Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat Says Roe Overturn Echoes Hitler and Fascist Spain ‘Reversing The Emancipation Of Women In Every Way’

Historian and author Ruth Ben-Ghiat told radio host Dean Obeidallah that the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade fits a pattern of authoritarians attacking women as they rise to power.

On Friday’s edition of The Dean Obeidallah Show, the host asked the  “Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present” author to weigh in on the news that the Supreme Court has effectively overturned the landmark s Roe v. Wade decision with its 5-4 decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Ben-Ghiat told the host that authoritarians from Hitler to Spain’s Franco followed a similar pattern of rolling back progress for women:

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: Says here a right women had since 1973 was just taken away by six people sitting in a court.

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. This is not democracy. And this is well, it is connected to authoritarianism because the kind of– I see this as a right wing counter-revolution. They’re trying to literally go back in time and take away rights, including voting rights and and racial equity rights. And there’s that. And the other thing is, I have a line in my book, Strongmen, that women are always as much the targets of authoritarians as prosecutors and journalists and opposition politicians. They want control of those bodies. And so it’s a very sad day.

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: Why is it part of authoritarianism that men, and controlling women, is a component of that?

RUTH BEN-GHIAT: So one of the most interesting findings from my research is that every time you have an appeal of strongmen, it’s been a time when there’s the society’s gone through a lot of progress and it’s, and including gender emancipation. So even like back in Spain before, and it doesn’t matter if it’s somebody who comes along like a Hitler and and becomes popular and, or somebody who gets elected or even a coup. Because in Spain, in the 1930s, part of the atmosphere of of making way for a military coup was that women became, like they got independence for the first time. They could own their own property. There were a lot of gender emancipation. So every time these strongmen come along, they are the agents of taking those rights away and reversing the, reversing the emancipation of women in every way. And that that holds true throughout all over the world, throughout a century. So here here we have it here now.

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