A historian’s warning: when society tells women to ‘play nice,’ it never ends well, and today, the warning signs are all around us.
Oh, 2026. We had such high hopes for you.
But the party’s definitely over. A week in, and I’m already done.
WTF is happening in Venezuela? Then there’s all the sabre rattling over Greenland (… and Cuba… and Colombia… and Mexico). Now, the horrifying reports emerging about an ICE agent allegedly shooting and killing a woman during an attempted escape.
I’m shaken. I really am. And I know I’m not alone.
Dealing with the uncertainty and ever-shifting emotional and physical landscape that comes with being a woman of a certain age is bad enough without having to watch the decline of Western civilisation into the bargain.
It pains me to say it. Because I’m a historian with a PhD to prove it. History has been an obsession since I was a tiny thing. I thought that by studying history, I could understand what it meant to be a human being.
Instead, I’m getting to watch history play out in real time… and not in a good way.
We look to the past to avoid repeating its mistakes. Which is why the current state of the world is causing students of history such existential horror.
We know this won’t end well.
Tearing at the seams
With America casting itself in the role of pirate captain of a ship full of global renegades, the geopolitical fabric is tearing at its already fraying seams.
As small-dick energy floods the airwaves, it’s difficult to know where to channel our distress. As a woman, it’s particularly troubling.
Women are taught to play nice. To placate. To bite our tongues. We put on so many masks to fit society’s expectations, it’s easy to lose track of who we really are.
Case in point. My literary agent always told me that my social media posts should be politically neutral, lest I alienate potential audiences. I played that game for a while on Instagram, which gets the rosy-hued Meaghan. It’s not that it’s inauthentic. It was just one, very limited, side of who I am.
But then I started my latest novel. Its working title when I started was A Beautiful Age. It was meant to be gentle and contemplative; a portrait of the middle-ages shot through a heavy filter.
Something in me snapped
Then the 2024 US election happened, and something in me snapped. The gloves came off when I discovered Threads – Meta’s version of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. I couldn’t bite my tongue any longer.
As I found my voice again, so did the heroine of my novel. When I pitched a TV series based on my story and a male producer questioned the wisdom of making television that would have “half the audience reaching for the remote,” as yet another triumphal piece of dick-swinging TV (Landman, anyone?) hit the airwaves, Sunday Reilly roared.
It was no longer A Beautiful Age because, well, it was no longer a beautiful age.
Instead, I wrote Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give. When an agent urged me to reconsider using ‘Fuck’ in the title because it would mean department stores wouldn’t stock my book, and book clubs wouldn’t recommend it, you know what I said? Fuck it.
I know how this plays out
I’m not going to be silent and play nice anymore. Because as a woman, I know how all this plays out for our kind. And it’s not great.
A few years ago, I was one of the writers on a TV documentary series, Hitler’s Handmaidens, about the women who enabled the Nazi regime and were complicit in its long list of horrors.
It’s been a long-term… can I say, interest?… for me. As a history-obsessed child, I had a morbid fascination with the rise of Nazi Germany. I read William Shirer’s telephone-book-sized tome, Inside the Third Reich,when I was twelve. Yes, I was a peculiar child.
I couldn’t understand how an entire nation in the heart of Europe—people who seemed just like those I saw around me every day—could commit such ghastly crimes. Even the thought of saying nothing, and turning a blind eye as neighbours disappeared without a trace, horrified me.
It’s impossible to ignore the parallels with what’s happening in America today. And then, as now, women are front and centre on the battlefield. They are both behind, and in front of, the cannon.
Think Erika Kirk with fewer pyrotechnics and less glitter.
Like in today’s America, Hitler and his poisonous henchmen placed particular women on a pedestal.
Those women toed the party line and wore their allegiance to the Führer on their sleeves.
They donned Bavarian beer-hall–wench dirndls with the same enthusiasm the Mar-a-Lago women turn their faces into something resembling a balloon-animal made by a slow-learner in clown school. To us, it looks ridiculous. To them, it’s a brand to show they move in rarefied air.
And they’re important to the movement, because there’s no revolution unless you let the women into the tent.
Hitler knew that. Without Germany’s Frauen onside, the Third Reich would have been nothing more than a potent fart on the wind.
But by the time the war ended, Germany’s women would have much cause for regret.
Beginning at the end
In the dying days of the Second World War, Private Willi Anderson was dodging bullets fired from a sniper’s nest in the once picturesque German town of Aachen.
When the shooter was taken out with a bazooka round, what Willi found would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Because the body he found wasn’t a battle-hardened Nazi soldier. It was a young girl.
How did Nazi Germany get to a point where girls were being sent to war? Because it sure as fuck didn’t start out like that.
Hitler had a thing for blondes
Hitler knew what he liked in a woman. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Buxom. Yeah. The “Aryan” ideal.
Which was a little embarrassing for him, given that the true “Aryan” women came from modern-day Iran and India; regions not known for blue-eyed blondes.
Either way, as far as the Führer was concerned, busty German wenches weren’t made for the workforce. In the early days of Nazi Germany, women were expected to stay in their lane, specifically: “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.”
“Children, Kitchen, Church.”
His deputy, the blood sausage in a suit, Hermann Göring, made no bones about it. All German women, he said, should take a pot, a dustpan, and a broom and marry a man.
Aryan perfection?
There was more than a little hypocrisy in the Führer’s fixation with physical perfection.
By the end of his life, Hitler had racked up an addiction to multiple prescription drugs, including oxycodone, plus twice daily doses of cocaine and regular hits of crystal meth.
Among his many physical afflictions, he had Parkinson’s Disease, spina bifida, hypertension, chronic flatulence, had lost most of his teeth, and endured terminally bad breath.
A physically incompetent and personally repellent authoritarian leader. Now, where have I heard that before?
He liked his women young
As for the Führer’s personal taste in ladies, he liked to get them when they were young. That way, as he put it, they were as “malleable as wax.” Any man who wanted to stamp his imprint on a woman had to start early, he declared.
Eva Braun was just seventeen when they met. And when he took up with his own niece, Geli Raubal, he was almost forty, and she was just twenty. Yes, you read correctly. His niece.
Although the thought of it makes me vomit a little… well, a lot, really… in the back of my mouth, Hitler believed an important part of his appeal was that women found him sexually attractive.
Through his enabler, film director Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler had a platform to reach millions of German teens. It gave him a Hollywood-superstar level of adulation. Teen girls cried and fainted when they saw their Führer in the flesh. Yes, really.
As far as his besotted female fans were concerned, Adolf Hitler was a living saviour.
… Sound familiar?
I’ll just pause a moment to let you digest that… or wipe the sick from the corners of your mouth.
Liberating women from women’s liberation
Outside his own bedroom, Hitler was hard at work reforming Germany’s women to fit the Nazi mould.
He was going to liberate women from women’s liberation.
Within months of taking the reins of power, Hitler swung the axe on women’s freedoms.
So, it was back to the Dark Ages for Germany as women lost the hard-won rights they fought for after World War One.
In 1933, their right to vote was abolished.
University admission rules were changed so that only one in ten students could be a woman.
All female public servants were given their marching orders, and women working as lawyers, judges, and doctors were banned from practice.
They were also barred from jury duty because Nazi leaders decided that women were slaves to their emotions and incapable of rational thought.
The other upside for Nazi Germany was that many of the intellectuals who lobbied for women’s rights were… guess what?… Jewish.
But Hitler didn’t stop there.
The non-smoking and teetotalling Führer added drinking and smoking to the growing list of no-go zones for women.
Hair-dye, makeup, and nail polish were also frowned upon.
The androgynous French fashion of the time was blasted as a Jewish conspiracy invented to mock the voluptuous German figure. Hitler wanted his ,en in dirndls.
But there was a hidden agenda. Because there always is.
Jewish women were leaders in the independent women’s movement. They were prominent in German medicine, science, law and education. The Nazi push to get women out of the workforce and crush feminism was a way of pulling the pin on Jewish influence in German society.
The other reason for wanting Germany’s Frauen out of the workforce and back into the kitchen was to address the unemployment crisis. With one in three workers unemployed, it was a great way of freeing up jobs for the boys.
As for the official stand against imported fashion, it wasn’t just that Hitler had a thing for busty German women showing off their child-bearing curves in traditional folk costume.
He wanted women to spend their fashion dollars at home because it was a sure-fire way of reducing foreign debt and diverting much-needed cash into the German war-chest.
Every movement needs a poster-girl
Nazi Germany’s reverse women’s movement found its poster-girl, conveniently, in the wife of Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Magdalene Goebbels became the Third Reich’s First Lady. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and with seven children hanging off her various limbs, she seemed to tick all the boxes.
She was the figurehead of the Nazi Women’s League, or NSF.
In 1931, it put in play a vast network of programs geared towards churning out cookie-cutter Nazi wives and mothers.
By the time war broke out, eleven million women had joined its ranks.
Its key mission? To promote the Nazi family unit.
Get me to the church on time
With government incentives encouraging couples to marry, there was an unholy rush to the altar.
Newlyweds were given generous loans by the state. As the couples took their vows, they pledged their allegiance to Hitler. Their gift from the Führer? A copy of Mein Kampf.
If a woman left her job to walk down the aisle, she and her groom would be given the equivalent of a fifth of the average annual wage.
A quarter of the loan was written off each time a baby arrived… four births put the couple back in the black.
Where the money to pay for this come from, you ask? Single workers and childless couples were slammed with an income tax increase to pay for the scheme. So, yeah.
The ultimate flex
The ultimate flex for all would-be Nazi brides, was to marry one of Heinrich Himmler’s SS troops.
Himmler believed his men were the duck’s nuts, racially speaking. He wanted his men to spread their seed *gag*. But the women who wanted to bear their children had to prove their bona fides.
First, they had to pass rigorous medical exams to confirm their Aryan ancestry.
They were also checked for any genetic defects that might be transmitted to the sons and daughters of the master race.
Bride school
After proving her Aryan credentials and genetic suitability, an SS bride was expected to sign up for one of the Reich bridal schools.
Over a six-week course, she’d be taught the finer points of home management and parenting compliant little Nazis.
She’d begin each day with a swim or jog, before turning out for a parade at the daily swastika-flag-raising ceremony.
She was taught how to be the perfect Hausfrau, and schooled in everything from nutrition, hygiene and sewing, to home decorating and health.
And being Nazi Germany, no educational program would be complete without lessons in racial theory and eugenics.
Growing good little Nazis
These new brides were expected to start reproducing… Quickly.
They had no agency over their own bodies; they belonged to the Reich.
As part of the push to procreate, contraception was banned.
With as many as 600,000 pregnancies terminated in Germany each year, Hitler was obsessed with the thought of all those German foetuses going to waste.
Under Nazi law, terminating a pregnancy landed you in jail for five years. During the war, the crime was punishable by death.
Meantime, Hitler enacted “the Program for Racial Hygiene.” Jews, and any Germans with inherited or mental illnesses, were pressured to abort their children.
Almost half-a-million German women suffering from conditions including epilepsy, blindness, and alcoholism were forcibly sterilised.
Germany’s secret weapon
Hitler and his noxious sidekicks knew that the Third Reich would only thrive if its tentacles wormed their way into every corner of the German home. And Adolf Hitler saw Germany’s mothers as his secret weapon.
Because when a mother spoke, her child listened. She served them Nazi ideology with their Cornflakes and tucked them in with it at night.
Expectant mums were taught new fairy tales for their baby Nazis. So, the prince in Cinderella didn’t turn down the ugly sisters because they were, well, ugly, but because they were racially unsuitable Slavs.
Brides also memorised a bedtime prayer to teach their children: My Führer, I know you well and I love you like my father and mother.
Feeding the war machine
Newlywed Nazi brides were also expected to be frugal.
The NSF taught the good German Hausfrau how to prepare meals with locally produced ingredients and leftovers. She was expected to make her own clothes, as well as furniture and toys for her children.
Those savings put a billion reichsmarks a year back into government coffers.
It also meant that local manufacturing could turn its production lines over to the war machine.
Cannon fodder
Hitler made no secret about his global ambitions. But German birthrates were in a terminal nosedive after the First World War. Without a wave of baby Nazis, the Thousand-Year Reich would be lucky to last two generations.
So Nazi women were expected to breed like rabbits.
The most prolific mothers were treated like celebrities and showered with gifts. Mothers with three or more children could jump queues in shops and were given rent rebates and discounts on their utility bills.
The ultimate reward for Nazi mums was the Mother’s Honour Cross. It was awarded to women who had given birth to four or more children… Bronze for four, silver for six, and gold for eight or more… the thought of which makes my brain (and lady parts) hurt.
Predictably, the first woman to have the Gold Mother’s Honour cross pinned to her blouse, was Magda Goebbels.
School of hate
It turned out that Germany’s educators were keen supporters of the regime. More teachers, per capita, joined the Nazi party than any other profession.
They completely rewrote the curriculum to reflect Nazi ideology.
It’s almost getting redundant at this point, but… sound familiar?
History teachers trumpeted Germany’s military achievements and placed Hitler in a pantheon of legendary historical figures, including Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and Bismarck.
Poisonous Nazi indoctrination spread through all aspects of the curriculum. In mathematics, students were asked to calculate the cost of caring for what Nazis termed “useless eaters”: disabled Germans. These calculations were later used to justify the mass murder of these people.
Girl Guides for fascists
The League of German Girls was Hitler Youth for chicks.
All “racially suitable girls and young women” were expected to sign up. Parents who refused were told that their children would be put in state care if they didn’t cooperate.
At weekly meetings, regular excursions, and annual summer camps, girls were indoctrinated with Nazi ideology.
Around the campfire, they were taught how ‘defective’ Jewish genes had weakened the German population.
Academic pursuits took a back seat, because Nazis believed the female mind was not hard-wired for intellectual activities.
Instead, women were expected to keep their bodies in tip-top condition.
Girls were encouraged to take up sports like gymnastics, ballroom dancing, horse riding, and tennis. It helped them attain the levels of grace and fitness that appealed to their Nazi overlords.
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels spoke glowingly of girls who were “easy on the eye.”
Ironic for a man who looked like a moth-eaten weasel fished out of a septic tank.
Don’t change the Kool-Aid
When you’ve convinced people to drink the Kool-aid, you can’t just announce you’re changing the flavour.
And at the outbreak of war, that’s exactly what happened.
It turned out that the Nazi female ideal was a moving target.
Under pressure, it would turn out that all the Nazi talk about creating the perfect Aryan woman would be nothing more than window dressing.
During the war, as the economy started to tank, Goebbels proposed a ban on women’s luxuries and cosmetics.
Adolf Hitler warned his propaganda minister to drop it because his sidepiece, Eva Braun, who didn’t give a flying fuck about politics in general, made her feelings known when the cosmetics ban was floated.
The proposal was dropped, and Goebbels announced that there was no need for young women to make themselves look ugly.
Too good to be true
Even Magda Goebbels was revealed as a hypocrite.
The poster-girl for the regime that sent six million Jews to the gas chambers carried the Jewish surname of her stepfather until the age of nineteen. When that man was sent to the concentration camps, she didn’t intercede to save him.
To make it worse in Nazi eyes, before her marriage, Magda Goebbel’s first lover was a Jewish Zionist, who encouraged young Magda to wear a Star of David and join him at Jewish youth club meetings.
It also turned out that her marriage to Joseph Goebbels, which was held up as a benchmark for all Germans to emulate, was a farce. Both husband and wife had many extramarital affairs.
They remained married in name only at the insistence of the Führer.
Did we say we wanted stay-at-home mums?
When the air-raid sirens began to sound, the ideal German woman wasn’t a mother. She was a warrior.
Labour service became compulsory for women. One in three married women combined family duties with full-time work; far more than when the Führer had taken power. And when half-a-million German men died in Stalingrad in 1943, women between seventeen and forty-five were conscripted.
That didn’t sit well with the soldiers at the front. They’d been sold the story that they were fighting to protect their women who were keeping the home fires burning.
To make matters worse, as millions of German men died, the Nazi hierarchy calculated that there would be four million fertile women in surplus after the war.
Their solution?
In 1944, Hitler legalised bigamy. Yes, really.
The Volkssturm
The last straw was the “people’s storm” – the final attempt to defend Germany in the war’s dying days. It was a militia manned by old men, young boys, women, and young girls.
Its objective? To defend Germany at all costs.
The female guerrillas were called werewolves. They were taught to lay booby-traps, sabotage roads, railways, and telephone lines, and shown how to operate anti-tank weapons.
They were schooled in the finer points of stick grenades, Molotov cocktails, and sharp-shooting. The most capable shots became snipers.
After the war, one fifteen-year-old girl in a Volkssturm unit recalled asking for help from an SS soldier in Aachen as Allied troops marched towards her home. In response, he told her that when Russian soldiers arrived in the city, first she’d be raped, then she’d be shot.
It was not a hollow threat.
Historians estimate that as many as two million German women were raped as the Reich crumbled, largely by advancing Soviet forces.
Bunkering down
Hiding in his bunker, Hitler left Germany’s women to fend for themselves.
The Goebbels family was with him. Magda Goebbels wrote to her eldest son, Harald, who was in a POW camp and told him that the world without Hitler wasn’t worth living in, and that she would rather see her children die than live in disgrace.
The five remaining Goebbels children were aged between four and twelve. After dressing them in white nightgowns and brushing their hair, Magda fed her children cyanide capsules.
Once she and her husband were sure their babies were dead, they took their own lives.
The heart of the Nazi family
Women in Nazi Germany were portrayed as the heart of the family. They were the foundations upon which the Thousand-Year-Reich was to be built.
But at the same time Hitler was championing mothers and wives as the most important people in Germany, his policies were destroying the very things that made them strong.
As the dust settled after the war, it would be the widows, the mourning mothers, and the girl soldiers who picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and stitched Germany back together again.
So, am I angry?
Yes, I fucking well am. Because if things keep going the way they are, this is where things are at risk of heading for many women around the world who have, until very recently, enjoyed unprecedented freedom and independence.
Think it couldn’t happen in America? Well, try this on for size.
One of JD Vance’s most influential supporters, billionaire Peter Thiel, had this to say in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.”
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.’
In short: women care about the plight of the vulnerable, so they won’t support politicians who don’t.
Removing women from the democratic process has never ended well.
And that terrifies me. Because I have a daughter who’s going to have to navigate this world. One day, I may have granddaughters who’ll have to deal with it as well.
I know how this plays out. And I don’t want them to be part of it. I don’t even want them to see it come to pass.
But if it does, I want them to be ready to fight back.
So, I’m not going to play nice anymore.
I’m going to make a noise because I want them to know that’s OK.
Sorry.
Not sorry.
If you agree, share this. You know what they say, right? United, we stand. Divided, we fall.
