In 1980, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, an unrepentant former leader of the Nazi women’s bureau in Berlin from 1934 to 1945, described her former job to historian Claudia Koonz as “influencing women in their daily lives”.

To her audience – approximately 4 million girls in the Nazi youth movement, 8 million women in Nazi associations under her jurisdiction, and 1.9 million subscribers to her women’s magazine, Frauen Warte, according to Koonz – Scholtz-Klink promoted what she called “the cradle and the ladle”, or reproductive and household duties as essential to national strength.

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Thinkers including 20th-century German theorist Theodor Adorno and contemporary American political philosopher George Lakoff theorized about the paternalist personality of authoritarians, with Lakoff noting that in modern history, far-right authoritarian regimes institutionalize male authority through a family-like hierarchy: women are subservient to men and both obey the nation’s metaphorical “strict father”. In the home, paternal authority and maternal subservience prime children for a wider social order, teaching them to see women’s submission as stability, and to accept fear and conformity as the price of belonging.

“There’s been a reluctance to name this moment as fascism,” says cultural historian Tiffany Florvil, yet extreme authoritarian dynamics can be clearly seen in the American right today. (Indeed, Trump supporters can’t seem to stop calling him “Daddy”.)

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