what types of agency do women have in armed conflict

The National Socialist Women's Union and German Women's Agency used Nazi propaganda to encourage women to focus on their roles as wives and mothers. The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored 'child-rich' families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion. Instead, Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage. In the end, however, the Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children, provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children. In an extension of the SS Marriage Order of 1932, the 1936 Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock. Nazi population policy took a radical turn in 1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn (Fount of Life).

The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many children as possible. In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe. Praising German women as “our most loyal, fanatical fellow-combatants,” Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race. Women were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan” community ( Volksgemeinschaft).

What types of agency do women have in armed conflict