Radical utopian socialism valued motherhood and traditional women’s work. According to Barbara Taylor in Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Early Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, “To Robert Owen and his followers, particularly his feminist followers, socialism represented a struggle to achieve ‘perfect equality and perfect freedom’ at every level of social existence.” Furthermore, she asserted, “The ideological roots of Socialist feminism lay in the popular democratic tradition of the late eighteenth century, and in particular the radical egalitarianism of the 1790s.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication on the Rights of Women and Owen’s New View of Society divided the labor between men and women. He and his supporters, the Owenites,…show more content… German nationalism developed a theory of race based Social Darwinsim—the idea based on evolutionary theory that some groups should not be protected by the state because they are considered genetically weaker. In post-World War I Germany, Jill Stephenson in Women in Nazi Society claimed, “Marriage [was] not merely a private matter, but one which directly [affected] the fate of a nation at its very roots.” Because of falling birth rates, women had to both have large families and became political educators to ensure the survival of German Weimar Republic, reflecting the separate spheres ideologies of liberalism and utopian socialism. However, the state also heavily politicized their reproductive capacity—more so than utopian socialist. Also, unlike Malthus’ liberal philosophy, women’s capability to reproduce became the founding blocks of on the nation and literal sustainers of the race. The German government also directly tried to limit women to the domestic sphere. For example, unlike the liberal states, which did not directly support women, the German state created programs that sought to prevent abortions and protect the health of the mother to ensure the health of unborn child. Thus nationalism radically politicized motherhood and
