Do we need a school for brides?

The Telegraph tells what one taught.

Dressed in modest petticoats and starched white aprons, their hair pulled back into neat plaits, a group of women are pictured marching through a hayfield. Arms linked, broad smiles across their faces, they are carrying baskets laden with flowers, which later they will arrange into pretty garlands. In another photograph, they are purposefully huddled around a sewing machine, darning pairs of pinstriped trousers, while other images show them gleefully feeding livestock, chopping vegetables on a kitchen worktop and singing along to another woman’s accordion-playing.

So far, so good.

These faded black-and-white pictures are reminiscent of scenes from the 1800s: surviving off the land, communal living, hard work and simple, wholesome pleasures.

Could this be Homesteader Porn?

So just what were “bride schools”? … The first of them (was) a vast villa mocked up inside to look like a model household… According to a newspaper article from the day, its aim was “to mould housewives out of office girls”.

Sounds like a bunch of unrealistic, idealistic dreamers. You cannot turn a whore into a housewife, and it’s awfully hard to get a woman to drop her “corporate boyfriend.”

An official pamphlet explains: “In circles of 20 students, young girls should attend courses at the institute, preferably two months before their wedding day, to recuperate spiritually and physically, to forget the daily worries associated with their previous professions, to find the way and to feel the joy for their new lives as wives.” The live-in course lasted six weeks and cost … about £400 in today’s money.

Attendees learnt household skills including cooking, ironing, gardening, child care, interior design and animal husbandry. No aspect of daily life was omitted: from cleaning a husband’s uniform to conducting politically correct conversations at cocktail parties.

Deprogramming all that feminist programming is CHEAP at about $600 in today’s money! Where do we send our debt-afflicted young women to learn this?

The bride schools, explains Jill Stephenson, emerita professor … at the University of Edinburgh, were designed “to give more intensive training and indoctrination than was possible at weekly training sessions. Courses were held at any time of day to suit the clientele.”

She adds: “Housekeeping was a much more labour-intensive business then than it is today. Cleaning, laying a fire, shopping, cooking and looking after children was very time-consuming.”

In a society that urged women to “take hold of the frying pan, dustpan and broom, and marry a man” (one of the Nine Commandments for the Workers’ Struggle …), it was little surprise that marriage featured so prominently in the … vision of the ideal family.

Shocking that any society would so oppress women! They must have been the epitome of evil.

Young girls learnt the importance of the three Ks (kinder, küche and kirche; children, kitchen and church) through compulsory membership of the League of German Maidens, and later the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft). Under the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage, newlyweds were given a state loan of 1,000 reichsmarks (approximately £3,000) of which they were allowed to keep a quarter for each child they had – in effect, a bribe to procreate.

In this respect, explains Dr Marius Turda of Oxford Brookes University: “The bride schools perfectly illustrate the Nazi regime’s ambition to control its population, both privately and publicly. A good German wife was supposed to be at the same time a supportive mother and a promoter of racial values in the family.”

Oops. I guess the Alpha Socialists ruined the idea. Still, couldn’t it be one of their “good” ideas, like Volkswagens, Autobahns, Rockets?

The training was the result of a collaboration between SS chief Himmler and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, leader of the NS-Frauenschaft. Scholtz-Klink was a charismatic, determined champion of the female cause – in a speech to the Nazi Party Congress in 1935, she described motherhood as “divine” and exalted women as “the secret queens of our people” – and it was her magnetic personality that helped ensure the courses were so well-attended and successful.

Where have we read this before? Oh, yes, Will and I tracing the undermining of male headship. Catherine Beecher

“believed fervently in the moral superiority of women over men… Because the “cult of true womanhood” linked the home with piety and purity, Beecher sought to connect architectural and landscape design with her domestic ideal. … Although her designs were technically conventional – the houses were boxes with a central core of fireplaces – the book provided a vision of a healthy, happy, well-fed, and pious family living harmoniously in a well-built, well-furnished, well-kept house.she argued in favor of the physical and social separation of the population into the female-dominated sphere of home life, preferably suburban, and the male-dominated sphere of the business world, usually urban”

Back to the bride schools:

(T)he homely, wifely domesticity was simply a front. For while these women were learning to cook and clean and sew, they were also creating the perfect home in which to nurture the Nazi elite. … They were, in essence, training to become the nucleus of the Nazi state.

“Exercising the kind of domesticity that a woman learnt at an SS bride school was, in a sense, ‘living’ her Nazism,” explains Torrie.

Women at home, lacking proper male guidance, whether the men are off 15 miles away in an office or 1500 miles away in Russia, can nurture the worst anti-social cretins. We do not think that the “dad breadwinner/mom homemaker” model is necessarily Fascist, Communist, or National Socialist. But rooted in the alienating separation of men from house, hearth, and headship, it leads inexorably to a conclusion: a man’s only role in the house is to earn money, and that can be much more easily done by a check from Daddy Government. If you wish to uproot feminism and socialism, you must remove the farrowed ground in which they flourish. A dream of a return to a 1950s America is simply a request to repeat the cycle of family destruction. We need another model.