AHC: Female Führer, or How Feminism turned Extreme

I believe that Mosley and his wife both tried to make the case that Fascism was good for women and their particular program included various initiatives for state provided childcare and other programs designed to benefit British women. In a timeline where Britain goes Mosleyite Fascist you could end up with a situation where his wife takes over perhaps?
 
I believe that Mosley and his wife both tried to make the case that Fascism was good for women and their particular program included various initiatives for state provided childcare and other programs designed to benefit British women. In a timeline where Britain goes Mosleyite Fascist you could end up with a situation where his wife takes over perhaps?
might be a realistic scenario for a 'soft feminist' style fascism, depending on how the term is defined.
 
I think if OP wants a female Fuhrer like person then there is potential, but a form of Fascism based of Feminism is very unlikely. Feminism stands for equal rights for women after all. It would take a big perversion of it to make it about superiority.

For the more likely you would need an earlier POD. Maybe have Nazi doctrine changed so that both genders should be active in politics. Second change would be to get Hitler to marry some powerfully charismatic and well liked women with Germany. Then have him die slowly. Maybe his syphilis get worse and he starts to rely on his wife more, she starts performing speeches for the people. Then when he dies she picks up the mantle.
 
I think you can do this pretty easily, with the right goals. But it won't be "And suddenly Men are treated like Jews in Germany". I think it'd be a slower, more gradual process.

The first thing we need is a society lead by a woman or a matriarchy. Where the ruler can be semi-divine.

Cleopatra seems like a good place to start. I don't claim to be able to understand her, since.. y'know. Time. If she can establish a Ptolemaic Dynasty down the female line, essentially refusing to marry, but installing her daughter into power.

Say we have an alternative timeline where Rome isn't quite as epic, but we still get Cleopatra (I know, the butterfly nets scream at me too) - Say they never defeat Carthage, or are penned in the west. This leaves Egypt as still a big player, and Cleopatra still in the position of wanting to have strong military allies on side.

Start making the priesthood more female, allowing inheritance of property down the female line, and other similar practices, is a start. But I think to count as "Extremist" you basically need men to be a lesser class, or 'different but equal' if you want to spin it.

So women take the roles of artisans, politicians, etc - with men forming the army, and manual labouring groups. It might work if the army because huge and constantly sent out under different Generals (Women, ofc, or at least supervised/under the political command of a ambassador/politician figure). Even if this drastically warps the gender balance, it doesn't threaten Egypt with non-existence as you only NEED a fraction of the blokes to have a new generation.

So yeah, TL;DR - somehow have Cleopatra install a dynasty of unmarried Queens, and have men focus almost exclusively on military affairs, whilst women take almost every other position that isn't life threatening. As long as the men who survive all the wars are kept happy and distracted, you've got the seeds of the OP, I think.
 
I don't get so much an anti-male/misandrist feel from OP's request as much as the challenge for feminism to produce a horrific dictator. Historically there have been few female dictators (Indira Gandhi, I guess, and who else aside from female monarchs if you can count them), at a far lower rate than female democratic leaders. I just assume OP wants feminism as part of the political program, with a huge amount of women backing it, and serving as the powerbase for a female dictator.

Exactly
I just need a female dictator who was born as result of earlier, more prominent feminist movement, who wants to start a world war to avenge her nation's defeat in 20th century.
Not to eradicate males.
I need the good POD of this scenario
 
Exactly
I just need a female dictator who was born as result of earlier, more prominent feminist movement, who wants to start a world war to avenge her nation's defeat in 20th century.
Not to eradicate males.
I need the good POD of this scenario

In which case it would likely be a very charismatic wife of the male leader of the overall movement who takes power after her husband dies/is assassinated. Not beyond belief. She wouldn't be gaining power without a man helping her, but she'd still be gaining power, and it would be presumably under her rule that the movement/country actually committed the majority of its crimes (compare Nazi Germany 1933 - September 1939 to September 1939 - 1945). And we know that women can be just as ruthless as men, so there's no reason to think our Führerin is going to be any nicer than a male leader might.
 
A Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Angel One", features a long-standing matriarchical government on a planet, a society whose males are second class/subservient to the females.
 
This has a strange deja vu feeling about a episode i once saw on sliders years ago.
Basicle the show was jumping from one dimension to another
There was a episode there where they got somewhere where men got whiped out due some chemical weapon leaving a female/feminist world behind with a few man surviving

Other then that dont see this happening in the passed but hey perhaps a female american president takes over then gets rid of the white man first using racial tensions then all man after

A Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "Angel One", features a long-standing matriarchical government on a planet, a society whose males are second class/subservient to the females.

John Wyndham wrote a short story called 'Consider Her Ways', where men got wiped out (kind of a 12 Monkeys plot going on) and women managed to create a caste-based society run by a council of scientists. It was a good story, though of its time (1950s) - given that his POV character's biggest problem with a women-only world was 'but there's no romance!' :D Poor sheltered Englishman :p
 
Fascism has military-worship as a core principle, so you'd want a country where women can somehow be allowed into frontline combat in the early twentieth century. A smallish Eastern European country is most likely for that--Poland or Romania or Serbia or Bulgaria--but they're also less likely to start a world war than Germany. On the other hand, one can imagine a more Feminist Prussia having women in the army, which could carry over to Germany after unification (or have Germany unite in a different manner).

The Soviet Union is another possibility, for similar reasons--long, bloody war leading to women's conscription.

At the other end of the scale is France, whose demographic difficulties are well-known. French women driven by revolutionary egalitarianism might fight as well.

However you do it, you now have a country where women serve on the front lines and in heavy industry. This helps erode popular sexism against female commanders.

From there, a charismatic woman picking up the pseudo-nietzscheanism and Nationalism of fascist ideology is easy enough.

I think your best bet would be to trigger a very long and bloody industrial war in Europe, then, as that would help drive women's liberation in the manner suggested. A Crimean War that becomes a general continental war might do the trick.
 
Suppose a country faces a war that causes a significant loss of it's male population: Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance, Serbia in WWI, Rwanda after the genocide or maybe an USSR which looses even more men than in OTL in WWII. Due the power vacuum and the gender disparity, women rise to positions of power - there is simply none else. Such a female dictator might even institute polygamy as a way to boost the population. One generation later, that female dictator leads her nation, and the new after-war generation, in a revenge war.

The problem is that such a nation would be hard pressed to recover within a single generation, but let's try something.

I don't know much about the internal politics of the USSR during the first half of the 20th century, but since every renown leader was a man, I'm guessing we need a POD in which the Bolsheviks become more open to the idea of female leadership. Stalin suffers a stroke when German invades and Beria doesn't go into the gulags without a fight. So, as the Germans invade from the west, the Soviet leaders decapitates itself at the Kremlin in the power struggle. Our Female Dictator might be the one to survive the power struggle, or better yet for her future credentials, she's not included in whatever government emerges. The Germans, in the meantime, perform even better (if that's possible at all) due the collapse in Soviet leadership. There is no Soviet winter offensive in 1941 - maybe the power vacuum manages to last even up to that point.

The war eventually ends by 1944/45 without a clear winner, but with exhausted Germans and Soviets accepting some sort of Brest Litovsk peace in which Germany gets a significant portion of the Western USSR and proceed to kill and enslave the surviving Soviet citizens.

The Manhattan Project gets delayed for whatever reasons (nuclear research went slower in ATL, key scientists were killed before they could emigrate to the USA, the British don't share Tube Alloys, or something else). An exhausted rump USSR now lead (or soon to be lead) by our Female Dictator sells Germany the raw materials Germany needs to wage war against the Western Allies, either out of the peace treaty, because they desperately need the cash or both. They have a huge gender imbalance so the Nazis don't see them as a threat for the foreseeable future. In the West are faced with the brunt of the German armed forces which now have access to plenty of oil and all the strategic materials they need (think reliable jet engines, produced in Poland, captured Soviet territory or maybe even imported from the rump USSR as a way to avoid American strategic bombardment). D-Day fails and with no atomic bomb in sight, a peace of exhaustion is signed by 1946/47, after the American public can barely stomach the casualties of the invasion of Japan and isn't willing to tolerate the butcher's bill of liberating Europe.

The Manhattan Project, now operating at a lower priority, eventually yields nuclear weapons by the late 1940s and the USSR spies still deliver enough information to the Rump USSR so the Soviets manage to produce their own weapons by the 1950s. The Third Reich remains behind, but not out of the atomic race. The USA remains unwilling to start a nuclear war in Europe. An uranium embargo is placed against Germany and all countries enforce it (nobody wants Hitler with nuclear weapons, even if their power isn't really understood IOTL)

In Rump USSR, Female Dictator has risen to power and begun to improve the lives of the surviving Soviet citizens. She's wildly popular and, after the experience of the Politburo killing itself at the start of the Great Patriotic War, not only has she turned misandric, but misandry itself has become sort of validated in Rump USSR. Feminism becomes the matter of fact way of life because, with 70-80% of the workforce being composed of women, it's women who are running nearly everything.

By the late 1950s the Rump Soviet economy has somewhat recovered, maybe even helped by the USA, which sees Rump USSR as the only possible counterbalance to Nazi Germany. A generation of teenagers raised in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War is becoming of age. For that, Female Dictator has looked to strike a work-life balance that allows every woman to have at least one child, but preferably, two or more. Yes, there are a lot of half-siblings out there. Out of necessity, Rump USSR is a heavily militarized society (think mandatory military training for both genders since they are at least 12 years old) and has a significant nuclear arsenal, maybe only bomber based. By the time Nazi Germany is finally doing its first nuclear tests the Rump USSR is mass producing H-Bombs. The KGB discovers the Nazis are finally managing to miniaturize their fission bombs enough to fit them in their missiles and will test a prototype soon. Female Dictator launches a preemptive nuclear and armored assault on the Third Reich both to recover the lost Soviet lands and to avoid the risk of getting nuked by the Nazis a few years down the line. Rump USSR takes significant losses to bomber carried fission bombs but ends up destroying the Third Reich in a nuclear holocaust.
 
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