1940
Collins
An account of life in Nazi Germany, and the implications of a Nazi invasion of Britain, addressed to women. Her main point is that the Nazi regime seeks to crush the individual, and force all citizens to serve the state without dissent. Delafield discusses home-life: married women will see little of their husbands, since compulsory military service, and parents will have no choice over their children’s education. Children will be indoctrinated into Nazism and encourage to report any dissent from their parents. Young lovers may have been separated by war-work, but in Nazi Germany they can be separated by arrests, deportation, disappearance if one of them has spoken unwisely about the regime. Delafield argues that love and affection can be used against women, to blackmail them into the service of the state. She shows how thought and ideas can be state-controlled by Nazi control of the education system, and how this is managed on highly gendered lines. She criticises the ways in which schoolchildren are inducted into violence and militarized behaviour. As well as deploring Nazi antisemitism, she describes how membership of Christian churches have been regulated by the Nazis. She shows the loss of freedom for all under Nazism, and particularly for women, given the expectation that women would be relegated to the home. Wartime restrictions, she suggests, however severe, are nothing to the lack of freedom under Nazi rule. Nothing else matters, she says, other than supporting the war effort and ensuring we win the war.