enough to avoid foisting a nominally theocratic model on allies like France, but I bet it catches on in Britain (if that is the Americans can succeed in imposing their order on either European nation--a big "if").
Odd. I asked this question because I’m writing a story in collaboration and for a plot-point we need a women-subjugation timeline with a post WWII POD. That was the very first thing we both agreed independently of each other. The west is badly weakened in the cold war. Less economic growth. A propaganda coup for the Soviets. “Capitalism enslaves women, downtrodden workers and women of the world unite) On the other hand is it an automatic victory for new soviet man (and women)? The Soviet economic system is still crap compared to a fifties housewife US one isn’t it. Or would the Soviet counter reaction mean putting more females in position of power in the Soviet Union and does that make any difference? After all they could hardly to worse than the old-men’s home of the Kremlin in OTL
Does a mid nineteen century level of female subjugation automatically mean no productive female workforce? Even in the nineteen century there were female writers and scientists even if they were effectively legal wards of their husbands or fathers. No saying it isn’t bad but is it western civilization looses out to the Soviet bad? Again, the requirement is for effective female dis-empowerment, not some sort of formal chattel status. Think Victorian Britain sex-relations.
Ah. But consider your own logic. The reason you "need" female disempowerment is as a way of controlling Western discontent. It's one thing for the 19th century to carry forward a legacy of thousands of years of female subjugation and absent-mindedly let it start fraying around the edges until suddenly there are Suffragettes demanding the vote and Social Democrats asserting the essential equality of the sexes. It's quite another to stare down that legacy of recent emancipation and enfranchisement, bearing in mind that the vast majority of women then went on to become perfectly patriotic and productive citizens who as often as not vote conservative, slap down the loyal and patriotic and working/consuming women
en masse in order to get an iconic and elusive leaven of radicals. No, the reactionaries are going to have to go far and be strict to justify this betrayal. And they've generated their own resistance in doing so, so they have to go further yet.
...Communism was all about the "socialization of women", turning them into sex-slaves in its early practices. ...
Um, say
what? That's what reactionaries
said about them, where are you getting that that's what the radical Left of Europe ever intended?
What they were for was sexual freedom, not compelling women to submit to a collective gang-bang. But the latter is what their enemies said they would do. Show me where actual leftists actually did that, any time, anywhere.
That is actually quite clever. I need a near-future world not changed utterly beyond recognition that essentially makes women the wards of men – rather like children in fact. Mistreatment and abuse viewed the same way as we’d view someone abusing a child in their care. The concept of making the family the defining social unit rather than the individual is the best idea I have seen so far.
Reestablishing elements of the legal concept of Coverture from the 19th century under which husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned. Women and girls subject to coverture have their legal identities subsumed under men’s, first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Under its strict terms, females submitting to it cannot own property, participate politics, serve on juries, write wills, sign contracts, make legal complaints, or exercise custody rights over their children if their husband or farther objects.
Still can’t find a post WWII POD. Think I’ll have to bite the bullet and go back further. Mormonism replaced by another religion putting enormous emphasis on keeping women in their proper place.
How this isn't "Talibanesque" eludes me. But I don't think you need a new superreligion; the old established ones have plenty of potential. You're going to need something industrial-strength to turn your back on the whole trend of the Enlightenment though.
And America's economy is crippled in the process (less workers and less academics in terms of production, less people with disposable income for consumption) and Europe, Canada and Australia become more and more wary about this. Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain said alienation of women is a useful tool at keeping people from finding capitalism attractive. With this, the Reds gains an upper hand in the cold war.
Zor
Oh yes. I'm getting there!
No one would buy it.
You can't have Rosie the riveter followed by a go back to the kitchen in 10 years.
Women's liberation had been gathering pace in the West for centuries. You can't stop it with something so shallow and fleeting as a McCarthy trial or a few men talking pseudoscience.
IMO you need religion to do it. Only religion has the self confidence and cultural power to turn the clock back on progress and to get women to accept it.
I agree to that go as far as Ulver wants, there needs to be both some major divergence from OTL post-WWII conditions particularly in the USA, and religion, specifically some US Protestant-Catholic alliance, is going to be needed. The mainstream Protestant denominations postwar weren't nearly hardcore enough to do the job, and evangelical Protestantism was too marginalized. Something has to unmarginalize them, and in the process ally with the more reactionary elements of the Catholic Church who then use their authority within the Church to reinforce the compulsions coming from the religious-reactionary alliance dominated government to keep the liberals quiet and compliant (or else).
OTOH, don't underestimate just how much reactionary backlash there was post-WWII. Driving not only Rosie but women in the mold of Amelia Earhart, or the female leads of screwball comedies, back into the kitchen and killing the dreams of girls who grew up with such examples before them in the '30s and '40s is exactly what Betty Friedan's
Feminine Mystique is all about. We had another backlash in the 1980s which is what Susan Faludi's
Backlash is all about.
Still, it obviously had and has limits; to go farther than the assault on the cultural value of women's equality and to start encoding it in law again requires some heavy divergences, because this is a direct and explicit reversal of the progressive principles that form the very cultural identity of a nation like the USA, and insofar as it derives its legitimacy from the revolutionary legacy of 1789, France too for that matter. To go backward
de jure requires a heavy-duty political movement presumably driven by the perception of dire crisis.
It's really hard to see how the USA as of 1945 could be driven that far that soon. We were riding high. Sure there was still a lot of anxiety, but basically the world, except those parts of it sequestered by the Soviets and eventually the revolutionary Chinese, was at American command. Now the sorts of things that did potentially threaten this hegemony were precisely the kinds of things that might empower a bunch of reactionaries and in our timeline actually did, to a sad extent in my humble opinion. But what could be scary enough to to drive a movement to reduce women to the status of minor children?
Assuming someone else comes up with the motive, the means would be some religion allied fascist movement that doubtless would incorporate white supremacy as well along with violet suppression of the Left in general. It would be anti-labor and pro-business in the sense of gratifying the impulses of the most reactionary business circles.
It would be making a lot of enemies, around the world and in the very heartlands of these movements. Alienating half of humanity at a blow does not strike me as the most clever move of Machiavellian chess to make!
As long as this regime lasts, the Marxist Left will be criminalized but also legitimized in standing forth as the most committed and consistent opposition. The reactionaries will have tossed the torch of the values of Western Enlightenment and progressiveism to their enemies--in the Kremlin and in Beijing, but also in resistance cells (and jail cells) all across America and Europe. That Liberty Enlightening the World is a Lady is going to have a bitter and ironic resonance in this generation, perhaps these Ameri-Christo-Taliban types will blow up the Statue of Liberty?
It's a species of fire your smarter reactionaries will avoid playing with unless the crisis driving it is really major. The smart thing to do is rail against women when they seem to be stronger and then niggle away at their position with a death of a thousand unkind and invidious cuts, not jump in and wholesale write off half of one's constituency, labor force and market in one blunt stroke. Doing it this way sets up a dynamic of civil war.
