This paper develops a new comparative framework for understanding how Fascist and militarist states mobilised motherhood to structure women’s political inclusion and exclusion. Bringing together two cases rarely analysed in tandem—Fascist Italy and imperial Japan—the study argues that the politics of suffrage under authoritarianism cannot be explained solely by institutional design or ideological resistance. Instead, both regimes deployed motherhood as a technology of governance that linked demographic anxieties, social discipline, and state legitimacy.
In Italy, Mussolini’s regime transformed pronatalism into a political project, elevating the madre-cittadina as the moral foundation of the Fascist state. Yet this symbolic elevation coexisted with the systematic denial of national voting rights, even as the 1925 local suffrage law partially incorporated women to strengthen corporatist legitimacy at the municipal level. New evidence from local archives reveals that this selective incorporation was not merely propagandistic but served to anchor the regime’s demographic ambitions and territorial control.
In Japan, the pre-1945 state also drew on motherhood as a pillar of national mobilisation—embodied in the ryōsai kenbo (Good Wife, Wise Mother) ideology. Although Japan did not introduce women’s suffrage until the immediate postwar period, the militarist regime integrated women into the state through patriotic motherhood, neighbourhood women’s associations, and mobilisation networks that paralleled the Italian Massaie Rurali and Fasci Femminili. These organisations disciplined women as reproductive and moral subjects while denying them sovereign political authority. The result was a distinctive form of proto-citizenship that expanded women’s obligations without granting political rights.
The paper argues that both cases illustrate a common authoritarian logic: Fascist and militarist states secured legitimacy by politicising motherhood as a tool of demographic governance while simultaneously restricting the boundaries of formal citizenship. By theorising motherhood as statecraft, this study offers a new lens for analysing gendered citizenship under authoritarianism and contributes to broader debates on how states mobilise, manage, and contain women in moments of crisis and expansion.
